 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 Asperg-Jackson and the worship team of Drew Collins, Linda Warren, Stephen Gregorius and Daniel Carnes. The vision of First Unitarian Society is growing souls, connecting with one another and embodying our UU values in our lives, our community and our world. Immediately following the postlude, we ask you to help keep everyone safe and not linger here in the auditorium or in the building in general, and you're welcome and invited to socialize outside. Kelly and I look forward to greeting you after the service at the Atrium Doors. If you're a parent of a child in our religious exploration program, please remember that the children are picked up out on the strip of lawn near the landmark building. Today, we'd like to bring your attention to our Journey Circles Covenant-Based Small Group Ministry. Registration for this year's Journey Circles begins this weekend, and you can find the registration link and more information about Journey Circles in the news from the red floors on our website. These small groups of 8-10 people meet each month to explore our monthly theme. There are a wonderful way to meet others and get connected here, and we hope you will consider joining one. I invite you now into a moment of silence to center yourselves and bring yourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. Some people are used to keeping rules. Don't cross the street when the light is red is only sensible. It turns out that keeping rules isn't the same as keeping covenant, which asks us instead of keeping a bright line to keep our promises. To what have we promised ourselves? To this moment in time and place, to this community and even tenderly interconnected this planet, we promise ourselves to the idea that we are each and all human beings. We promise that there is something moving between us that we cannot tame and cannot measure. The chalice is a reminder that what flame we keep inside us cannot light the way. The light must spill to shine. The thing you must be is yourself. Unadulterated, shedding the willingness to journey alone, as though you are made of something hard and unforgivable. You are human, you belong right here, right now. And together we will chase away the sickness, the secrets, and leave only the open possibility that the future is a space for growth. And I invite you now to join together in our words of affirmation as we light our chalice. For every time we make a mistake and we decide to start again, we light this chalice. For every time we are lonely and we let someone be our friend, we light this chalice. For every time we are disappointed and we choose to hope we light this chalice. Rise up, O flame, by thy light glow to us beauty vision. Please sing with me our opening hymn number 324 where my free spirit onward leads. Those worshiping with us in person are invited to hum. There is a story from the Buddhist tradition about a certain person who was walking through the jungle one day and as he walked through the jungle he spied in the distance a tiger. Now obviously that was a very dangerous thing to see even a long way away so he turned around and ran in the opposite direction and he was running from that tiger when he came to the edge of a cliff and fell. He didn't fall all the way down though. He was able to grab a hold of a branch just below the lip of the cliff. It's a good thing too because it was a long way down. Now as he was hanging from that branch he looked up and he saw that the tiger that he'd seen over there before had come right up to the edge of the cliff. It was licking its lips excited about the prospect that it might get an easy meal. He looked down below far, far down below and not only was it a long way to fall but wouldn't you know it there was another tiger down there. So here he was hanging by this branch and as he was thinking about what he wanted to do two little mice very small ones came out of two little holes in the cliff face. They started to nibble on that branch that he was hanging from. Well that was quite a predicament wasn't it? So he was hanging by this branch a tiger above him, tiger below him, two mice nibbling at it. He noticed something else right beside the branch. Just a little bit further up there was a red ripe strawberry. It was so beautiful and he reached up with as much strength as he could muster and he picked that strawberry and he ate it. Now as good Unitarian Universalists we might think a few different things about this problem that the man in the story was facing and how we might like to address his various needs and this strange and unfortunate circumstance he was in. Maybe we could get a very tall ladder and climb up there and help him down off of that cliff and maybe we could gently restrain the two tigers and make sure that they didn't menace him quite so much anymore and maybe carefully delicately we could find new and better homes for those two mice but whatever it might be that we would want to do to help this poor soul and this strange and difficult predicament it begins it begins with the taste of the strawberry how sweet how fresh it was even as he was hanging by that branch. 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 here as well as our outreach offering recipient and this week's offering is shared with RISE or the respite center the respite center provides emergency childcare and respite for children ages birth through 14 parent support and crisis counseling seven days a week in addition to quality child care the respite center helps parents and caregivers access important resources to help support and stabilize their family so you'll see on the screen that you can donate directly from our website fussmedicine.org you will also see our text to give information there there are also offering baskets outside all of the doors of the auditorium and we thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. She wanted to find God that's how she explained her decision to her family they were perplexed and concerned it wasn't a choice that had made much sense to them they were Catholics yes and had raised her in the church but they were not a particularly pious family and now this shy bookish daughter of theirs who rarely disagreed with her parents or went against their will made it clear to them that she was adamant teenagers are notoriously willful but this was no passing whim for the young woman her mind was set and seeing this her parents decided the best thing they could do was to get out of her way so it was that in the fall of 1962 Karen Armstrong entered a convent of the society of the holy child Jesus embarking on a spiritual quest to become a nun you may recognize the name Karen Armstrong she is a contemporary scholar of comparative religion her books on Islam and its relationship to Judaism and Christianity have been quite successful and she is a sought-after public lecturer and on television and radio but just as she was entering adulthood Karen chose for herself a path with rather a different destination in mind as she put it to lose my adolescent self in the infinite and ultimately satisfying mystery that we call God for the next seven