 Good morning and welcome to the First Unitarian Society. My name is Kelly Crocker and I'm one of the ministers here. Today I'm joined by my colleague, the Reverend Kelly Asperg-Jackson, the worship team of Linda Warren, Drew Collins, Daniel Gregorius, Daniel Carnes, and Stephen Gregorius. They just combined the guy stand up so they see that you're actually two people. Daniel and Stephen. You may not know that there's the two of them behind that booth every week making it all happen. And a very special welcome to our guest musicians, Chelsea Bowles, Margie Marion, and Phillip DellaQuest. Thank you for being with us. At First Unitarian Society, we question boldly, listen humbly, grow spiritually, act courageously, and love unapologetically. If you're visiting us today, welcome. We're so very glad that you are with us. If you'd like more information about First Unitarian Society, please stop by the welcome table that is located in the commons through those doors to your right next to the elevator. We also hope that you'll be able to stay and join us for coffee hour immediately following our service, also held in the commons. And for those of you joining us virtually, we welcome you as well. We are so very glad that you are with us this morning. We hope you'll take a moment to watch the announcement slides shown immediately after today's service to learn more about our upcoming programs and activities. And now I invite us into a moment of silence as we center ourselves and bring ourselves into this time joining together once again in community. The curtain comes up on a large room with large windows and medium sized chairs. It is a Sunday morning in summer, a hot summer and dry enough for the people to remark upon and offer gratitude for each small dose of rain. Those rain appreciating people have gathered in those medium sized chairs. Well, some of them have. A few still linger outside of the room listening, one or two toil in the kitchen getting things ready for after the proceedings have ended to the benefit of all the rest. Some will arrive late, of course, their presence no less important. And some others still are in places seemingly separate, even at times entirely different this afternoon or later this week or in the chill of winter, three years from now. But they are no less apart of the people. That cast of characters is too large to list out completely. But it does include at least one person who is here for the first time. At least one elder who has been here an uncountable number of times before. And even though they are not too terribly impressed with the still relatively new still relatively young preacher, they continue to attend, not me. You're not an elder yet, Kelly. They continue to attend loyally nevertheless. At least one child who is already working on the question they will ask during the message for all ages. At least one person who is carrying a grief or a pain or a secret they aren't ready to share yet. Perhaps they will feel a little more ready by the end of the hour. All these people have gathered for a worship service. They adhere to a particularly skeptical mode of religion which requires that this question must be asked periodically. What are we supposed to be worshiping anyway? And the ritual response comes. The word worship in its origins means to ascribe worth to something. We do not all have to have exactly the same thing or things in mind every time we gather in order to explore what may be worthy together. This exchange and the sharing of coffee are among their traditions most frequently observed sacraments. This service has a stage and many vibrant characters and scenery in the form of real orchids and fake ferns. It has a score, even a script, but if it is a play it is a strange one. One that asks its players, all of us, not to pretend to be people and things we are not, but to practice being what we already are worthy. Ready now? The show is starting. Don't be worried if you can't remember your lines. They will be provided on the screen in front of you. Come, let us worship together. And we invite you now to rise in all the ways we do, joining together in our words of affirmation. Deep calls unto deep. Joy calls unto joy. Light calls unto light. Let the kindling of this flame rekindle in us the inner light of love, of peace, of hope. And as one flame lights another, nor grows the less, we pledge ourselves to be bearers of the light wherever we are. Good morning. Let's sing together our opening hymn number 1010 in the Teal hymnal. We give thanks. Just sing that one more time. I would like to invite anyone who would like to take part in telling a story with me today to come on down. And I changed up the location on you. How do you like that? Come on, come on. It's good to see you. Good morning. I'm so glad you're here. So I want to tell a story today, but I need your help to tell it. Would you be willing to help me a little bit? Yeah. Thank you so much. So this is a story that comes from the Buddhist tradition. It's actually a story that there are different versions of that I've heard from different parts of the world, different religions, different cultures. And it's always a little bit different, but it has the same basic concept. And I chose this one. I chose this version of it because this is the one that has monkeys in it. And I thought that would be fun. So here's the help that I need. I need you to pretend to be monkeys for a little bit. Can we do that? Can we can we get a little monkey impression going on? Like, like, what's a monkey like? Yeah, classic, right? All right, little, little, little, yeah. If you're good at pantomiming, having a tail, that might help. But so OK, so here's the situation. Once upon a time, there were a whole bunch of monkeys who all lived in the jungle. And