 where curious seekers gather to explore 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 Dorrit Bergen and 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 are on your life's journey we celebrate your presence among us. We trust that today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart and stir your spirit. I invite you now into a few moments of contemplation, meditation, prayer as we settle in and come fully into this time and place together. Rise and body your spirit and follow along in the words printed in your order of service. Every living thing should be valued the same, even not living things should too. Everything should be kind to speak for people, speak for friendship. Now turn to your friends and neighbors and shake hands. This is our time for a message for all ages so if all the young and young at heart want to come up we have a special dance message for all ages today. Both those up here for the message and those in the audience will learn a few dance moves and share with Kathleen Conklin of our FUS Dance Fellowship. Her dancing to Bobby McFerrin's the 23rd song. Hello, I have a fairy tale for you. Long ago there were no cell phones and no smart phones and no electronic tablets, joy. How did people share their stories? Do you have an idea with no phone? What's your idea? They wrote on paper. Love her. Long long ago in a land far away there were no books and no pencils and no paper and no writing. And then how did people tell their stories? They danced. Even before that there was dance. Dance was the word. This is excerpted from Cynthia Hoven. In the beginning human beings were mute. We could not speak, but we could dance. Even as plants dance in the wind, as jellyfish dance in the water, as cilia dance in our bellies, we first participated in the dance of creation. The dance of our bodies has become small, but we have learned to dance with our words. With our speech we can now name the birds and the beasts and the butterflies, the wind and the rain, thunder and lightning, stars and sun. The great creative mysteries of the word now live in our throat, and we can tell each other's stories through our words. But here's the thing. How much do we remember that we are told to hold up your hands if you still have ten digits? We remember ten percent of what we are told. How much do you think we remember that we do? Almost. Ninety percent. That much we remember when we do. So, we're going to do. In the old time, humans moving celebrated their stories. They celebrated birthdays and mothers and daughters and fathers. They danced weddings and funerals. They danced their joy, their laughter and their sorrow. They danced reverence and grace and the wonder of this world of sound, color, light and wind. In our time, we have forgotten the ancient dances. I am sad that I cannot dance the ancient dances. So, one day, this is still a fairy tale, right? So, one day, I learned to dance out loud. So, to move, share the language and sound, it is time for dance to be reborn to worship. Are you ready to learn with me? So, in the back of the program is printed the lyrics for the 23rd Psalm by Bobby McFerrin. And you all are invited to help me with this. I want to teach you the vowel sounds of movement, manifesting sound and language. So, the first sound is the sound ah. Do you remember ah? Remember ah? So, here is ah. Ah, it's a chalice, receptivity. And if you're shy, do you remember ah? Remember ah. What is ah? This looks like an X, right? It's this powerful, if you push one arm against the other arm, it's about learning to separate yourself from everything else. And then there's e, e, me on the other side of ah, ah, x. And then oh, oh. The self-realized individual in collaboration with the world. And ooh, twilight are our lives. Ooh, connecting the earth to the heavens. Ah, if you're shy, eh, e, oh. Okay, I'm going to disentangle from this, and y'all are going to stand up. This can go to Summer Fun. Thank you so much, the Dance Fellowship, for being with us here today. I really appreciate it. Summer Fun folks are waiting for you just outside the door there. And while they leave, love you, buddy. And while you leave, ah, we will be singing hymn number 20, if you can please rise and bow to your spirit. Be thou my vision. And today comes from the Tapestry of Faith, which is a UU curriculum. It's entitled The Mystic, the Scientist, and the Activist. One day, a religious man approached a mystic and asked, does God exist? Allow me to go within for an answer, the mystic replied. After meditating for quite some time, expanding her heart consciousness to embrace the totality of existence, she answered, I do not know what you mean by the word God, but I do know that this world is more mysterious and more wonderful than I could ever imagine. I know that you and I are part of something so much larger than our lives. Perhaps this something larger is what you seek. Then the religious man approached a scientist. Does God exist, he asked. Let me think, the scientist replied. And so she thought. She thought about the vastness of the universe. 