years of her life Karen Armstrong would work and study and pray in pursuit of a holy life and a spiritual communion with God she advanced from postulate to novice to professed none she made the walls of the convent and the strict order of its rules and expectations into her world following their rhythm and flow she walked the path for as long as she could but try as she might she couldn't find God there so Karen left the society not in anger or bitterness but with frustration at herself and a great deal of uncertainty about her future outside the boundaries of religious life strange new challenges awaited her in the first years in the convent she had been almost completely cut off from the outside world when the Cuban missile crisis broke out soon after she joined the society her superiors told her and their other charges that the world was teetering on the brink of nuclear war they neglected to inform them when the crisis had passed however so Karen and the other young women lived through several weeks of terrifying uncertainty before the mistake was corrected when she became a full-fledged nun Karen's work required her to study and teach which took her outside of the convent walls but she remained set apart and aloof from the wider world then she left her order and the world seemed to come rushing in again from 1962 to 1969 she had missed seven years of politics art and culture almost nothing made sense to her in this new secular world newspapers were a confusing jumble of unfamiliar names and problems no longer a nun Karen was now just a university student trying to find a place for herself in an alien environment at her first college party she tried to fit in and adjust to the strange world she had decided to rejoin the lights seemed too low the music too loud the young men and women too comfortable with with each other's bodies and their own trying to make polite conversation Karen asked another guest what band was playing on the stereo the Beatles of course her friend shot back and then under the dawn of a terrible realization she asked you have heard of the Beatles haven't you now it may be that some of you are so tuned in to the music world that you've never had this exact experience you've never been the only person at the party who's never heard the band on the stereo before but all of us can find some empathy for what that feels like that sense of being so completely out of our element Karen Armstrong had left the strict rigor and discipline of the religious life behind the social and political upheaval of the spring of 1969 she found herself a stranger in her own country a place where she spoke the language but no longer understood the idiom learning to live in this new and different world could not happen overnight it would take many long hours much hard work and much so much discomfort and uncertainty now in the world of amplified sound there is a concept called clipping which you can get from over driving an amplifier when the device gets more voltage from a guitar or other instrument that it was designed to handle the sound becomes distorted the edges of the sound waves if you could see them with your eyes would appear to be clipped instead of moving back and forth smoothly the edges are all flattened out the peaks and the valleys stop rather abruptly becoming blunt the new sound is considered dirtier and more gritty it can only be reached by using the amplifier in a way not quite intended by the manufacturer but it's an effect sought out by some artists in Karen Armstrong's near perfect innocence of the popular culture of 1969 she was almost certainly unaware of Jimi Hendrix and the other pioneers of the age great masters of the electric guitar who had chosen to explore this new sound including clipping and other forms of musical distortion the singer songwriter and guitarist Ani DeFranco titled one of her albums living in clip in reference to an over driven amplifier because of the songs she was playing in the way that she was playing them her amp was spending most of every show handling too much volume and putting out intentionally distorted sound the plight of the over driven amplifier was also a metaphor for living life outside of our comfort zones past the margins of the manufacturer's warranty living in clip means living in uncertain places beyond the limits of what we already know we can do it is far from the easiest sort of way to go through life and in the case of amplifiers and other such things it probably has a negative impact on a lifespan of the appliance it's not easy on us humans either it can be frustrating and it can be dangerous but it is also the only way that we learn joshua four published a book some years ago about his quest to become a world-class player in the field of competitive memory there are in case you didn't know multiple tournaments held each year at the national and international level in which people compete in various contests to prove the speed and accuracy with which they can memorize things like random lists of names or numbers or the order of a deck of playing cards joshua started out with a journalistic interest in the sport and became obsessed with developing his abilities to a competitive level in the course of his training he learned a lot about how to learn one of the key insights was staying out of his comfort zone when we first start to develop a new skill we fumble and make mistakes and even that usually takes a lot of focus over time we become more effective and efficient at the task until finally we reach a level at which we can cruise we've become as good at the skill as we need to be at least for whatever we're doing with it just then and we can keep that performance up more or less automatically the key to actually learning and growing in areas that have already become automatic for us is to push past the point where our autopilot breaks down as for puts it amateur musicians tend to spend their practice time playing music whereas pros tend to work through tedious exercises or focus on difficult parts of pieces similarly the best ice skaters spend more of their practice time trying jumps that they land less often while lesser skaters work more on jumps they've already mastered in other words regular practice simply isn't enough to improve we have to be constantly pushing ourselves beyond where we think our limits lie and then pay attention to how and why we fail it is not easy to push past ourselves push ourselves past what is easy in order to become more and more the people that we wish to be to step willingly into the unknown and uncomfortable is an act of courage there are many places that such courage can come from hunger will give you all the courage you need to steal a loaf of bread anger can make you brave enough to strike back against your tormentor even fear can make you bold enough to propel yourself in the opposite direction the character of aurora munro once said to kurt vagner in 2003 is now largely overlooked superhero film x-men 2 sometimes anger can help you survive her wise observation receives a humble but equally wise response so can faith there's an english language expression that pronounces a curse