 Welcome to the First Unitarian Society. Excuse me, my name is Becky Burns, and I use the pronouns of she or they, and I'm a member here at our congregation. One of the ways I serve it is as a worship associate. Today, I'm joined by one of our ministers, Kelly Asperth Jackson, and the worship team of Linda Warren, Heather Thorpe, Stephen Gregorius, and Daniel Kearns. As well as all of those volunteering today as greeters, ushers, hospitality providers, sound tech, and lay ministers. At First Unitarian Society, we question boldly, listen humbly, grow spiritually, act courageously, and love unapologetically. If you are visiting us today, welcome. We're so very glad you're here with us. If you would like more information about First Unitarian Society, please stop by our welcome table located in the comments. And we also hope that you'll be able to stay and join us for a coffee hour immediately after the service. Following the service today, our climate action team will be leading a discussion circle in the landmark auditorium. And for those of us, those of you connecting with us virtually today, we're very glad that you're here with us as well. And we hope that you'll be able to take a moment and watch the announcement slides after today's service to learn about some upcoming programs and activities. If you haven't already, you'll be receiving a postcard in your mailbox soon. It'll be coming sometime this week, so please take note of it, sign up in the comments, and we offer great thanks to Bev for her volunteer crew, for arranging their support for this event. And now I invite you to join me in a moment of silence, to center ourselves, and bring ourselves fully into this time and space as we join together once again in community. Open the doors, push on looming wooden archers and broidered with ironwork, brace shoulder to shoulder against the weight of history, unmoved, slough off any musty smell of unused joy or stored up sorrow. Knock rust off the hinges if you have to, and let your breath precede you inside. Open the doors more, make room for a shaft of sunlight to cross the threshold, give the dust motes something to dance about, peek through a single slice of possibility, and name even the half-hidden truths you see. Open the doors wider still, pour yourself through the gap, strut or sneak or sidle as suits you best, cleanse whatever scrapes catch your skin, and bind up the wounds that keep you from entering hole. Open the doors as far as they will go, draw on the strength of the stones beneath you, ground yourself in a firm sense of who you are, stand as a beacon welcoming the next seeker, and shine far beyond the lintel and sill. Open all that you are, heighten and deepen your connections to the world around you, broaden your definition of neighbor, grow into the largest target of grace that you can muster, and pray to become a gateway for even greater love and compassion. Open up the doors, my friends, lest we keep the stranger out and condemn ourselves to prisons of our own making. And now I invite you to rise in all the ways that we do and join me in the words of aspiration for the kindling of our chalice flame. May the flame of this chalice, the symbol of our faith, connect us to all who have come before us, all who are with us in body and spirit, and all who are yet to come into being. May it serve as a reminder of our unity and connection across all time and space. And now I invite you to turn to those around you and greet each other with signs of love and peace. When I would like to invite forward anybody who would like to come up here and share a story with me this morning, good morning, those are fancy shoes. Well, good morning, it's good to see you today. Indeed, that is not only is that a picture of a crane, it's a picture of the best dancing crane that I could find in all of my time on Google. So it's getting to be spring now, this morning's temperature notwithstanding. Can we think of any signs that we are seeing in the world around us that make us think about how it's spring? Yes. The W made out of flowers. Yes, at the university. That is definitely a sign of spring in Madison. You are right about that. Yes, did you have something? Yeah, flowers are blooming and it's getting warmer on average. Yes, making seas out of pretzels. I don't know, but I'm intrigued. I wanna know more about this. Yes, animals coming out of hibernation. Yeah, for sure, absolutely. We care for other people that we love. Hopefully a year round activity, but also a good springtime activity. Yes, flowers, I agree. Birds are hatching out of their eggs, out of their shells. Yes. The trees are blooming. They're really blooming right now. Yes. There's buds on the trees. Yes. Plants are getting sunlight. They're growing bigger. They're blooming. They're blossoming. Yes. Buds are growing on the trees. Yes, yes. The flowers are coming up. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. So here is one example that I have in mind. Some of the birds that don't hang out with us all through the winter are coming back now and one of those are the sandhill cranes. Have you seen any sandhill cranes yet this season? Yeah? Some of you have? Not, it's not a sandhill crane, but a crane nonetheless, yes. You saw a crane during the winter, out of place, out of step, undermining the entire background of my argument. Yes, thank you. So I have a story for you today that's about some cranes, or at least some cranes are involved in it, but it starts out with a character named Lu Dongbing. This is a story from a very long time ago in China. Did it really happen? Can't say. But Lu Dongbing is an actual person who lived a long time ago in China. Can I check in with you at the end? Is that okay? Okay, great. So he was traveling from city to city and town to town and he was a very wise person and he was a very kind person, but he didn't have any money at this point in the