156 billion light years and the almost immeasurable smallness of a quark. She thought of how the energy of the Big Bang fuels the beating of her own heart. And then she answered, I do not know what you mean by the word God, but I do know that this world is more mysterious and more wonderful than I could ever imagine. I know that you and I are part of something so much larger than our own lives. Perhaps this something larger is what you seek. Then the religious man approached an activist. Does God exist, he asked. Let me remember, the activist said. And so they remembered. They remembered all the different people of different faith and no faith with whom they had worked for justice over the years. They thought of how they had seen people of desperate circumstances who had lost everything, still willing to reach out and help another. They thought of how working for justice had saved them from a life of despair. And then they answered, I do not know what you mean by the word God, but I do know that this world is more mysterious and more wonderful than you or I could ever imagine. I know that you and I are part of something so much larger than our lives. Perhaps this something larger is what you seek. The religious man then thought to himself, he thought of what he knows and what he does not know. He thought about how he knows what he knows and how he knows he doesn't know what he doesn't know. He thought about his experience of the world and how it is but one tiny, infinitesimal fraction of all experience. He thought about his dependence on forces larger than himself and he thought about the interdependence of all existence. He experienced wonder and pondered mystery and then he knew, he knew in his soul the truth of what the mystic and the scientist and the activist said, that he is part of something so much larger than his own life. And then only then did he think about what he'd call it. Our second reading comes from Women Who Run with Wolves by Clarice Pincola Estes. A part of every woman and every man resists knowing that in all love relationships death must have her share. We pretend we can love without our illusions of love dying. Pretend we can go on without our superficial expectations dying. Pretend we can progress and that our favorite flushes and rushes will not die. But in love, psychically, everything becomes picked apart. Everything. What dies? Illusion dies. Expectations die. Greed for having it all, for wanting to have all be beautiful only. All this dies. Because love always causes a descent into death nature. We can see why it takes abundant self-power and soulfulness to make that commitment. To preach love is at best bad taste. Those are the words of prominent UU theologian James Luther Adams. Well, Dr. Adams, I'm afraid this sermon is going to be in bad taste. When I asked how this year went for me, you asked that a lot, I can honestly say that I loved it. I snuck into this building my very first night back in Madison in mid-July of last year and stood at what was this pulpit and wondered what it would be like to preach here, to try to imagine what it would be like to preach in front of a crowd here. It's top notch. This sermon is about what I found here and what I found here and there and there was love. But I get where Adams is coming from. There is no word in our language, he argues, that has been so much misused and prostituted as the word love. Love may be all you need in life, but it's not going to make for interesting sermons. Adams' response to the abuse of this word was to give ministers the unavoidable duty to make a cool and critical analysis of the phenomenon of love and to unmask pseudo love. Doesn't that sound fun? So let's get to it. Let me start off by talking about my love of the sermon. Writing a sermon actually is a fairly lonely experience. You gather up some books, do some background reading on Wikipedia, maybe look for a few academic papers and studies if you really want to impress. And then you flounder around like the Dickens for something original to say, which mostly looks like staring out into space and heading into the kitchen for more snacks and playing a slow game of chess. But you do all of this mostly alone. In the late stages of my sermon writing process, I will let one or two people look over it to see if it is completely off. But I have yet to cultivate a sizable group of pre-sermon readers, which is the practice of some. Now my process isn't too much different from most writer's methods, except their experience doesn't culminate in their writing being the hypothetical center point of a community's worship life every weekend. This mix, though, of the solitary, the social, and the spiritual is a real unique then, and at least for me, highly rewarding experience. So to make this process a reality, when writing a sermon, I, like many others, learned to cultivate a trusted group of internal conversation partners. Obvious ones are the writers of the materials you were consulting for that sermon, but others come from other places in your past. I've tried to carefully craft this group of internal advisors, including such people as seminary professors and theologians from my three years of study in Austin. More recently, my internship supervisors, Michael and Kelly, as well as my dedicated and appreciated ministry intern team, internship ministry team. I also try very hard to listen to the voices of gender, race and class theorists and activists who often have very legitimate critiques of the status quo of liberal religion and politics. But some voices you don't get to choose. One, for me, is the authoritative voice of my Mormon past, to which I spoke a little last month. It's hard to shut off a voice that you've been taught to obey for the first 25 years of your life. But that voice is starting to fade, or at least deeply shift. A voice that I would never have chosen, but yet persistently remains, finds its personification in a man I met here at church several years ago. Actually, I didn't really meet him. Rather, I sat next to him in the library for an hour during services. And we never talked to each other. But he definitely talked. First to himself, and then to what I assumed was his partner on the phone. He talked about how much he hated being dragged to these hippie-dippy services, where people get touchy-feely for an hour to pat themselves on the back for being good white people. I'm not a fan of this voice, but he is always there in his ripped jeans and two big jacket. That day, as most days, I was actually really enjoying the service I had chosen to give my Sunday morning to. But when he started talking, I immediately began to see things through his eyes, like when an uninvited guest