 who would like to come on closer for the story to come on down. Hello? Kate, what are you doing all over there? What? Trying to tell me something? Why are you so far away? Want anything? Oh, those are awesome toenails. You're going to go fishing today after this? With grandpa? I wouldn't mind going fishing with your grandpa. He'd be a good guy to go fishing with. Well, I'm going to tell you a story today, one that I am sure you have heard in one form or another. It's called stone soup. Uh-huh. I bet, Ollie, do you know this one? I love this one, and this one's a little different version, so if you can see, it's got some great pictures with it, too. Three monks, hook, look, and sow, traveled along a mountain road. They talked about cat whiskers, the color of the sun, and giving. What makes one happy, sow, asked hook, the youngest monk. Old sow, who was the wisest, said, let's find out. The sound of a bell brought their gaze to the rooftops of a village below. They couldn't see from so high above that the village had been through many hard times. Famine, floods, war, all these had made the villagers weary and untrusting of strangers. They had even become suspicious of their neighbors. Suspicious. What does suspicious mean? It means they were kind of questioning of their neighbors. They didn't trust them. They mainly stayed in their own homes with their windows closed in their doors shut, and they didn't really talk to each other much. Does that make sense? Okay. So, there was a farmer, a tea merchant, a, a tea, is that the tea merchant? There he is. A scholar, ooh, a seamstress, a doctor, a carpenter, and many others. But they had little to do with one another. When the monks reached the foot of the mountain, the villagers disappeared into their houses. No one came to the gates to greet them. And when the people saw them enter the village, they closed their windows tight. The monks knocked on the door of the first house. There was no answer. Then the house went dark. They knocked on a second door, and the same thing happened. It happened again and again from one house to the next. These people do not know happiness, they all agreed. But today, said Sao, his face bright as the moon, we will show them how to make stone soup. They gathered twigs and branches and made a fire. They placed a small tin pot on top and filled it with water from the village well. A brave little girl who had been watching came to them and said, what are you doing? We are gathering twigs, said Locke. We're making a fire, said Huck. We're making stone soup, and we need three round smooth stones, said Sao. The little girl helped the monks look around the courtyard until they found just the right ones. Then they put them in the water to cook. These stones will make excellent soup, said Sao. But this very small pot won't make much, I'm afraid. My mother has a bigger pot, said the girl. The little girl ran home. As she started to take a pot, her mother asked what she was doing. The three strangers are making soup from stones. They need our biggest pot. Look at the size of that. I think you guys would fit in there, don't you think? It's huge. You're a little bigger than that pot. Ten times bigger. Said the girl's mother, stones are easy to come by. I'd like to learn how to do that. The monks poked the coals, as smoke drifted up the neighbors peered out from their windows. The fire and the large pot in the middle of the village was a true curiosity. One by one the people of the village came out to see just what this stone soup was. Of course, old style stone soup should be well seasoned with salt and pepper, said Hulk. That is true, said Luck as he stirred the giant pot, but we have none. I have salt and pepper, said the scholar, his eyes big with curiosity. He disappeared and came back with salt and pepper and even a few other spices. Sao took a taste. The last time we had soup stones of this size and color, carrots made the broth very sweet. Carrots, said a woman from the back, I may have a few carrots, but just a few. And off she ran. She returned with as many carrots as she could carry and dropped them right into the pot. Do you think it would be better with onions, asked Hulk? Oh yes, maybe an onion would taste good, said a farmer and he hurried off. He returned in a moment with five big onions and he dropped them into the bubbling soup. Now that is a fine soup, he said. The villagers all nod at their heads as the smell was delicious. But if only we had some mushroom, said Sao rubbing his chin. Several villagers licked their lips. A few dashed away and returned with fresh mushrooms, noodles, pepods and cabbages. Something magical began to happen among the villagers. As each person opened their heart to give, the next person gave even more. And as this happened the soup grew richer and smelled more delicious. I imagined the emperor would suggest we add dumplings, said one villager. And bean curd, said another. What about cloud ear and mung beans and yams, cried others. And taro root and winter melon, baby corn, garlic, ginger root, soy sauce, lily buds. I have some, I have some, people cried out. And off they ran, returning with all they could carry. The monk stirred, pot bubbled, how good it smelled, how good it would taste, how giving the villagers had become. At last the soup was ready. The villagers gathered together. They brought rice and steamed buns. They brought leechy nuts and sweet cakes. They brought tea to drink and they lit lanterns. Your allergic to nuts will then no nuts for you. You could have the sweet cakes. Mom's allergic to nuts? Whoa. Well, everyone sat down to eat. They had not been together for a feast like this for as long as anyone could remember. After the banquet they told stories, sang songs, celebrated long into the night. Then they unlocked their doors and