 Please join me in a few moments of centering silence and now please remain seated while we sing the in-gathering hymn which is number 1003 in the Teal hymnal. The First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment. Unitarian Universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Erica Coleman-Arris. On behalf of the congregation I would like to extend a special welcome to visitors. We are a welcoming congregation so whoever you are and wherever you happen to be on your life journey we celebrate your presence among us. Newcomers are encouraged to stay for the fellowship hour after the service in the commons area of our atrium edition. Members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. If you are accompanied by a young child please remember that if they need to talk or move around the locia over here to my right is a good place to retire with them and still hear the service and at this time we ask that you turn off any beepers cell phones and other electronic equipment that might cause a disturbance during the service. I'd like to acknowledge those individuals who help our services run smoothly. Our greeter today is Carol Rowan and our R.E. greeters are Anna Cohen and Lisa Simpson. Our ushers are Paula Appleback and Shirley Chosie. Our sound operators are Steve Gregorius and Dan Carnes both of whom would be very happy to teach you how to do their job. Feel free to talk to them after the service and our lay ministers today are Shirley Chosie and Bob Redford. Please note the announcements on the red floor in the red floors insert of your order of service which describe upcoming events at the society and provide more information about activities and here are a couple of announcements that deserve special attention. Each year our seventh grade compass points students survey the congregation on their beliefs about a variety of issues. Today they will be in the commons following service to survey your beliefs about what will happen, what might happen when we die. Please be sure to get a survey from them and select the belief that best reflects your own. Thank you for helping our kids better understand our FUS community and the ideas we hold dear and you'll be able to see the results of the survey the following week displayed in the commons. October 24th will be Shelter Saturday at FUS. It's getting colder and we are reminded that our homeless shelters need our help. FUS shelter ministries need more volunteers of almost all ages to make meals and take shifts. Next week in the commons after services experienced volunteers will answer all your questions. We will also collect adult twin sized flat sheets and blankets new or in very good condition. Please wash them and put them in the dryer before bringing them in. Again welcome. We hope that today's service will stimulate your mind touch your heart and stir your spirit. A refuge for minds in search of the truth unfolding ever beautiful and ever strange. Here compassion is our shelter. Freedom our protection from the storms of bigotry and hate. In this abode may we find comfort and courage. Here may our sight become vision to see the unseen to glimpse the good that is yet to be. Welcome to church and Erica will now come up and light our chalice and if you all will stand and join me after my tough technical difficulties in the chalice lighting words in your order of service. This fire is a reminder of the light within us all the yearning for freedom, the longing for truth, the flame of intuition, the torch of conscience. We dedicate this service to the remembrance of this holy light. Encourage you to look at one another and exchange friendly greetings. I'm gonna come up here a story. Oh, she knew what was coming. Come in here a story. Any children in the congregation. We got some cool cushions here for you. How is everyone today? His name is Julie. What's your name? Nice to meet you, Mia. That's Julia. All right, we'll get this figured out in a minute. How do we tell the story first? Okay, in lots of religions, there are things called miracle stories. Does anybody know what a miracle is? Yeah, I don't think I could have defined it better. It's something that happens and people think it's so awesome that they think it's magic. I don't know that I can define miracle better than that. In fact, that may be my new definition of miracle. Thank you very much. Yeah, yeah. So people think it's magic. And in our religion, we don't have a whole lot of miracle stories, but we kind of have one. And I thought I might tell it to you guys today. Does that sound good? Okay, so once upon a time, a long time ago before anyone in this room was born in like the 1700s, there was a man named Thomas Potter. And Thomas Potter, Thomas Potter thought, you see Thomas? Thomas the choo-choo train. That's a little bit different. All right, we will definitely hang out later and talk about that one. But Thomas Potter was a man who lived in New Jersey a long time ago and he built a chapel and he said to God, I want you to bring me a preacher who knows that God is a loving God and will preach that God loves everybody. Because at the time, there were all these theories that God loved some people but not other people and that doesn't make sense, does it? So Thomas Potter built a chapel and way over and he said, one day I will get a preacher in this chapel that says God loves everybody. And then way over in England, there was another man named John Murray. And John Murray was a preacher and he thought that God loved everybody and things have gone pretty well for John Murray in his life and he wanted to preach about God's benevolence and love. But then there were some people that didn't agree with him and so he couldn't get a job. So he lost all of his money. So he decided