story. So when he got to a new place, he would have to find someone who would be willing to give him the things that he needed in order to live, things like food and shelter, pretty crucial stuff, even though he couldn't pay them for it. So he went to different restaurants and taverns in each new city and he would go to the place and he would say, look, I would really like something to eat, really appreciate it, but I'm not gonna be able to pay you. And most of the people who ran those restaurants and taverns and other places like that were like, well, goodbye. They were not interested in that arrangement, but there was one person in this one particular city who owned a tavern and when Lu Dongbin explained the situation to him, such as it was, he said, yeah, okay, here, have some food. And Lu Dongbin ate that food and he drank something to drink and he had a very nice evening in the tavern and he thanked the tavern keeper and then he left without paying as they had agreed to at the beginning. And so, about a year passed and he came back through the same town and this time he started in that tavern where they had been so nice to him in the past, where the owner had been so understanding and he said, do you remember me? And the tavern said, I think I do, tavern keeper said. And same arrangement. He ate, he drank, he had a nice time, he didn't pay anything. This happened a few more times, a few more years went by and eventually, on the fourth time, Lu Dongbin said, thank you so much. The meals have been excellent. I am very grateful. I would like to do something for you in return. And so he took out a paintbrush and he went to the wall of the tavern and he painted a beautiful picture, beautiful picture of some cranes on the wall. Big cranes, just like that. So he painted a picture of the cranes and he said, this is a special picture. Play some music and see what happens. And so the tavern folks did, they played some music and the cranes climbed down off of the wall and they started dancing. How do you think that a crane dances? I think it's mostly in the wings, personally. What do you think? Oh, like in ballet, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, what do you think? How do you think a crane dances? Okay, I like that, I like the shoulder action. Yep, yep. Okay, it can do some break dancing on its beak. I think that's awesome. I'm not gonna be able to illustrate it personally. Yes, twirling around, yeah, okay. So the cranes danced and the people in the tavern thought this was a lot of fun and they watched the cranes dance and some of them danced with them. And so Ludong Bin went back on his travels but people came to the tavern from all around to see the dancing cranes to play music and to dance with them and to just enjoy the food at the tavern, to enjoy the company of other people and the music. And this went on for many years. The tavern became very famous. It had a very brisk business. The tavern keeper was doing very well and many, many years later, Ludong Bin came back through the city once again and he came right to the tavern and the tavern keeper greeted him warmly and said how grateful he was to see him and Ludong Bin asked the tavern keeper, have I paid you back what I owed you? The tavern keeper said many, many times over, I have done very well for myself in the years since you painted those cranes on my wall and the tavern, the Ludong Bin said, very good, I am glad that I have repaid my debt and he took out his paintbrush and he painted over the cranes so that they were not there anymore and they wouldn't come down and dance anymore. And do you think that the tavern keeper was disappointed about that? No, I think it would have been reasonable if he had been, I wouldn't be upset with him to be disappointed, but he wasn't. He said, I'm very grateful for what I received. I do not need more than what I got. And you know what else? The people who were used to coming to that tavern to enjoy the dancing cranes, they kept coming to that tavern because in all those years of enjoying the show, they had gotten to know each other and gotten to enjoy each other as well. So it was still worth coming back to that place even if the cranes weren't there anymore. Thank you so much for listening to my story. We're gonna sing a few classes now. Hi. Oh, you can make the world so presence-free. Please join together and rise in body and spirit as we sing hymn number 308, the blessings of the earth and sky. The sounds of wind and water, of animals moving about and calling to each other. The innumerable sounds created by human beings and all our artifice. However, out beyond our planet's atmosphere into the vast gaps between the stars which compose most of the cubic footage of the cosmos, it is a different story. Waves and particles still fly about. It is beautifully, mysteriously complicated up there. But the human ear is evolved from our environment down here such that there is very little for us to literally hear in space. In a sense, the world is loud, but the universe is quiet. So now, in order that we might commune for a time with that vast cosmic silence, let us spend this moment together, resting in reverent quiet. Amen. It must have been hot when they set out into the desert. The spring in Egypt is not what I would call mild. And although the local climate has shifted somewhat in 3,000 years, the Sinai was a desert then as it is a desert now. In the story of the Exodus, of the liberation of the Hebrew people from slavery in Egypt, the possibility of freedom comes abruptly and is almost immediately revoked. It is a daring, desperate flight into the wilderness seeking to outrun the grasp of oppression. And in addition to the strain, the struggle, and the fear of that moment, it must have been hot because the story goes that the people had no time to let bread rise and bake conventionally. They just flattened the dough and carried it