in the formula of a blessing may you live in interesting times the tradition of the idiom is to present it as a traditional chinese curse but this has no basis in actual fact in english and in other languages sometimes we may choose to present an idea which is useful but uncomfortable as coming from somewhere else conveniently foreign and far away we comfort ourselves a bit with the assurance that the disquieting call is not in fact coming from inside the house but if i tell you friends that we live in interesting times surely there is no one within the sound of my voice who does not have some sense as to what that means dwelling on a planet becoming hotter weirder and less predictable enduring the chaotic disjunctions of late stage capitalism witnessing an ongoing violence against the pretense of democracy and weathering the alienation of a pandemic which now persists largely due to our collective inability as a species to care for each other interesting times indeed last week kelly crocker gifted us with a sermon an epistle really of encouragement for living through and growing through these interesting times that we are all in together she rightly described our contemporary condition as a place that is an endless dance of shadow and light hope and grief that is not a comfortable place our world at this moment is not a comfortable one no but it seems to me to be a little like an amplifier living in clip stretched to the outer margins of what is possible perhaps beyond what is advisable we feel the strain in our relationships in our hopes for the future for ourselves and our children and for some of us in our own bodies and it takes a toll on each of us and all of us in the Hebrew Bible we encounter the character of Jacob the grandson of Abraham a character who spends most of his childhood and early adulthood getting by on luck and wit and a clever trickster like roguishness again and again he faces some danger or some challenge and mostly he escapes by outsmarting his adversary changing or inverting the rules in order to get what he wants even when he has to flee the home of his childhood it is a fate of his own making after he tricks his brother Esau out of his birthright and their father's blessing jacob fears his brother's rage but he seems to do so with a spring in his step like jack of beanstalk climbing and giant slaying fame jacob is never down for very long makes a new fortune and a new family for himself and then he comes time to go home to return to land of his birth and face again his brother whom he cheated for perhaps the first time in his life to confront the real consequences of his actions and experience real discomfort uncertainty and fear the night before he is to meet his brother jacob is attacked by a mysterious figure even in the text itself it is ambivalent the strange assailant is referred to both as a man and as god elsewhere in the bible we see them referenced as an angel but in the story itself they pointedly refuse to reveal their name jacob and the man the god the angel whoever it was wrestle through the night the stranger strikes jacob brutally on his hip marking him in a way he will carry for the rest of his life he will never be exactly the same again but still jacob will not let go of a stranger dawn breaks and they are still wrestling the stranger for whatever personal or mystical reason needs to depart at the onset of day but jacob wounded though he is will not let go though not until his opponent blesses him first and so in order to be released the stranger gives jacob a new name which he will use for the rest of his life israel one who wrestles with god as unitarian universalists we are not waiting on redemption from outside of time we do not look to a god who intervenes in history to save us from the mess that we and other human beings have made our individual understandings of the source of hope and salvation vary some of us know it as god some as the human spirit some of us do not claim to know it by any name at all but if we disagree on this one small point we enjoy a blessed and uncharacteristic agreement on the much greater point of how exactly the world is made whole things get better tears get dried mouths get fed chains get broken by the work of human hands by the individual and collective action of human beings so our faith demands from us that we work for justice because justice isn't coming any other way it falls to us to repair the world just as it did to those who came before us just as it will to those who come after us just as it does to everyone else on earth now as individuals and as a congregation we must continually ask ourselves what comfortable ruts do we need to drag ourselves out of what vital form of justice making do we need to challenge ourselves to undertake the condition of this moment that we are all in together this time of living in clip is the product of circumstances beyond our control but it is subject to our choice whether the result from it shall be noise or music whether we choose to toil burdened by the curse of life in interesting times or to embrace the breath the blessing of life in a world and at a time that needs us karen armstrong spent a long time living in clip it took her most of a decade to make sense of her life after she stopped being a nun there were failed studies failed relationships a failed career a long while spent trying to adjust from the world she left behind to the new world in which she lived but one chance meeting led to another strange opportunity until after many years and disappointments karen found herself wrapped up in the study of god and religion as a scholar of many faiths this time rather than a woman religious of the roman catholic church in that work the work she is still doing karen found some echo of the wholeness she had been searching for in the course of studying and trying to teach what she found in the wisdom of human religion karen found god not the god she had set out originally to find but a source of meaning and purpose in her life nonetheless i invite you to join me now in an attitude of prayer and meditation as i share these words from sandra fees the moment comes when a choice arises a holy moment a decision must be made do i remain as i am or do i risk inching leaping flowing in another direction do i risk what i think i already know and already am do i forfeit my security for the possibility that a simple shift may alter the course of my life even perhaps the life of another i long to let go of all that restrains me so that i might pursue the impossible and surmount the insurmountable to let go of anger to let go of the need to be in control to forgive a friend to forgive myself to refuse what thwarts my spirit to refuse what limits my mind to surrender to what will come to surrender to this holy moment i have let slip away for too long are we where as our chalice is extinguished and offer you this simple charge go and do what your heart demands that you do where you have bread and others hunger give where you have strength and others falter lend where you are lost and others know the way listen where wrong endures yet people still struggle against it hope amen