that he was going to go to America and try to find a place where he could preach that God loved everybody. And he said, I'm going to go to New York and I'm going to do this. But on the way there, his ship went a stray. It was a huge storm and his ship blew all over the place. He can go and help me blow the ship. And the ship ended up in New Jersey. But on the way to New Jersey, John Murray had lost everything. He had lost his wife and his child and his faith. He said there could be no loving God if all these terrible things have happened. So he gets on the shore and he has nothing, not even his faith. And this man, Thomas Potter, greets him and he says, I'll give you food and I'll give you shelter. And Thomas Potter tells John Murray about his ideas about God that God loves everyone. And John Murray says, I used to believe that too. I used to believe that. But then all these horrible things happened to me. And now I don't know that I believe in God at all. And Thomas Potter said, will you will you preach in my chapel about a God that loves everyone? And John Murray said, I can't do it. I've got another boat. And when the winds pick up, I'm gonna go. And John and Thomas Potter said, okay, but if this Sunday, if the winds haven't picked up yet, will you preach? And John Murray said, okay, I'll preach. So that Sunday. What do you think happened? The winds did not pick up. And then because you've studied this, and then the next Sunday, what do you think happened? The wind didn't pick up. And so he preached. And then and then when didn't pick up this Sunday after that, so he preached again. And Thomas Potter told John Murray, this chapel was not empty by accident. I have been saving it for a preacher that would preach God's universal love for everyone. And you have come. And John Murray said, and I will stay because this has restored my faith. And people sometimes say that it was a miracle that that happened. And there are other accounts that say that it was just a windy day and circumstance. But either way, it's a pretty cool story, and a good way to get people saying that God loves everybody, because that's a good message. What do you guys think? Yeah? All right, will you guys have a great day? Go to your classes, and we're going to sing you out. Okay, Korean Christianity. It was the first time and he is defending it in this sermon, saying, really, this is the reasonable thing to do. We regard the scriptures as God record. We regard the scriptures as the record of God's successive revelations to mankind, and particularly the last and most perfect revelation of his will by Jesus Christ. Whenever doctrines seem to us to be clearly taught in the scriptures, we receive them without reserve or exception. This authority, which we give to the scriptures is a reason we conceive for studying them with particular care, and for inquiring anxiously into the principles of interpretation by which their true meaning may be ascertained. The principles adopted by the class of Christians in whose name I speak, Unitarians, need to be explained, because they are often misunderstood. We are particularly accused of making an unwarrantable use of a reason in the interpretation of scripture. We are said to exalt reason above revelation and prefer our own wisdom to God's wisdom. Loose and undefined charges of this kind are circulated so freely that we think it due to ourselves and to the cause of truth to express our views with some particularity. Our leading principle in interpreting scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for men in the language of men, and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner of other books. We believe that God, when he speaks to the human race, conforms, if we may say, to the established rules of speaking and writing. How else would the scriptures avail us more than if communicated in an unknown tongue? Were the Bible written in a language and style of its own, did it consist of words which admit but a single sense and of sentences wholly detached from each other, there would be no place for principles to be laid down. We could not reason about it as with other writings, but such a book would be of little worth and perhaps of all books, the scriptures correspond least to this description of little worth. We profess not to know a book which demands a more frequent exercise of reason than the Bible. In addition to the remarks now made on its infinite connections, may we observe that its style nowhere affects the precision of science or the accuracy of definition. Its language is singularly glowing, bold and figurative, demanding more frequent departures from the literal sense than from our own age and country. And we find too that different portions of this book, instead of being confined to general truths, refer perpetually to times when they were written, to states of society, to modes of thinking, to controversies of the church, to feelings and usages which have passed away. And without the knowledge of which we are constantly in danger of exceeding at all times and places, what would be the contemporary and local application? We find too that some of these books are strongly marked by the geniuses and characters of their respective writers, that the Holy Spirit did not so guide the apostles as to suspend the particularities of their minds and their knowledge of feelings and of the influence under which they were placed. This is one of the precarious. This is one that is precarious, for we must understand them in their writings. With these views of the Bible, we feel it our burdened duty to exercise our reason upon it perpetually, to compare, to infer, to look beyond the letter of the spirit and to seek the nature of the subject and the aim of the writer, his true