gave the monks beds to sleep in their homes. In the gentle spring morning everyone gathered together near the willows to say farewell. Thank you for having us as your guests, said the monks. You have been most generous. Thank you, said the villagers. With the gifts you have given we will always have plenty. You have shown us that sharing makes us all richer. And to think, said the monks, to be happy is as simple as making stone soup. All right, thank you all for being such great listeners. We are going to rise in body or spirit and sing you out. Have fun at summer fun. Thoughts this morning on theology, this first one from Nancy Schaefer. Not God as one who set the earth in motion and withdrew. Not the one to thank when those cherished do not die. For providence includes equally the power to harm. Not a God of extracting as if love could be earned or subtracted. But this may work in the night. Something that breathes with us as others sleep. Something that breathes also those sleeping so no one is alone. Something that is the beginning of love and also each part of how love is completed. Something so large, wherever we are, we are not separate. Which teaches us again the way to start over. Night is the test. When grief lies uncovered and longing shows clear. When nothing we do can hasten earth's turning or delay it. This may be adequate for the night. This holding, something that steadfastly breathes us. Which we also are learning to breathe. And then this child's view from Terry Sweetser. I was seven years old when I had my first encounter with theology. My mother made a batch of fudge, put it in the fridge and decreed it could not be touched until after supper. I was not pleased. I conjured every scheme I could to sneak some, but someone was always lurking in the kitchen. About four in the afternoon I got an incredible break. My mother and sister had to head out for the store leaving me all alone. Mom must have been reading my mind because she gave me a warning on the way out. Just because I'm not here, don't think you are alone with that fudge. God is watching you. The word theology means God study and after they drove off I studied hard. It did not take long for me to conclude I was a seven year old atheist. That fudge tasted good. Unfortunately for me, mom had counted the pieces and the recount on her return showed a deficit of three. When asked how I dared to steal fudge right in front of God, I said, I don't believe in God. My ever practical Unitarian Universalist mother swatted my behind and sent me to my room saying it would be in your best interests to act as if you did. The personal God who could legislate justice and control the universe died for me that day. But a passionate interest in what people mean by the idea of God was born. I sense it is a passion most of us share. Unitarian Universalists really get worked up about God. For all practical purposes though, mom was right. It's in our best interest to act as if God were there. Thank you both. I arrived here in the summer of 2001. One of my first responsibilities was to figure out the adult education courses I would teach that coming fall. I immediately thought of a course titled Building Your Own Theology. It is a uniquely Unitarian Universalist program in which participants think through the big questions. Human nature, the afterlife, your own spiritual autobiography, and of course the ultimate God. At the end of the course you write your own credo or this I believe statement where you share with the others what it is that you do believe. As a recent seminary grad I thought this one would be a breeze for me to offer because I was of course knowledgeable about all these areas. I remember setting up the room on that first night, name tags, check, craft supplies, check, chalice, check matches, got it. I was ready. Then the first participant came in and said, I just hope we're not talking about God tonight because I don't want to waste any time on that. I mean, either you believe it or you don't. What is there to talk about? I think I froze. I think I said something totally unintelligible and probably not helpful at all. And at that moment I realized I was no expert on theological matters and still had some things to figure out for myself. I learned that night as our reading from Terry Sweetser said, Unitarian Universalists really get worked up about God. I remember a lively discussion where we proved that there really was much to talk about when it came to an ultimate reality. Now I was raised in a family where certain religious matters weren't really a question but more of a given. Of course you believed in God. We were at mass every Sunday, six days a week when I was in Catholic school. God was more of a distant relative than an all-powerful force. Invoked at meal times and holidays, praised during the good times and solicited during the difficult ones. Always present, always close, always available for comfort. I did find this to be comforting, for I never felt that I was ever truly alone. In moments when I was physically alone, there was always this invisible friend I could talk to who was always there to listen. And as my grandmother would say, always there to give proper instruction if you listened hard enough. Then there's the concept of salvation, another given in my upbringing. Yet one morning I entered the office of the First Unitarian Church of Philadelphia where I was a ministerial intern to find my supervisor waiting for me. And at that moment I realized that perhaps ideas of salvation are not a given. When I entered the office he turned and said, So, what saves you? Excuse me? For there was no good morning, no how was the train, no. So what do you got on your plate today? Simply what saves you? My blank stare must have caused him to continue because he said, where is your