comes over to your messy house, and what was cozy and eclectic becomes scattered and depressing. This is a voice that society has trained me and plenty of the rest of us to listen to. He's on the cover of rock albums and the star of many films. He's a regular contributor to Fox News and the steady fixture in boardrooms. The kind of person who is seen behind all of society's surface niceties to see the real ugliness underneath. Consumerism loves him, encourages us to listen to him because when he sells us something, we know he really means it, and that he would never sell anything just because the man tells him to. And he sits across from me every time I write a sermon, looking at my attempts at sincerity and insight. I've learned to tolerate this voice, learn from it, if not to appreciate it. Because despite how much I dislike him, I must acknowledge that he is just a little bit right. And he is definitely not alone. We all know those people who somewhere along the line got an extra dose of cynicism and too coolism, but society makes sure that all of us got a dose of the same medicine at some point in our lives. I've seen the arms cross, the eyes roll, the passive-aggressive email that got sent, all with the same underlying message I see right through you, and I don't like what I see. What ripped jeans and baggy jacket taught me more than anything else is that what we have here is fragile. So very fragile. And it is fragile not just because of the appearance of hypocrisy, but its constant unavoidable presence in our midst. Now, I read the other day that hypocrisy has become the cardinal sin of the millennial generation. And I knew right away this guy had never been to a UU church. We owned the sin of hypocrisy since way before Al Gore invented the Internet. Whenever I try to explain unitarian universalism, we are a value-based church is most likely to slip out. But basing our whole communal lives on values is just throwing the doors right open for all the hypocrites to show up. I'm reminded of the man who was asked why he had started attending church and said, Well, I heard that Jesus called for the vilest of all sinners to come to him, and I'll be darned if I'd ever felt more invited anywhere in my life. I don't necessarily want the vilest of hypocrites here at FUS because there are some really nasty ones out there. But I think the time has passed, far past, that we should make our welcome of hypocrites official. I'm really surprised that during my time here as an intern, no one asked me to make a new motto for FUS. But if it was up to me, I'd hang a big sign right from the prow of the landmark auditorium where that old copper bell used to be that you can see in the Gable of Living Room. First Unitarian Society, home of hypocrites and hippies. But mostly just hypocrites. And I mean this in the very best sense. Because this is my story as much as it is yours, just like all of my sermons. I once saw a cartoon graph that I adored. One line rising steadily up was what I expected of myself. Another line crawled up much slower and was labeled what I actually achieved. And in this graph, the increasingly large empty space between the two lines was filled with one word, beer. What I am trying to do is fill just a little bit of that space with church. What my 32 years in the human family has taught me is that living up to your values is a choice for almost no one. We are far too human to live up to who we want to be. I think most of us, most everyone I've met is exactly 32% a hypocrite. And it's going up 1% each year I'm alive. I plan on being a very cynical 75-year-old. And while most of us, this is a little tricky, but while most of us don't get to choose not to be that 32% a hypocrite, I do think what we get to choose is what our hypothetical 100% looks like. The size of that pie chart where the 32% is the hypocrisy. Because low expectations for ourselves might make our 32% hypocrisy feel smaller. But it also shrinks down our 68% authenticity that same amount smaller. We are the church of unusually high expectations for humanity. The sign is getting a little long. Where we thrive is in helping people find the strength to expand their vision of the possibility inherent in human nature. But we often fail to recognize that we are also opening ourselves up to the deep vulnerability of similarly expanding our experience of the hypocrisy inherent in human nature. I'm not arguing that we'd be proud of the size of our hypocrisy, but I think we can and must take pride in how and when we have forged on in spite of that inescapable hypocrisy. When the temptation comes to shrink at the dark parts of our soul to gain distance and security, our great effort must be in approaching that darkness and giving it the care it needs to be transformed into something else. This place, from the moment I walked in, was a place of life renewed, of courage found, of community unfolded. But reflecting on my reading from Clarissa Pincola Estes, I am forced to admit that this place was also a place of great death for me. In love everything becomes picked apart. She says, illusions die, expectations die. Greed for having it all, for wanting to have all be beautiful only. All of this dies. In a very welcome way, the birth of a new kind of faith, a new kind of religion, death dueled my Mormon faith to its mostly peaceful end. But much more sorrowfully, it also saw the death of many of my expectations about what a life free from the constraints of this conservative religious outlook would be like. Yes, I had my first coffee here. Yes, I had my first beer here. Thanks, Mike. Yes, people here were much more politically aligned with me than I had come to experience in Mormonism. But the people here, much to my chagrin, turned out to be no closer to perfection than anywhere else. What I did find at FUS, what I did find was a more perfect mirror. I've often said that I've taken