on their backs, letting it bake in the sun. That is the reason why the Jewish Festival of Passover, which commemorates the story of the Exodus from Egypt and which begins this coming Monday night, is also known as the Feast of Unleavened Bread. Being a Jewish holiday here in the context of Unitarian Universalism, some number of us celebrate Passover and most of us do not. Our tradition is shaped and informed by many different strands of human spirituality and one of these is Judaism. We do not all need to share a given practice or a particular theology in order to engage with it and to learn from it. This vast breadth to our tradition is among its most distinctive and vital qualities when we engage it deeply and with care. Here at FUS, our spiritual theme this month is interdependence, the ways in which our lives and the freedoms and purposes which give those lives meaning rely upon each other. So with Passover about to begin, as a Unitarian Universalist and a Jew for whom this holiday holds deep meaning, I am inviting you to join me in considering some lessons that we might draw from the particularities of this festival and the story that animates it. So first, just the bare bones of the narrative. Once, the children of Israel were a single family. They were called the children of Israel because there was one man named Israel and his children, their associated households. The family settled in Egypt where they were welcomed and over generations they grew numerous until the pharaoh, the king, out of fear or greed or malice or all three decided to subjugate the children of Israel, the Hebrew speaking people in his midst. They became slaves and there was suffering and death for a very long time. Until the cry for freedom rose to heaven. The demand for justice reached the pharaoh and he refused again and again and with each new refusal life got worse for everyone, even the pharaoh. So that one day he relented and the people fled quickly in case he changed his mind, which he did. He chased after them, trying to recapture them, to force them back into slavery, but pharaoh failed and the people got free. This is not a history. It is a type of story older and more powerful than that. It is a myth. And while history is full of details that have no discernible larger meaning, every element of a myth matters. At the triumphant moment of the Exodus story at the edge of the desert, the people are certainly hot and probably tired, but they are free. And who is they? According to the story, the people who left Egypt were a mixed multitude, not just Hebrews. But many other Egyptians besides. Perhaps due to connections of family or other close relationships, maybe just getting out of, because getting out of Egypt seemed like a really good idea to a lot of people at that moment. There is no freedom in a slave holding society. There's just the people that you can step on and the people who can step on you. So when they left Egypt, they left as a coalition. This is the central event that Passover celebrates, literally the point at which its signature lack of leavening enters the narrative. And who is it for? A diverse community, not a uniform group, but all sharing in the realized possibility of liberation. Now the lessons that I have to offer you from this are probably already obvious. About how the struggle for liberation from oppression can unite us across differences and variations. How powerful we can become together when we do not make sameness the precondition for belonging. In the text of the Torah, the central account of this ancient story, the message is incredibly hopeful. The mixed multitude is blessed and embraced. The whole body sets out together with one common good between them, one destiny in front of them. The sad truth is that it does not last. A millennia or two later, it would become relatively common as an idea in Jewish thought to blame certain offenses committed and woes experienced by the many generations after the Exodus on this mixed quality. Recasting as weakness or corruption, the hallmark of the most transcendently joyful moment in the tradition's very origin story. Now a lot of people across time and space have buttressed their fears and prejudices with bad theology. That human tendency is not news. So I pointed out not to spoil the hope and possibility of a mixed multitude, not to discourage us from embracing the power of our differences, but to remind us that the scapegoating impulse about anyone and everyone who got here or got over a minute or more after you did is hack material. That joke was played out before the invention of the printing press. Now from mythology, sometimes mistaken for history, let us move to a matter of history too often misunderstood as mythology. You probably know that the Seder, the ritual meal of Passover, has a ritual plate which holds and displays certain crucial foods important in conducting the meal and telling the story through it. There are six elements usually considered traditional, although that tradition actually has a long history of evolution and change. For instance, there used to be a fish, which is a whole different sermon, although ironically, also having to do with the erasure of women leaders as this one is about to be. Some number of us have heard this story before, I am sure, of why it is that some people, each Passover, place an orange on their Seder plate. For those of us who haven't, it goes something like this. At some synagogue, somewhere, some time, in relatively recent history, a woman was giving a scholarly talk on a topic of interest to the congregation. Occasionally, when this story is told, a phrase that is grounded in the configuration of Jewish religious space, that you can get the gist of. This character needs no particular credential to know intrinsically that his is the most important voice in the room. This anonymous wag interrupted the scholar in order to loudly