there was one monkey who came with a very serious problem that he had to report to the other monkeys to get their help with. I'm that monkey. OK, so here's the deal, monkeys. All right. I was over by the well. You know, well is like a hole in the ground where there's water in it, right? I was over by the well in the middle of the night, and I saw that the moon had fallen out of the sky and into the well. Because I looked down and there was the moon, clear as it could be, right at the bottom of the well. So what are we going to do about that? It seems like that's a problem right at the moons down in the bottom of the well instead of up in the sky where it's supposed to be. What do you think? You think that moons are really huge. You know, that's a good point. But somehow it fit in the well because I saw the whole thing down there in the bottom of the well. It's just a reflect, like, so you're telling me, you're telling me that all the way down at the bottom of the well, that's not the whole moon down there, it's just the reflection of the moon, like a mirror, right? Like the water, the water made a reflection of the moon in the sky. Yes. Oh boy. Well, that's good news in one sense because it means that we don't have actual problem. It means the moon's still up in the sky. But it's bad news in another sense in that the entire premise of the story is now thrown completely out of whack. But that's what happens sometimes when you have very clever monkeys. Sometimes they outsmart the premise of the story. Because I was going to do a whole thing about how we're going to have to form a chain and reach down all the way into the bottom of the well and try to pull the moon out and then we'd all fall into the well and that would be very unfortunate. But see, here we are because we understand, at least one of us understands the way that light reflects off of water. You've saved all of us from a terrible fate of falling into the well. Thank you so much. What we can accomplish when we work together. And now we will sing our children to their activities. And you can turn the day from... I invite you now into this time of giving and receiving where we give freely and generously to this offering, which sustains and strengthens the work of our community. You'll see on your screen that you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org. You'll see the text to give information there as well. And we thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. Thank you so much for that beautiful music. Religious professionals, we whose work it is to craft and lead worship on a frequent basis, largely rankle at any discussion of the theater in the same breath as our own trade. As a class, we take great pride in being distinct from actors and take great pains to emphasize that our services decidedly are not performances. This is for at least two main reasons. The first harkens back to Plato's ancient argument for why, in an ideal society, theater should be banned entirely. This is the premise that the fundamental act of acting is deceit, pretending to be something one is not. A worship service, on the other hand, is all about authenticity, being more true to our own deep selves than we might otherwise be, not less. And the second reason is the idea that in a performance there is a passive audience, and it is extremely important to always make a strong distinction between that mode of experience and the active participation of a congregation in a worship service. But this morning, I want specifically to put aside that resistance to the comparison. Because there are real parallels, indeed a close historical relationship, between the theater and the house of worship. Because the particular space that the stage creates offers the potential for deep spiritual and existential insights, and it would be a shame for us to ignore them. And because both of those reasons for pretending to a perfect separation between these two disciplines hinge on a facile understanding of what theater is and how it actually functions in practice. Let's begin there with that first reason to hold the dramatic world at a distance, because it is about people pretending to be things they are not. There's a play by George Kaufman and Moss Hart in which two men get into an argument. They're both about the same age, old enough to have grandchildren. Mr. Kirby spends his days working hard, trying to make as much money as he can, and he's made quite a bit of it over the years. Mr. Vanderhoof used to be about the same way, but now he's retired and doesn't see the point in it anymore. What's all that money supposed to be for? Mr. Kirby thinks that attitude is foolish and dangerous and downright un-American. So they argue about it a while. Mr. Vanderhoof talks about the things he likes to do now that he has the time for them. Read, talk, notice the seasons passing by, maybe visit the zoo. And Kirby remarks that we can't all very well live that way with everybody going to zoos whenever they feel like it. And then, because people in plays often have important secrets that are revealed at just the right moment, it comes to be known that Mr. Kirby had a dream once before he began spending all of his days making money. He wanted to be a saxophone player. He still has a saxophone at home in his closet, a reminder of what might have been, of the life he might have lived instead of the one he was living now. Now, real people, the sort you don't find as characters in plays, also often have important secrets. So it may be that wherever you are at this very moment, there is a saxophone not too far away tucked back in a closet. There is some dream you put aside, some life you might have lived instead of the one you are living now. The universe is full of varied possibilities, and we only get to be