the spiritual development track of all the different possible tracks that seminary and an internship can follow. I was and am still deeply unsure if I am a good fit for ministry and if it is a good fit for me. So I tried to look both deeply inside of myself and deeply inside of this institution I had thoughts of dedicating my life to. And what I have found deep inside both is nothing but a mirror. I do the same thing. I keep looking for the people in the top row and they're not there. A terribly wonderfully fragile mirror. We all know that the best mirrors are the most fragile. I don't know if that's actually true, but let's all pretend it is for the sake of this metaphor. It has been both wonderfully comforting and terribly convicting to find that there is nothing deep inside except what I bring there and what we bring there. The experiences, the connections, the convictions and yes, the hypocrisy. I feel like most of my life I have sought out sturdy hard mirrors that I can trust not to break like this faux polish granite and found that they reflect back only the bright parts of life and blur them into near meaninglessness. The destination, the goal I've learned is not an end, but a clearer picture of the journey in its wonder and its wretchedness. And while this internship has almost certainly been the year where that 32% hypocrisy has appeared in its most awful clarity, it has also been the year where I'm humble enough to admit that 68% authenticity has shown most clearly through in its soft golden hues and I wouldn't have it any other way. Yes, what I found here was a church full of hypocrites and hippies, but mostly hypocrites, and I fell immediately in love because I knew it was a place where my concepts of love and its limits would be challenged in a way that would help me grow where I was supposed to be, where a more perfect mirror would be held up to my life, the good and the bad, because, as Pema Children says, when we truly confront our wretchedness and hold it in balance with our gloriousness, wretchedness can soften us up considerably. Glorious and wretchedness support each other. One inspires us, the other softens us. We go together. Now, let us re-center here for just a moment in this space. When Frank Lloyd Wright designed the meeting house, and yes, I've been to the archives, all you tour guides, and confirmed this, I get emails every time I talk about the meeting house. I confirm this. He had plans on installing multiple water features to balance our blue pools with our red floors. Now, the one that's in most of the diagrams but he also had a plan for a below-ground pool that extended from the edge of the terrace outside of the loge here. It would be the floor of the terrace and then it would go underneath into the loge and meet the western doors of the loge, right next to where that plaque, the... our mission statement, our vision statement. Anyway, it would have been really cool. You'd walk out of that sanctuary and you'd walk across a pool that would, as Frank Lloyd Wright loved to do, bring the nature inside and take the inside out. Of course, the pools were apparently the first thing to get cut in the budget and the floors stayed. Certainly a wise choice. If we struggled to repair the roof, imagine how we would have done raising funds to repair the koi pond. But since we have no physical pools, hopefully the koi pond would have lasted in the roof, that's all I'm going to say. But since we have no physical pools to soften our backbone of stone, my charge to you today is that we, each of us, must become those soft pools. We are each... We are each one of us called to preach softness to a world that has grown so incredibly hard. On this Memorial Day weekend, I think we can all recognize that our country has consistently communally and most often disasterously chosen the hard appearance of strength over the soft and the lives of thousands of our men, women and gender queer folks who chose or were compelled into service have suffered the life-altering consequences along with countless others who have been at the receiving end of these shows of strength. Right now, at our borders, we are actively witnessing children torn from their parents' arms on a daily basis in the name of border security. Yes, our hard strength that takes so many forms beyond brute military might does often in reality protect us. And there is so much in this world that needs real protecting. But it is not our hardness but our softness that will save us. That strength and hardness will not do and not a softness that comes despite our hypocrisy but the softness that comes from learning to hold our hypocrisy and our lust and our sloth and all our failings and the tender embrace of our full selves. The great pseudo love of unitarian universalism to get back to James Adams is the love that says when you're good enough then you will be worthy of love. The great temptation of the liberal church will always be to use our machinations of moral strength to attempt to turn our soft parts hard. But the great redemption will be when we are able to use our weaknesses to turn our hard spots soft. Only this tender embrace will save. Thank you. I want to take a minute to thank the volunteers who helped out with our service today. Sound operator is Mark Schultz our worship associate was Dort Bergen our lay minister was Anne Smiley our greeter was Mark Schweitzer did you usher Elizabeth? No. Did you? Yeah. Oh no she did. Okay. Did Hathaway also? We have written reports about who is ushering. So thanks to everyone who ushered. Anne Smiley, Wally Brinkman. Yeah. We have a tour guide for after the service Rose she will meet anyone who would like a tour underneath the light of that window over there. Our offering today and I want to say if you want to express generosity or gratefulness for my time here of the donation today because it's a cause that's very close to my