meaning, and in general, to make use of what is known for explaining what is difficult and for discovering new truths. Pardon our technical difficulties. One of my favorite pastimes is people watching. And my favorite place I have yet to discover on earth to people watch is a little cafe in Berkeley called Brood Awakening on Euclid Street. And the reason Brood Awakening is so particularly good for people watching is because it is situated, well, one, in Berkeley, California, two, right near the Bart Station, the Bay Area Rapid Transit, and all of the interesting personalities that come with public transportation, and then also equidistant from the UC Berkeley College of Engineering, which is a whole different kind of crew, and then also equidistant to the Graduate Theological Union, which has nine consortium seminaries of all different religions and all different people, and all of these things put together makes for some fantastic people watching. And my friends and I even developed whole games sitting at Brood Awakening about that centered around, centered on people watching. My favorite of these is called Patron Saint or Deity. We would watch people walk by and assign them a patron saint or deity if they were vaguely Scandinavian looking and you thought that they might be going to do crew in the Bay, we would maybe assign them something from the North, North's Pantheon. But more often than a deity, we would assign a patron saint. So, say, a woman was walking by and she looked very self-assured and also pretty stylish, we might say, Gloria Steinem is her patron saint. And I was often playing this game with people who were from religions that actually had patron saints and deities. And one day, somebody said to me, Julie, what's the patron saint or deity of Unitarian Universalism? And I had recently taken an intensive course in Unitarian Universalist history. And the thing that came to my mind might not make immediate sense to you, but the thing that came to my mind was Enigo Montoya, a character from the Princess Bride. And when I said this, my friends looked at me and said, your entire religion wants revenge for their father's death? And I said, well, no, as I'm hearing from the reactions, many of you have probably heard of the character Enigo Montoya. He is a terribly quotable character and the line in which he talks about his father's death is probably the most famous of his quotable lines. But that's not what I was thinking about. He has another amazing line where this other character named Vassini keeps setting up these crazy situations and explaining to Enigo what is going to happen in these situations. And when it doesn't work out time and time again, Enigo looks at Vassini and says, you know, you keep saying this is this. I don't think that means what you think it means. Sitting in history class listening to all of the big changes in our Unitarian and Universalist and Unitarian Universalist theology. And every time we had a reforming moment, it was because our church forebears looked at the theologies and best practices of the church at the time. They looked at their concepts of God and Jesus and scripture and said, I don't think that means what you think it means over and over again. In also the words of our wonderful character Enigo, I will say, let me explain. No, no, there is too much. Let me sum up. Reformation is a logical thing. A lot of people think that reformation comes from some movement of the spirit from some insight from some revelation. And sometimes it does, but it's hardly ever, it hardly ever comes about without people, human beings looking at a situation and saying, this does not make sense to me. The Protestant Reformation didn't come about because people stopped believing in the Catholic Church. The Protestant Reformation came about because the way that the Catholic Church functioned didn't make sense to people anymore. Someone once said to me that Unitarian Universalism was the logical conclusion of the Protestant Reformation, that other people started this idea of Reformation, this idea of analyzing things logically, of figuring out what made sense in religion and then stopped at points along the way and that we just kept going. Back in the day of the Catholic Church, the Catholic Church ruled everything. In the first thousand years of its existence, the Catholic Church had an iron clad lock on what was truth and what was right. And there wasn't a whole lot of reason and logic and education that was available to the average person. So the Catholic Church would say things like, if you're sick, you can pray and give us money and you'll get better. If you talk to your priest, he will help interpret what God is saying. We are the way to get to heaven through these acts, through these sacraments. And one thing happened more than any other that really messed with the Catholic Church's plan. And it was the plague. Can you imagine? Can you imagine a third of the people around you dying from sickness and you going more than to a doctor trusting that your God would save you? People paid for miracles. People prayed for miracles. And it didn't work. And one day, well, I was going to say one day there was a man named Martin Luther who came along and protested that this was not the way to do religion. But actually, there were several people that had come along before Martin Luther that those people had been persecuted. Martin Luther was the first successful person. He was a German monk. And in 1519, he was the first successful person to say to the Catholic Church to look at what a miracle was and say, I don't think that means what you think it means. He said, we are going to create a faith that is not based on money or acts of the church or the say so of a priest, but of our own knowledge