salvation? How are you saved? Again, I believe I was completely unintelligible on the subject. I believe what he was trying to ask me that morning was this. In a world of pain, suffering, disappointment, injustice, what brings it and you to wholeness again? Living in a fragmented state, in a fragmented world, what transforms you toward a state of wholeness, a holiness that is the original core of our being? Or maybe he was trying to get me to think about an even larger question, a question about our communities of faith because here we do not grant salvation in any traditional religious sense. When you enter into a Unitarian Universalist community of faith, no one is going to say to you, Here it is, here's the answer once and for all. Here's the answer for the questions of God and salvation and all those others. And if you just follow these steps, then all of it will be granted to you. We don't have the answers and it is our job individually and collectively to search for those truths together. I have been asked that question of why are you here? Why would someone attend your congregation? What is the purpose of a religious community that doesn't glorify the one true God or give one path to salvation? Add into that equation the numbers in our congregations who cringe at the use of the word God and are skeptical of its usefulness in any form and would much rather be thinking about anything else at this moment. So after much thought and reading into the work of Henry Nelson Wyman, I was able to return to my supervisor with the beginnings of an answer, which I'll share with you in a bit. But first, Henry Nelson Wyman. He was a Unitarian Universalist philosopher and theologian who spent most of his career as a professor of philosophy. He was ordained to the Presbyterian ministry in 1912, but an encounter with Unitarianism in 1949 led him to receive fellowship as a Unitarian minister. For the rest of his life, he was active in UU communities and taught at both of our two seminaries. Wyman spent his entire adult life wrestling with ideas of religious philosophy and theology. In his autobiography, he stated that the primary question that absorbed his attention for over 50 years was this one. What operates in human life with such character and power that it will transform men and women as they cannot transform themselves, saving them from evil and leading them to the best that human life can ever reach? This man wrestled with the question of God and salvation for over 50 years. What he came to was that human beings were created for transformation, and he wanted to know what it is that can transform us and save us. His answer to that question was very simply God. But Wyman's God was not a supernatural, transcendent, otherworldly personality separate from and above us in this world. He explained it this way. Nothing can transform humanity unless it actually operates within human life. Therefore, in human life, in the actual processes of human existence, in that human life must be found the saving and transforming power which religion seeks and which faith tries to understand. For Wyman, God is not a noun but a verb, and that verb is at work in ever-evolving relationships, relationships that are transformative, creative, and generative. God, he said, is the integrating process at work in the universe. God is the growth which springs anew when old forms die away. Wyman called this process creative interchange. And by this, he means a transforming interaction between individuals in community. He defined creative interchange as a four-step process, one event with four stages. It begins with emerging awareness of qualitative meaning derived from other persons through communication, then moves on to integrating these new meanings with others that you have previously acquired. And this causes the expanding of the richness of quality in the world by enlarging its meaning. And finally, it deepens the community among those who participate in this total creative event of intercommunication. And that one extremely long and wordy sentence is this man's total understanding of God. So what does it all mean? Step one is getting the perspective of another person. By sitting together and listening and sharing in conversation with another, we are made aware of a perspective beyond our own. We take in another person's understanding without argument, without judgment. We listen. This is the beginning. Then we move on to integrating this new perspective with what we already know or what we think we believe. If you listen to another person, but you do not allow their perspective to enter into your way of being, possibly allowing it to influence you, then Wyman says it's not creative interchange. But if you can listen to another, even someone who has a different sense of the world and you are open to the possibility that it may shift the way you see things, then it is a creative event. Following this new way of thinking, believing, and being, we can have what he calls expanding appreciation. We live differently. We choose differently. We can do more than we thought we could do alone. You give to me and I grow. I give to you and you grow. In giving, we receive. And beyond this, expanding appreciation is growing community. Creative interchange within community is when we engage in creative and open dialogue, conversation, discussion. This is when we find the holy at work. And missing the mark, he says, that traditional word sin is when we do the opposite, when we close our minds, when we insist only on our way, when we refuse to listen to those we disagree with. Creative interchange is the deep and profound sharing of ideas, our ideas, but also our inspirations, feelings, understandings. Simply put, if I have examined my worldview and I've experienced something from deeply listening to your