heart. Black Lives of Unitarian sorry Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism 100% of the gifts received in today's offering will be given to the Unitarian Universalist Association to help fund their sorry to help fund their the promise and the practice campaign for Black Lives of Unitarian Universalism This nationwide campaign asks congregations to take the lead in the effort to collectively work to dismantle white supremacy culture and connect our finances with our theological values. As you use we are being invited to nurture a radically inclusive justice centered multicultural, multiracial religious faith. Please be generous. He disappeared in the first service I'll be coming back. So TK is the 10th and the last ministerial intern that I have had the honor and the pleasure of supervising during my time here at First Unitarian Society and each of these men and women as you know have been distinctive in his or her own right. Each has brought to us to our community fresh ideas innovative ways of conducting worship and educating our congregation. And while I as a supervisor and you as a congregation have provided these interns with opportunities to find their footing as prospective ministers they in turn have served us with a rich variety, a rich assortment of gifts and talents. Now as someone who found his way into our faith tradition via the First Unitarian Society of Madison and who then based on his experience decided to prepare for a possible career in the parish ministry it was especially gratifying given the foregoing to have spent the last 10 months working with TK Browning. There is no doubt that he does have a mind of his own and he has exhibited a willingness perhaps even an eagerness to take calculated risks at times including calling out our hypocrisy as Unitarian Universalists. And as a result there have been a few surprises along the way. And in this respect I did recognize myself at the tender age of 32 and for the most part I did find at that stage of my life that a little audacity served both me and my congregations rather well. It is too easy to get caught up in the tried and true patterns that can lead eventually to congregational stagnation. As an intern however you always have the benefit of sympathetic in-house mentors and observers who can provide you with some good constructive feedback. That is not always the case when you are called to serve your own congregation. You will get feedback it's not always going to be sympathetic. So I will miss the rich conversations that TK and Kelly and I have had every week in the course of our internship and our supervision. I will miss the collegiality that I have enjoyed with TK as he has gained confidence and has taken on more and greater responsibilities. I will miss seeing his wife Caitlyn and their kids and I will miss the millennialist challenges to my own baby boomers sensibilities that TK has afforded although my own son at 32 will be filling that void rather nicely. And so TK you will be missed and while here you have helped to validate the importance of the First Unitarian Society as a teaching congregation a teaching church. And so at some point in your own life work if you choose to enter the parish I hope that you will be afforded the experience of working with the next generation of up-and-coming Unitarian Universalist ministers. I hope you will enjoy that experience as much as I have. Thank you TK. And now I will turn the mic over to Lorna Aronson who has been serving on our ministerial intern support groups for many years. It's been a real pleasure to be able to work with TK this year as Michael said he's brought us many adventures. I want to first of all acknowledge the ministry team the Unitarian Universalist Association requires that interns have a lay group to walk alongside of them on their journey in addition to the professional mentors and supervision that they get. And part of that is to help the intern become accustomed to getting feedback of all sorts from lay people in the congregation which as Michael said is something that ministers learn to do gracefully. So we hope that we've given TK the opportunity to gracefully receive a lot of feedback this year. And he has been quite graceful. I also want to acknowledge the ministry team that has worked with TK Katie Beam Luke Anderman and Ann Gullickson aren't here today but I'm here with Kirsten Sieber and Andy Levy and we have worked together to give support to TK throughout the year. One of our traditions is to leave our interns with a notebook with messages from members of the congregation. If you haven't had a chance there are message forms out at a table out there. The mailbox and the message forms will be out throughout the week and so I hope that you will leave TK with a message to take with him and the message goes to his wife Caitlin and his children although they did actually include a number of messages. So I would like to give you this on behalf of the congregation and encourage you as you go through the next few months, few years have a look at some of the things that people say about you and that have learned from you and with our appreciation. Thank you. TK we also want to present you with this gift and actually if you could take it out and just hold it up so people could see it. So a gift to help remember us by and the if you could hold it up so people could see it. There we go. The chalice was made by Dave Webber from Stone from the Lower Meeting House and the box was made by Lorna with icons of FUS. I invite everyone to stand and body or spirit to join me in reading number 685 which you can find at the back of your hymnal. What we call a beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time. And you can remain standing to sing hymn number 1. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being here together. Go in peace. Please be seated and enjoy the post loop.