of the Bible and faith. And the Protestant religion was born, the Lutheran religion at that time. And over in England, over in non mainland Europe, these reformationist thoughts were wafting across the channel. And religion was even more tricky in that country, because at that time, the law of the land was based in the church and the church changed with each successive monarch, depending on which wife of Henry VIII, she or he had been born to. So for 10 years, it was a Catholic church and the Protestants were persecuted. And then in another 50 years, it would be a Protestant church and the Catholics would be prosecuted. And there was this group of people. There was this group of people who were very, very fed up with the country telling you what to believe with this lock step stance of church and state. And they said, you know what? We are going to take a pilgrimage. We are going to take a pilgrimage somewhere else to believe what we want to believe and live a pure faith. We'll call ourselves the Puritans and we will form a new land where religious freedom is key and church and state don't mingle. They looked at this idea of nation and piety and they said, I don't think that means what you think it means. And while this new nation was being formed, new ideas of God started to form and one of the base ideas of God that came about with this idea of Calvinism and Calvinism said that God is so powerful and so true and so all knowing that God knows whether you are going to be saved or whether you are going to be damned before you are born. There is nothing that you can do about it. It is predestined. And John Murray, you just heard John Murray's story. John Murray came to this country. Calvinism wasn't so big in England where he was and he came to this country and saw this overwhelming, this overwhelming preaching of Calvinism. There was a man named Jonathan Edwards who did a very famous sermon called Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. And he preached this sermon about how God was dangling us all over the pit fires of hell on golden threads and it was up to God whether or not he would strip them and snip them and we would fall or whether he would keep them strong and we would stay connected to him on golden threads. John Murray looked at those golden threads and he thought about the term salvation and he said, I don't think that means what you think it means. I think God loves everyone and he preached universalism. And then in Boston, a few years later, there was a man named Hosea Baloo. There was a man named Hosea Baloo who studied the Bible and he said, wait a minute. So you're telling us, you're telling us that we have to believe in Jesus because Jesus died for our sins and God's mad at us so he killed his son so that his son could make up for our sins. This doesn't make sense to me. It wasn't reasonable to him because he said God is perfect and God is infinite and sin is finite and we are finite. And what could we possibly give to God? What could God possibly need made up for? This idea of atonement means that God isn't whole as God is and that God needs something else. And he looked at the ideas of sin and atonement and he said, I don't think that means what you think it means. And he wrote a book called The Tertis on Atonement, which is the first universalist tome. It's the first universalist guide to how God loves everyone, to how it is theologically and biblically possible for God to love everyone and the message spread. And then there was a man named William Ellery Channing. There was a man named William Ellery Channing and I read some of what he said. But what he said that I read was in very 19th century preachers speak. William Ellery Channing was a biblical literalist. That's right. Our predecessors were biblical literalists. William Ellery Channing read the Bible and he said there's no actual mention of a trinity in here. And people said, yes, there is. Yes, there is. It's in Mark 5 through 10. It says, and there are three who bear witness in heaven, the father, the son and the holy ghost. And those three are three in one. Read the King James Version Mark 5 through 7, 5 through 10. And that's what it'll say. Well, William Ellery Channing was a very learned man. Does it surprise you that our predecessors were extremely well educated? William Ellery Channing was a very learned person and he knew Greek. So he went back to the original documents of the scriptures. And he read Mark 5 through 10. And for him, it translated into there are three that sit in heaven, the word, the father and the water. And those three agree. And he looked at his translation. And he looked at the translation in the King James Bible and he said, I don't think this means what you think this means. I don't think that there is any biblical proof for a trinity. And also, that doesn't make sense. All of these people just kept saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, this doesn't make sense. Some of them said it doesn't make sense to me logically. And some of them said, I have experienced life and this doesn't make sense to me based on my experience of the divine, but all of them used reason to decide that we were going to make bold, progressive moves in theology. They went even further. In 1838, a man named Ralph Waldo Emerson. I'm sure that's not a new name for many of you. A man named Ralph Waldo Emerson, who was a Unitarian preacher, spoke at Harvard Divinity School at the graduation of one of his young colleagues. And normally, Divinity School graduation speeches were full of rich biblical exploration, because you were speaking to mostly preachers, so you could get away with that, because everyone sort of had a higher level of biblical analysis. And Emerson got up there and he started