 Please join me in a few moments of centering silence. And now, please remain seated while we sing the in-gathering hymn, number 90. Welcome to 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 Erika Kolmenaris, and on behalf of the congregation, I would like to extend a special greeting to visitors. We are a welcoming congregation, so whoever you are and wherever you are on your life journey, we celebrate your presence among us. Newcomers are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service in the commons area of the atrium building. 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 loja area to my right is a good place to retire with them. And at this time, we ask that you turn off all beepers, cell phones, and electronic equipment that might cause a disturbance during our service. I'd now like to acknowledge those individuals who help our service run smoothly. Our sound operator today is Marine Friend. Our lay minister is Bob Radford. Our RE greeter is Nicole Fenske, and our greeter is Pat Coulson. Our ushers are Kirsten Sieber and Karen Timberlake. And our coffee is being made by Willie Bernstein. Please note the announcements on the red floor insert in your order of service describes upcoming events at the society and provides you with more information about our activities each weekend. Here are a couple of announcements that deserve special mention. After service, head to the commons to choose a needy family for the family to family holiday gift program. You'll be able to beat the Black Friday rush. Don't forget to tell the elves if you can help load social workers' cars with gifts on December 14th or 15th. Or if you can join the also needy elf committee, which only meets four times between September and January. And speaking of shopping, tomorrow is my favorite shopping event of the year, the art in the right place, art fair, and bake sale. Over 40 artists will be participating in this annual fundraiser for our children's religious education program. I encourage you to return to FUS tomorrow between 4.30 and between 9.30 and 4.00 and shop for lovely artwork that will be here. There will also be wonderful baked goods to satisfy your appetite. It's a great opportunity to keep your dollars local while supporting an important program at FUS. Today following service, we will be transforming this landmark space for the sale. If you're willing and able to stick around after service for a bit and assist the effort, moving pews and setting up tables, that would be great. We need your help for about an hour or so. Volunteers will gather in the hearth room, the back here, for instructions. Thanks in advance for your help. And again, welcome. We hope that today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart, and stir your spirit. In words are from Burton Carly who has served as the senior minister of the Church of the River in Memphis, Tennessee, a Unitarian Universalist congregation. Let this be for us an hour of celebration and an hour of renewal. In celebration, let our minds be awake to the common miracle of the earth, the flowing grace of the river, and to the answering spirit within us. In renewal, let our minds be aware of the deep down freshness of a new day, of holiness let loose in creation and of the responding yes within us. Let this hour be a time of celebration when we feel at one with the mystery in which we move and have our being. Let this be a time of renewal when we let go of past disappointments and present anxieties in order to embrace the healing power of our communion. I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for the lighting of our chalice, and, Erica, you will do the honors. And please join me in the words of affirmation printed in this evening's program. We light this chalice as a symbol of our thanks for the beauty of life. We are grateful for the many gifts we have been given, gifts of love and laughter, where mutual support is most evident. Gifts of conscience, which encourage us to contribute to the common good. Gifts of hope, which give purpose to our days and meaning to our efforts. For these and many other unnamed gifts of life, we give thanks. And in the spirit of thanks, I invite you to turn and exchange a warm greeting with your neighbor. It is our practice once a month to set aside a few minutes during the hour for the sharing of personal joys and sorrows, a time for members, friends, and even visitors to our congregation to relate to the entire gathered community some special event or circumstance that has affected your life or the life of someone close to you in recent weeks or months. General announcements, news items, political appeals are by no means appropriate during joys and sorrows. And so for the next few minutes, anyone who wishes is invited to step to the front of the auditorium and light a candle in the bowl of sand to my right. And then using the microphone provided by our lay minister, share your name if that's comfortable for you to do and also your message. Please note that our services are webcast so listeners are not restricted to the folks who are sitting in the room this evening. You may also come forward and wordlessly light a candle of commemoration and then simply return to your seat. And now I open the floor for the sharing of these important matters of our lives. And I would begin with the central candle, candle of memory for Ruth Hersko, longtime member of First Unitarian Society, whose memorial service was held here earlier today. I have a joy that my wife got to spend a week in warm Florida with her mother this week. My father-in-law passed away a couple months ago, so it was a joy she got to spend