worldview, I may have come to integrate these new understandings into my whole being, my way of being in the world. And if this is happening to each and every one of us in the spaces between us, then together we can grow as a community that will bring justice, care for the oppressed, and all the interactions of our life. And do this with deeper relational bonds that keep us part of something holy, something sacred and better than me alone. How does this save us? How does this restore us to our original wholeness? The fragmentation of our world is subtle. We come together week after week out of a society whose institutions oftentimes fail to set before us and our children values that are embracing, compassionate, and responsible. We come together out of a culture that more and more degrades the good, the true, the beautiful. We come together surrounded by messages of ambition that would destroy the air, devastate the soil, foul the waters, a place that has little sense of responsibility for the common good. We come together from a world that feels less and less related, in which the language of connectedness, if used at all, feels forced and false. Something precious, still within each of us, what Wyman called original feels more and more lost. Transforming relationship is what delivers us out of this fragmented world, helps restore our original wholeness, and turns us toward a restoration of the world. Victoria Safford puts it this way, if I were asked to confess my faith or my beliefs out loud and I were scrambling for some place to begin, I would start in the desert, in the lonesome valley, and say that first of all, and ultimately, we are alone. No God abides with us, caring, watching, mindful of our going out and our coming in. The only certainty is mystery. We are alone, and because we are alone, it is the chance connections, both chosen and involuntary, that matter most of all, and ultimately help and heal and hold us. We are alone yet intricately bound, inextricably connected to soil and stream and forest, to sun and corn and melting snow. We are alone yet bound by stories we cannot get out of to ancestors and descendants we will never meet. And all these natural conditions, these bonds we did not forge ourselves yet cannot deny are the strands of a theology, the seeds of a faith, the beginning of religion, the binding of all things. When I say God, and sometimes I do, because sometimes there's no other metaphor, no other symbol, no other poetry, when I say God, I mean that place of meeting, that place where solitudes join, the space between my hand and the dogwood, the space where the tiny feet of the ant brush the dry dirt beneath her, the space between Mercury and Venus, between electrons which we unblinkingly believe in without seeing, God is the space in between, the bridge between solitudes, the ground where we meet, you and I, or any to, by grace. If I were asked, I'd say that all of us together are alone, and the emptiness between us is waiting to be filled. So to that question of why we are here in this religious community, I'd say this. In this community of the spirit, we create a place where we accept each other's imperfections, reconcile our differences, forgive and be forgiven, comfort and be comforted. Love and be love belong and find a home. And in that space between us, we find the holy, we find wholeness, we find God. And to that question of what saves me, I would now tell my supervisor this. We are here to enjoy existence, to celebrate the life we share, the one blessed by pleasure and pain alike, affirming in the end that life is good. We are here to create community, for we are members one of another, to live in the unending charm of those who people this world with us sharing the ambiguity that is human living. And we are here to act as if it depends on each of us. It doesn't, for no one can do it alone, yet it does depend on us. We are here to connect, to be together, to help one another and the world. What else could possibly save us? And I now invite you into the giving and receiving of the morning's offering, which you can see in your order of service. We'll be shared with WAVE, Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort Educational Fund. You can find out more about them in the order of service. And we thank you for your generosity. We gather each week in this place, made sacred by the presence of both the holy and the human. We come together to sing and to pray, to be still, to be alert, to acknowledge hurt, to seek to heal, to remember our sorrows and our joys. This week we hold in our hearts Scott and Dawn Wavra. Scott was just released from intensive care. He was in for about five days with a bout of pneumonia. And she let me know this morning that he has been out of ICU and is doing well. So we share the ongoing concerns and the great joy this morning. We also share the joy and the celebration of Rob and Mary Savage. Today is their 40th wedding anniversary. We wish that many, many more years of love and happiness and adventure, for simple things that are not simple at all, for miracles of the common way, sunrise and sunset, seed time and harvest, hope, joy, grace, for all these and more. May we lift our hearts in thankfulness today and pray only to be more aware and thus more alive. Blessed be and amen. And if you will rise in body or spirit for our closing hymn, number 131, in this room are those whose hearts are sometimes tender, whose skin is sometimes thin, whose eyes sometimes fill with tears and whose laughter is a beautiful sound. We are each here seeking wholeness, and we trust that you are doing the same. As you leave this place, may your hearts remain open, may your voices stay strong, and may your hands always remain reaching out. Blessed be, go in peace, and please be seated for the post loom.