talking about what a beautiful day it was. And people thought, okay. And then he started going on about the weather even more. And people were like, okay. And then he said, and you know what? I'm having such an amazing experience standing out here and feeling the sun on my skin and the wind in my face. And I don't know that I need a book to tell me about what God is. And transcendentalism was born. This idea that we could experience God beyond scriptural analysis. And Theodore Parker took it even further. In 1841, Theodore Parker gave a sermon called The Transient and the Permanent in Christianity. Theodore Parker stood in front of a large church in Boston, Massachusetts, the headquarters of our faith. And he said some things in our faith are transient and moving. He agreed with me that our theology was one of them. And he said, and some things in our faith are permanent and stable, like our belief in God, like our dedication to knowing that we must live the principles that Jesus gave us. And then he said, I'm going to take you on a thought experiment. I'm going to reason with your rationality. What if we woke up tomorrow and we realized archaeologists could prove that Jesus had never existed, that the man was a myth? Would our religion be false? Would our religion still exist? He posited that it would. That Jesus was in fact kind of unnecessary for Christianity, that throughout the years we had followed this message of loving God and taking care of one another. And that we tried to live like Jesus. But if he didn't exist, would that be any less noble? If Jesus never existed, would the principles that he taught us be any less true? Would living your life to serve one another be any less right? If Jesus had been a myth instead of a man? Theodore Parker looked at Jesus Christ and the idea of salvation. And he said, I don't think this means what you think it means. And so for years, we evolved into a faith of lived experience. We evolved into a faith of living off principle and value rather than creed and dogma. We evolved so far that one day a group of people in the 1920s said, you know, I have seen the beauty of a sunset captured in a photograph. And I've seen the life of a child saved by a doctor. And I give worth to that doctor. And I give worth to that photographer. And I think that human beings deserve primary worth. And that I'm going to take this concept, this entire concept of divinity and tell you that I don't think that means what you think it means. And humanism was born. And for years now, for many decades, for almost a century, we have lived, we have lived as a faith held in the arms of this open theology. And we've also tried to balance when this reason and rationality was something that was freeing. And when it was something that was limiting, because there's a difference between something making not making rational sense. And something being impossible, because we haven't conceived of it yet. There's a difference. I used to work in a hospital. I used to work at the Mayo Clinic and my very first night on call, there was a terrible accident. There was a storm. And two young boys were brought into the hospital. They were cousins and best friends. And at one point, it was clear that one of them was not going to make it. And their family was not religious. So they asked me to come and explain to the other one what might happen to his cousin. And to be with him. Well, he said goodbye. So we had a hard conversation. And we said goodbye to the young boy. And the next day, I went to check on the other boy. And at rounds, the doctors told me they told me that he had made a remarkable recovery, possibly miraculous, and that he too was going to be okay. So I went to visit the boy and I said, hello. The doctors told me that you're going to be okay. And he said, yeah, and you want to know what else? My cousin came this morning. My cousin came to see me. And I said, oh honey, do you remember that we talked about this? That that your cousin's gone? And he said, yeah, I know you said that. But something of him was here. And he said that I had to stay here and that he had to go and that I think that both of us are going to be okay. What was that? Was it a spirit incarnate? Was it the imagination of a child? Was it a dream? Does it matter? For years, we have been the faith that has stripped down all of what God cannot be, what God cannot possibly be because it doesn't make sense. And I agree that it doesn't make sense that God is a male figure making rational decisions about sports games based on how many of his fans petitioned at one point. I agree that that does not make rational sense. But how amazing would it be if after being the religion that had done all of the work of stripping down what God could not be if we were the religion that explored the possibility of what God could be? What would it be like if we were the ones that said there's something in our human connectedness? There is something about the way that we interact with the cycles of the earth. There's something about how we feel when a child laughs or the sky turns pink. There's something in that that's worth exploring and naming as beyond what I reasonably can understand. Our reason has got us here. And I don't think that we should break from it now. But is it reasonable to think that we as human beings can and have conceived of all that there possibly is? I personally hope not. Please rise for our closing hymn, number 1020 Wo-ya-ya. I wish to suggest is a much more absolute which we exist through our human, human circumstances, clear notion of what existence is. Existence is full and reason is wonderful. I wish you these gifts and I wish you all of the possibility and imagination to see beyond them. Go in peace and return in love.