that time with her. The sorrow is that she has to come back. I have our baby brother able to join us here. My sorrow is from my brother-in-law, David, who is a recently diagnosed with lung cancer. And the joy is that the treatment is probably going to give him a few more. The sorrow is for the families of those lost in Paris last week. And the joy is for the love and prayers for those people. Hello. My joy is that I think this is the first time I want to say in a hundred years that I might have had my family all together around the Thanksgiving table. We had four pull-in yesterday from Connecticut, two on the road right now from Pennsylvania, and the rest are scattered throughout the Midwest. We start our celebration tomorrow with a big game luncheon for the Viking Pike Packer game, because many of us are transplants from Minnesota. And the daughter-in-laws are from Wisconsin, so it will be interesting. So I'm starting the day off with an old-fashioned Minnesota wild rice hot dish, and hope that kind of makes everybody happy. Signify any joys or sorrows that might have occurred to you as others were speaking, but that remain unexpressed. We hold those with equal concern and affection in our hearts. Please join me in the spirit of meditation. For the silence which soothes our souls and for the music which stirs us inside. For the earth and its miraculous lushness and the knowledge that it's all just a gift. For the children who keep us curious and for the aged who show us life's depth. For the visions which bolster our spirits and the places we love to call home. For the differences which make us unique and the convictions which link us as one. For all of this we are indeed lucky people. In this eleventh month of the year with the cold, damp and dark closing in, we pause to give thanks for all that we have. We pause to say that because of it all we are undeniably a lucky people. Let us continue on in just a moment more of silence. Blessed be and amen. And now as we turn to hymn number 322, singing verses 1, 2 and 5, we invite our children to leave for their classes. This well-known passage from the Gospel of Matthew, the sixth chapter. Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you shall eat, what you shall drink, or about your body, what you shall wear. Is not life more than food and the body is it not more than clothing? Look you to the birds of the air, they neither sow nor do they reap nor gather into barns and yet your heavenly Father, He feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And can any of you, by worrying, add a single hour to the span of life? Why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field how they grow. They neither toil nor do they spin and yet I tell you not even Solomon in all of his glory was clothed as one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you? O you of little faith. Therefore do not worry saying what will we eat, what will we drink, what will we wear. Strive first for the kingdom and its righteousness and all these things will be given unto you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today's trouble, that's enough for today. And then in a rather different and contrasting vein, this antidote from Robert Folgem's book, What on Earth Have I Done? A friend of mine, Brie, who was twelve at the time of this story, she's willing to go anywhere with me that involves dressing up. She likes my company and I like hers. And we both like looking good and laughing hard. She's my kind of guy. Technically speaking, she's my grandchild. But I emphasize that we are friends out of mutual admiration, not merely because we are blood kin. She is old and she is wise beyond her years. And I am young and goofy behind my years. She aspires to adulthood, but hasn't quite got the hang of it. And I know what's required of adults, but I can't get used to being one. Now with regard to dress up occasions, one in particular, Brie went along with me to a wedding where I was the ministerial officiant. It was a very romantic occasion that went off much better than I had expected. Both the mother of the bride and the mother of the groom were perfectly pleased. Miraculous. The bride and groom lived happily after that, at least as long as the reception. Laughter, tears, hugging, dancing, eating, drinking, whoopee, home run with the bases loaded. During the ride home, Brie was unusually quiet. I parked the car and we walked hand in hand toward my house where she was going to spend the night. Still quiet. Then suddenly she said, I wonder where he is tonight? You know, him. The man I'm going to marry someday. The father of your great grandchildren. He must be out there somewhere. Where is he? I can't imagine. Why do you ask? Well, said Brie, I worry about him. I hope he's okay. Well, I say if he's going to meet up with you somewhere down the road then I'm sure he must be fine. Safe in the hands of destiny. Silence. I looked down at her and saw trembling lips and teary eyes. What's wrong? Well, what if he got hit by a truck? What if he's out there hurt? I felt tears in my own eyes. That would be awful, I mumbled. Yes, she sobbed. He'd be so sad and so lonely without me. And just then we went through the kitchen door and my wife saw our distress. What's wrong with the two of you, she asked? Her husband was hit by a truck, I moaned. And we don't even know where he is or who's taking care of him. What? Underneath this story is the question that I often ask myself, Fogum writes, what will become of me? Someone once asked me, if you could know everything that will ever happen to you for the rest of your life, but you could not change a single thing about it, would