declare children is why, every year at this time, we put an orange on our Seder plate as an act of brazen defiance against the patriarchy. Defiance demonstrated by allowing a momentary, impulsive act by a single anonymous man to essentially dictate a change in ritual practice for generations to come. Now, some of us who know this story also know that it did not happen, that it is not the actual story of the orange on the Seder plate. I said before that the woman on the Bema sometimes has a name, and when she does, it is usually the correct one. Dr. Susanna Heschel, a contemporary scholar and professor of Jewish studies. But the man in the story doesn't have a correct name because there is no man in the actual story. The actual story is that in the early 80s, Dr. Heschel visited Oberlin College and she encountered there a particular Haggadah, the book that provides the stories and prayers to guide a group through the Passover Seder. This Haggadah had been composed by a group of students to express their intersecting values of feminism and queer liberation. As one expression of this, the text called for placing a crust of leavened bread on the Seder plate, a sign of radical inclusion and solidarity with Jewish lesbians. Today we might extrapolate this to all members of the LGBTQI spectrum. As they had been told time and again that they could not belong in Judaism had no place in Jewish space, the crust of bread was meant to symbolize the exact opposite. Dr. Heschel was moved by the concept but found the implementation too transgressive. That crust of bread is the most fundamentally forbidden thing during the holiday of Passover. To her, its presence on the Seder plate was a desecration. It would invalidate the Seder itself and it would reinscribe the contempt for and intolerance of queerness that it was trying to answer. So she devised a new ritual. She placed an orange on her family's Seder plate as a symbol of everyone excluded from and marginalized within the tradition. It was not there just to be looked at, it was there to be eaten, to be peeled and divided up into sections and shared around the table so that everyone could taste the sweetness of it so that everyone could practice expanding the circle of inclusion to something that had not been included before and so that everyone would have to spit out the seeds. Symbolic of the patriarchy, the homophobia, the queerphobia and all other dimensions of bigotry and bias that we must spit out of ourselves and overcome in our society. The actual story and the more fulsome practice that goes along with it offers us some strategies for building solidarity with one another. Being willing to create and adapt new practices, holding an intentional place for those people and identities that have been pushed to the margins. Accepting that the project of dismantling systems of oppression will sometimes call on us to do things that others find impolite, like spitting at the dinner table. Understanding the confrontation with intolerance as something that requires concrete action and begins within ourselves. It also counsels us to be mindful of the actual stories of things. Without some rigor in attending to the who's, where's and why's of things, our stories can drift away from the challenging and towards the comforting, away from disruption and complexity and towards simplicity and complacency. Like most progressive Jewish people in America, I keep this practice. Whenever I host a Seder, there is an orange on the plate. Even if I often struggle to find one with actual seeds in it. But there is a third layer to this story. I think we should trouble ourselves with. And that is to sit with the question of whether or not the transformation of the crust of bread into an orange was actually the same sort of change as the one that turned a woman's scholars considered innovation into a reflexive reaction to the prejudice of a single anonymous man. Each change renders its subject less radical, less challenging, less a confrontation with the underlying assumptions of the system it is embedded in. A story about feminist practice becomes centered on a man. A story about transgressive solidarity becomes a new affirmation for the tradition that it was transgressing against. I do not know, but it may well be, that there was someone for whom something powerful was lost in Dr. Heschel's innovation. Someone who might say, "'I was never so lucky as to be treated like an orange. Surprising, but not unwelcome, sweet, and worthy of a place at the table." No, it's the crust of bread that represented my experience. Cast out, anathema, forbidden. When I looked at it, I saw myself there in the ritual for the first and only time. I do not say this to criticize Dr. Heschel or the gift of practice he has given to contemporary Judaism. A practice I follow myself. I say it to name a question that I do not have an easy answer for, which I believe we all need to make time to sit with. Every practice of inclusion entails some transformation for the group doing the including. Where is the right boundary line precisely? Between transformation for the in-group and acclamation for the newly included. Rounding the bend now, and noticing that this whole message really has been about some of the finer points of Jewish story and practice, I am willing to bet that at least one of you is wondering, what does this actually have to do with me? I can enjoy the intellectual stimulation of a lecture on comparative religion from time to time, but I am not Jewish and this whole thing has gotten pretty deep in the weeds. And it's all right if you feel that way. I still love you. My liberation is still bound up with yours. But I have brought this to you, both of these detailed specific examples from some of the stories and rituals that deeply shape who I am, because they are both about and Passover, so far as I am concerned, is about and Unitarian