one version of ourselves at a time. Both that play, You Can't Take It With You, is the title. And any worship service might help a person who experiences it to get a little clarity for a moment, to ask ourselves anew, this day, am I living the life that I ought to be instead of just rolling along with the life that I happen to lead? To remind ourselves that it is never too late to open up that closet, reach way into the back, and take out the saxophone again. Hopefully this illustrates that the pretending which is essential to acting is not simply the moral equivalent of a lie. Lies hide the truth. An actor can, by taking on a character who is not them, reciting lines they did not create for themselves in the moment, and following a choreography set down in advance, illustrate something profoundly true that otherwise might have remained hidden. When I was an undergraduate, I went to see a student production at the school theater, and I was so affected by it that I had to go back for the closing performance the next day. I went around campus until I found one of the printed sheets of paper they'd used to advertise it, and I stole it. It's still framed, it hangs in my dining room right now. It was a play about school shootings, centered around a fictional teenage assailant and the psychiatrist meeting with him in prison. Sobering now to think that that was a relatively fresh, contemporary topic over 20 years ago. I found the performance deep, challenging, convicting, and at times very funny. Part of it was a play within a play, a satire of societal narratives and expectations surrounding the unthinkably terrible reality of these school shootings. It lampooned simplistic explanations for why such things happen, with a fable set at a high school populated by caricatures of nerds and jocks, outcasts, and popular kids. At one point, there was even a buffoonish stand-in for news media seemingly obsessed by the salacious details of the crime. And then a woman, playing a reporter, trying to cover the story, stood up from the audience and interrupted the action on the stage. She had done her best, she said, to tell the facts of the case as it happened, to transcribe the names, the sequence of events, and the body count. But no one really cares about any of that, she pointed out. The who, the what, the where, the when, they're all accessories. The why is the only thing that matters and was the only thing that she could not give. Of course, that woman was not actually a reporter and she wasn't a member of the audience either. She was one of the actors in the play. But her part required her to play an audience member for much of the show. And her pivotal scene helped to illustrate how being in the audience of a play is not a simple, passive thing. The show was challenging us to look at ourselves, our assumptions, our expectations, the problems too thorny for us to easily contemplate. At first, it did it in stroke so broad it was easy to laugh and think, that might be a reflection of someone, but if not a reflection of me. But then the reporter stands up and challenges the play, calls it out for being unfair to her. Really though, she is challenging the audience. Look more closely into that mirror. Your face is there as well. Now William Shakespeare's Hamlet is a play about betrayal and hatred and despair. In particular, how the cycle of wrongdoing and the quest for vengeance against the perpetrator can create a vicious consuming cycle where all the possibilities of life become narrowed down into one tragic singularity. At one point in the story, the titular character, the Prince of Denmark, talks with two affable fools, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, about fate. They pronounce that though they are not quite so lucky as they could be, as servants of the royal family, they are fairly pleased with the hand that has been dealt to them. And then comes the following exchange, Hamlet. What have you, my good friends, deserved the hands of fortune that she sends you to prison hither? Guildenstern. Prison, my lord? Hamlet, Denmark's a prison. Rosencrantz. Then the world is one. Hamlet, a goodly one in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one of the worst. Rosencrantz. We think not so, my lord. Hamlet, why then, tis none to you, for there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. To me, it is a prison. Rosencrantz. Why then, your ambition makes it one, tis too narrow for your mind. Now, here is a spoiler alert for one of the most famous plays in the English language. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern do not survive, Hamlet. And the well-known certainty of their doom forms the basis for the title and the structure of Tom Stoppard's play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are dead. The show is a series of scenes and episodes that fit in between the events of the original play. The hapless, foolish, minor characters are now turned protagonists and play silly games and have halfway deep conversations with each other. All the while, the inevitability of their fate looms. They are just as trapped in their own story as Hamlet was in Denmark. But that doesn't mean that there isn't laughter. Life is what happens between the grand events of birth and death, after all. A play may also provide a straightforward means for expressing something theologically deep, particularly the sorts of theology that might not play well in many more overtly spiritual contexts. Tony Kushner's great work, Angels in America, unfolds amidst the AIDS pandemic and its apocalyptic impact on the community of gay men in the United States towards the end of the 20th century. One of the main characters while living with the disease begins to experience a series of what are either hallucinations or divine