you want to know? Some days, yes, mostly no. But I can't stop wondering, even if it makes no sense. Even if I don't really believe in destiny or the one and only, I still wondered. Meanwhile, the trucks of fate roll on by and the trick is not to get run over by one. The trick is to be there, alert by the side of the road with your thumb out. And then if that truck with your number on it just happens to come along, you will know, you will be watching and you will get in and you will go and the ride will be as long and as lovely as you had always imagined it would be. A little more of that, because Americans are, according to a 2002 World Health Survey, Americans are notoriously anxious people. We worry a lot, more in fact than those who live in troubled countries like Ukraine, Nigeria and Lebanon. One in five of us suffers from an anxiety disorder of one sort or another. And we spend over $2 billion a year on medications to mitigate those conditions. This might seem strange that, given that the average American is amply supplied with the basics, food, shelter, proper clothing, schools, medical care, personal transportation, public safety. We get out exactly in the same position as the pilgrims who stepped off of the Mayflower 400 years ago in late November with little more than the clothes on their back. That first winter of 1620, half of those English refugees perished from exposure or poor nutrition. But thanks to Squanto and the remaining members of the Patuxet tribe, already decimated by diseases introduced by European explorers, because of the Patuxet assistance, the pilgrims adapted to their new surroundings, 60 or so of them were still around to celebrate with their gracious hosts, the Thanksgiving Day feast the following November, an event that was more than likely a traditional native harvest festival. It's perhaps ironic that the Patuxet were not more suspicious of these bad-smelling white interlopers who had occupied a site wherein better days, members of their own once numerous tribe had lived and worked. Without Indian assistance, the Plymouth Rock settlers would almost certainly have been up the creek. By contrast, in today's America, collective worry over refugees has led to both extreme rhetoric and extreme policy proposals. Over three million Syrians, an equal number of Iraqis, have now been displaced due to conflicts that the U.S. helped to instigate and for which we bear significant responsibility. And those burgeoning numbers have created a resettlement nightmare in the countries of Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and more recently in Europe. Hundreds of thousands of men, women and children have fled their war-torn countries seeking asylum, straining the capacity of countries ill-equipped to absorb them. And now, after recent terror attacks in Paris, persons of Middle Eastern extraction stand under a very dark cloud of suspicion. Now perhaps, given Americans still vivid memories of 9-11, we should not be surprised that so many of our own citizens seem so worried. More worried, it seems, than the British, the Germans, and even the French. You know, despite the carnage created by those ISIS operatives eight days ago, President Francois Mitter Hollande has renewed his country's commitment to accept a large number of Syrian refugees. European nations are indeed tightening their security. They're taking additional steps to ensure their citizen safety, but they are not reacting with the paranoia being displayed on this side of the Atlantic. Here, there have been calls to close the door to further Syrian immigration, to allow only Syrian Christians to enter the U.S. The governors of 31 states have now declared Middle Eastern refugees to be persona non gratis. Just two days ago, Indiana's governor refused entry to two Syrian families that had been living in a Jordanian camp for the past three years. Other proposals have included closing all of America's mosques and creating a national Muslim database. Faced with growing opposition to his own resettlement plan, President Obama has remained defiant. Slamming the door in the face of refugees would betray our deepest values, he tweeted. That's not who we are, and it is not what we are going to do. Well, that comment hardly satisfied South Carolina Congressman Trey Gowdy, who is demanding a risk-free immigration plan that guarantees America's absolute safety. Why do Americans worry so much? Why have we become so fearful? Well, truth be told, this is nothing new. The 1850s saw the rise of the American Party, better known to historians as the Know-Nothings. The Know-Nothings adamantly opposed Irish and more broadly Roman Catholic immigration. A few decades later and in the grip of the so-called Yellow Peril, the U.S. Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act, which shut the door to Chinese immigration for more than 60 years. And, of course, more recently, politicians have stoked American spheres of immigrants from south of our border. It is indeed puzzling that a country comprised almost entirely of immigrants and their offspring would turn out to be so inhospitable toward those who are seeking the very same opportunities as my German, Swedish, and English ancestors. Is it the violence that we are afraid of? Statistics indicate that Latino immigrants, documented and undocumented, commit violent crimes at a significantly lower rate than the American population as a whole. As Jonathan Roush wrote in The Atlantic last spring, President Obama catches flak when he lectures the American public not to be so darn worried. If you watch the nightly news, he said, it feels like the world is falling apart. I promise you, he