Universalism is absolutely about welcoming the wholeness of every precious individual person into an arrangement of full belonging with the larger whole, which means that sometimes we hear stories we didn't know before. If we're honest, not everyone is gonna speak to us. Sometimes we share practices that feel unfamiliar, possibly even uncomfortable, although bodily integrity and a baseline of psychological security is always a fair expectation. Our creedless faith refuses to make coerced sameness a precondition for a place at the table, which means that we get the opportunity and bear the responsibility to learn from each other in all of our differences and specificities. The traditional Haggadah and nearly all of the less than traditional ones I have encountered contains a formula. The leader indicates the matzah, the unleavened bread at the table and pronounces in part, this is the bread of affliction, which our ancestors ate in the land of Egypt. Let all who are hungry come and eat. Let all who are in need come and celebrate the Passover. The terms that we set for belonging, at least explicitly, for moving into relationship with us in our congregation are very nearly as vast and generous and open as this ancient invitation. Our promises have already been made. The work as ever is only for us to live up to them. I invite you now into this time of giving and receiving where we give freely and generously to this offering which sustains our community here as well as our outreach offering recipient who this week is a ray at forward. A project that FUS initiated with our partners that renew Wisconsin, a ray at forward provides advice on financing and energy efficiency as well as seed money for solar energy projects for nonprofit organizations. With your help, this program will continue to provide the gift of green energy for years to come. There are multiple ways to share your gifts this morning. Baskets are now being passed here in the auditorium for cash or checks. And you will see on the screen that you can donate directly from our website, fusmedicine.org. You will find our text to give information there as well. We thank you for your generosity and your faith and your faith in this life that we create together. Enjoy the losses of our days. We hold our own pain and celebration together with those. We share these here, knowing they're held gently in care, in support and in love. We light a candle of memory and mourning for Barbara Ellen Strong who passed from life last week. Barbara's a very long time member of FUS, fiercely committed to this institution and maintained her presence among us physically even when it was exceedingly difficult for her to do so. Private Memorial was held for Barb this past week and a public celebration of her life will be planned for later this spring. It allows that she touched, be strengthened and heartened by her memory. One of us lights a candle for their two year old and their care team at UW Children's Hospital as he approaches surgery this week. We extend to you our care, our hope for a good outcome. They all go well. We light a candle for all those who feel isolated by grief, by chronic pain, by mental illness and all others who are alone and lonely. To you we extend our compassionate hearts. We light a candle of ongoing lament for the violence which plagues our world. Fervently we yearn for peace here at home and around the globe. We light a candle for all those joys and sorrows, hopes and dreams that remain unspoken in the silent sanctuaries of our hearts. I invite you now to turn with me both inward and outward and join together in an attitude of meditation and prayer. Now in the season of spring as the rains fall gently on the angry and the fearful, the joyful and the sad alike. And as the earth gives forth its greenery once more, let us turn our hearts towards those who need our care. We think of those whose faces are now wet with tears in this season of falling waters, whether they be tears of grief or lights gone out of the world or tears of pain or sufferings of others or of their own. May those tears give sustenance to some new possibility as the spring rains help to melt the snow on the mountaintop and feed the rushing river below. Spirit of hope, current of life that draws us ever onward. Teach us to be patient with ourselves and others and show us courage in our crying. We think also of those who want for the stuff of life in the season of blossoming renewal. May the rebirth of the natural world foretell a rebirth of the human heart as well. A resuscitation of mercy and justice and loving-kindness until to help all who need it is our guiding goal. Spirit of love, heartbeat within every heartbeat. Teach empathy to us and help us never to forget it. We think finally of those who are not free in these days that celebrate freedom, whether that bondage comes from outside or within. May every chain be broken, every tyrant deposed. May every yoke be lifted up and every message of self-hatred be wiped away clear. Spirit of freedom, wind that blows from all directions, unfailing and undaunted. Teach us to remake our world into a place where all are free. May the meditations of our hearts lead to the work of our hands. Amen. Rise and body or in spirit as we sing our closing hymn number 318, we would. Ancestor Theodore Parker prayed for us, be ours a religion which like sunshine goes everywhere. Its temple, all space, its shrine, the good heart, its creed, all truth, its rituals, works of love, its profession of faith, divine living. And so I charge you to show your faith by living it. The work of our religion is whatever love demands of you. Seek and believe all of and only the truth. Worship at the altar of every heart you meet. Move as gently in the world as you do in this place. Go forth and carry this spirit with you everywhere. Amen. Blessed be, go in peace and please be at rest for the postlude.