visitations, or both. An angel brings a message that God has called for humanity to stop, to hold still at once so that things may be set right again. Very literally sick and tired and fed up. This is his response. We can't just stop. We're not rocks. Progress, migration, motion is modernity. It's animate. It's what living things do. We desire. Even if we desire stillness, it's still desire for. Even if we go faster than we should, we can't wait and wait for what? God? God? He isn't coming back. And even if he did, if he ever did come back, if he ever dared show his face or his glyph or whatever in the garden again, if after all this destruction, after all the terrible days of this terrible century, he returned to see how much suffering his abandonment had created, if all he has to offer is death, you should sue the bastard. That's my only contribution to all this theology. Sue the bastard for walking out. How dare he? He ought to pay. I want more life. I can't help myself. I do. I've lived through such terrible times, and there are people who live through much, much worse. But you see them living anyway. When they're more spirit than body, more sores than skin. When they're burned and in agony, when flies lay eggs in the eyes of their children, they live. Death usually has to take life away. I don't know if that's just the animal. I don't know if it's not braver to die, but I recognize the habit, the addiction to being alive. We live past hope. If I can find hope anywhere, that's it. That's the best I can do. It's so much, not enough, so inadequate, but bless me anyway. I want more life. We could go on here indefinitely, but I will leave you with a little bit more of the Bard of Avon. A bit before the end of Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, we are given these words. Our revels now are ended. These are actors, as I foretold you, were all spirits and are melted into air, into thin air. And like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, gay, all which it inherit shall dissolve. And like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on. And our little life is rounded with a sleep. At the close of his final work, The Tempest, William Shakespeare reminded his audience that all actors must eventually depart the stage. And that even things that seem built to last, towers, palaces, temples, must one day fade into memory. What remains after we have gone is the impression that our living has left upon the world. Every human life is a work of art, and just like a play, or a painting, or a building, what we take from the piece is determined mostly by what we bring to it. In the brushstrokes of a person's life, in the lines and the curves, we can find failure and success, anger and kindness, pain and strength once their performance is finished. So it falls to each of us, simultaneously the fellow players and their audience, to find our meaning in the artistry of each life lived. Every person's existence has something to teach and to tell to every person who knew them. Some of the details are disorderly and some painful, but there is beauty in the piece, something from a life to remind you how better to live your own. We gather each week, carrying with us the joys, the losses, the celebrations, the sorrows of our days. We share them here, knowing they are held in love and support. We light a candle for the family and for the life of Paul Fleer, who passed away in January of last year. Paul and his family have been a part of FUS since the 1960s, and we send our love to his wife, Beatrice, their children, their families, to all who miss him. And we light a candle to mourn the violence in our world, here in our own nation and around the globe. We know there are never enough candles to symbolize the pain, hold the anger, and cradle the tears. May this light fuel our passion for change and our hunger for justice. If you'll join me now in a spirit of prayer with these words from Douglas Taylor, spirit of grace and tender mercies, we gather on the edge of another week and for some of us on the edge of our strength. We come lifted up by events of this week or weighed down by them, and we arrive in some paradoxical mix thereof. We are here in our gathering of hope and reflection. At times, we come weary and worn down, and for some, that is how we arrive today. At other times, we come with questions, with a longing, or with something to offer. For those who come today shattered, broken, lonely, lost. Let us offer our prayer of resilience. Again this week, we test the tender places in our hearts and in our lives to see what healing may occur. Gratitude is often a source of healing, and so we give thanks for the landscapes of grace in our lives, for music and for good companions, for moments of beauty and peace, and for the ones who inspire us with integrity and compassion. We give thanks for all that lifts us up and for lessons that lead us on. For the times when we are brought low, show us the hidden wells of love we can tap into, help us rise up once more, just once more, and once more again will surely be enough. Remind us we do not strive in vain, that we are part of a chorus, that resilience is in our bones, that peace will prevail on earth, and that healing and grace come like soft rain. Be thou an ever-present strength upon our journeys, and teach us that in falling down, we do rise again. This we ask in the name of all that is holy. May it be so. Amen. Our closing hymn, number 112, have ended, but our connection to each other in this community remains. Together may we walk the path of justice, speak words of love, live the selfless deed, trod gently upon the earth, and fill the world with compassion. Until we meet again, blessed be, go in peace, and please be seated for the postlude. One, two, three, four.