said, that things are much less dangerous now than they were 20 years ago or 30 years ago. And you know what, Roush continues? Obama is right, and the alarmists are simply wrong. Violent crime in this country has declined by 70% since the early 1990s. And in 2011, the homicide rate in America reached its lowest level since 1963. Moreover, Americans are four times more likely to drown in a bathtub than to die in a terrorist attack. Roush quotes Stephanie Rogolo of the Libertarian Cato Institute, who observes that no great power in world history has come close to enjoying the traditional state security that the U.S. does today. Human beings are, Roush allows, hardwired to overreact to perceived threats. And in an earlier era, that hypervigilance did serve us well as a protective function. The snap of a twig, the sight of a shadowy figure, could alert us to a dangerous predator. But today, however, this attribute can often be maladaptive, leading us to take the kind of extreme measures to adopt state and national policies that will end up undermining our freedoms and ultimately serving to reduce rather than enhance our security. Roush says that memory also plays a role in all of this. Incidents of murder and mayhem make a much deeper impression on us than long stretches of peace and serenity. We conjure up a world that is fairly teeming with perils and pitfalls, and we tend therefore to overestimate the likelihood of calamitous events in the future. That's one side of the story. But none of the foregoing should be construed as an argument against worry and its place in our emotional repertory. While we should not allow fear to override common sense and compassion, complacency carries with it some real dangers of its own. In that same Atlantic article, Jonathan Roush characterized this back last March. He characterized ISIS as an almost entirely local menace, one that lacks an active lethal presence in either Western Europe or in the United States. Well, last week we learned the hard way that this was not the case. So perhaps those who had been entrusted with Francis security should have worried a little more. Worry, in other words, is by no means an unnecessary or inexpedient emotion. Problems arise, yes, when worry becomes excessive or chronic or misdirected. There are times that call for worry. There are occasions that warrant it. Yes, Jesus counseled his listeners not to give any thought to the moral to simply take care of business today. Can any of you, by worrying, he said, add a single hour to your life? Well, actually, yes, you can. Worry, that intuitive sense that something isn't quite right, that feeling of impending peril can protect us, can protect our loved ones, can add hours to our lives. Worry begets vigilance exactly what we need to stay out of harm's way. Robert Folgem's experience with his granddaughter, who was worried to tears about the safety of her future husband, that highlights a type of concern that seems just a bit out of whack. But Folgem's conclusion is the right one. We need to stay alert, because if there is a truck with our name on it barreling down upon us, it's reasonable to worry about it, reasonable to worry about the sobriety and the skills of that driver out there. Now, worry does, of course, create stress. And in extreme cases, it can become an anxiety disorder with physical symptoms that include palpitations, hypertension, insomnia, and even shorter life expectancy. Clearly, heightened worry like this does not serve us well. But moderate worry may. For example, a recent study published in the journal Emotion tested this thesis. Does worry help us on a sampling of students who were taking the bar exam? Now, once these students had completed the testing, they were awaiting the results, and some of those students adopted a kind of a fatalistic attitude, just relax, what will be, will be. Others, however, were anxious and they found it very difficult to tamp down their worries. They would hope for the best, in themselves, for possible failure. Now, once the scores were posted, which group was better prepared to handle the information they received? Turns out, the warriors. They were both more thrilled if they passed and less devastated if they failed. As Dr. Kate Sweeney observed, if the news was bad, the warriors were ready with a productive, reasonable response. If they passed, they were absolutely elated. But woe to those who remained calm. Those who sailed through the waiting period were shattered and paralyzed by the bad news, and if they got good news, well, they were underwhelmed. So does worry get an undeserved bad rap? To a certain extent, it probably does. If worry raises our stress level, we presume that it should be avoided because the stress we know is unhealthy. But that may be an oversimplification because recent research suggests that generally speaking, stress is harmful only if the subject believes it is harmful. If we reframe the experience of stress and regard it in a more positive light, its physiological effects are dampened. Over 100,000 Americans, Kelly McDonough argues, may have died prematurely, but not from stress. They died from the belief that stress was bad for them. I once had a female colleague who served a large Unitarian Universalist congregation in Texas. She always struck me as a little bit wired, a little bit high strung, and stress she once conceded is my drug of choice. For me, that was another way of saying that she found stress in her life, particularly her professional life, rather than discomforting. And I share those sentiments. After nearly 40 years of public speaking, not a day goes by that I don't worry about what I'm going to say and how I'm going to say it. And the same holds true of rites of passage. Now, I've conducted over 700 weddings in my career, half that many memorial services, but I always worry every single time about getting it right. And worrying can be kept within manageable limits the psychologist John Agro Hall suggests. It helps prepare us to make the best performance that we possibly can. And worry also demonstrates active concern. Our children, especially when they enter adolescence and have begun chafing at the bit, may express frustration with what they see as exaggerated parental concern. Recoiling from our adult worries, they say, don't treat me like a kid. I know how to take care of myself. How many of you have heard that or the equivalent of it? But if, as parents, we don't share our worries, our kids may judge us to be apathetic, unconcerned, indifferent. Now, as long as it doesn't suffocate them or cause resentment, worry can reassure our sons and daughters that we really do care about their welfare. And this is true as well for non-family members who happen to fall within our orbit. In his powerful book, Just Mercy, Brian Stevenson, who has been litigating on behalf of condemned prisoners for over a quarter of a century, Steven admitted that after 25 years he had reached the point where he was just plain worn out from worrying. He worried about pending execution dates. He worried about upcoming decisions from the Supreme Court. He worried about having sufficient staffing and resources to carry on the fight. He worried about released prisoners who were struggling. And despite all of his accomplishments, Stevenson felt overwhelmed and he wrote, it's time to stop. I just can't do this anymore. But then, a few pages later, and like the protagonist in Samuel Beckett's novel, Unnavable, Stevenson said to himself, I can't go on, but I must go on. The beleaguered attorney realized that not only were his worries inescapable, they were appropriate for the situation. Those worries were what motivated him in his ongoing struggle for just solutions. For Brian Stevenson, the emotion is not disabling because he can move from the pain of worry to constructive activities that prove to be worry's antidote. And we can do the same. But this means that we have to be selective, letting go of sources of worry and anxiety over which we can exert little if any influence, and turning our attention instead toward issues where we just might have some leverage. At a personal level, that might mean being more intentional about planning for our retirement, particularly if we're worried about our finances when we do retire. If we're a parent, it may mean keeping closer tabs on the social media that our children are using. And in the social and political sphere, there are many issues that are worth worrying about. The criminalization of poverty, hostility toward the Muslim faith and its members, glaring inequalities in our own community, in housing, education, and employment. We worry a lot about the future without there being anything that we can really do about it, Art Markham observes. So find an action you can perform and engage with it. Now, can we really do this? Can we really choose not to worry about certain things, to be selective about what we are going to worry about? According to the Stanford anthropologist, T.H. Lurman, around a third of us are born with a genetic predisposition for higher levels of anxiety, which may make it harder for at least some of us to worry less. And, furthermore, over exposure to the sensationalist, conflict-driven media increases our propensity to worry. You know, these days I think many Americans suffer from a kind of free-floating anxiety that then latches onto every disaster desgeur raising it to near-panic levels. And it's important, therefore, to find things where we can be effective and also to develop a strategy that can help us to understand and moderate our worry. Because when we lose the sense of having choice and we forget that things change, then those negative mind-states tend to solidify and they begin to seem permanent, Sharon Salzberg writes. A mindfulness practice can lead to self-empowerment. The ability, she says, to face our demons and to find the strength to stare them down. In other words, attempts to repress or to run away from our worry, that's typically not going to work. But if we allow those anxieties to enter and pass through consciousness, then we may be able, over time, to identify their true source, to put them in proper perspective and to control our own reactivity. Steady yourself and see that it is your own thinking that darkens your world, John O'Donoghue writes. But search and you will find a diamond thought of light and a new confidence will come alive to urge you toward that higher ground where your imagination will learn to engage differently as its most rewarding threshold. Blessed be. This being the Thanksgiving season, we will be collecting turkeys and fixings and also money for the Saint Vinnie de Paul food pantry, the largest food pantry in the county. And we will be directing those gifts to people who cannot afford a Thanksgiving dinner in 2015. Please be generous. I invite you now to rise once more from your body and spirit as we sing together him number 151. Gratitude for the wondrous gifts that are ours and moved by the desire to share this undeserved bounty with life's fellow travelers. We prepare now to re-enter the world as it is. May we leave here sensitized to the world's unfulfilled needs, but also with a song of Thanksgiving on our lips to the creator and sustainer of this daily miracle that I am and we are. Blessed be and amen.