 And what a perfect way to say good morning and welcome to another Sunday here at First Unitarian Society, where independent thinkers gather in a safe, nurturing environment to explore issues of social, spiritual, and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud and intellectually gifted member of this congregation, and I'd like to extend a very special welcome to any guests, visitors, and newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find that it's a very special place. In a moment, you'll hear the sound of the gong, and that'll be your signal to join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. And after that, I invite you to sit back or lean forward to enjoy today's service. I know it will touch your heart, stir your spirits, and trigger one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. Please remain standing for the opening words and the chalice lighting. We come together today in this room, some as friends, others as strangers, but all of us sojourners, seeking human acceptance and human warmth. Here may we discover others like us, and may the flame of love be rekindled in our midst. We come together today as teachers with visions to share, desiring to be heard and understood. Let us recognize that all men and women have something important to share, something worthwhile, a singular story to tell. May we listen to each other with respect and with compassion. We come together as seekers, our spirits impoverished from meeting the week's many demands, thirsting after the living waters of worship and fellowship. May all who have entered here be nourished in this house of free religion. Spirit of truth and goodness and community, we are thankful for the custom that brings us together, because we know that our lives would be so much poorer, our quest for understanding so much more daunting were it not for occasions such as these. So let us make the most of this opportunity for connection, edification, and renewal. Steve, if you do not light our chalice, and as he does so, please join me in reading the words printed in today's program. Come into this circle of friendship. Come with your questions. Come with your cares. Come with your sorrows, joys, fears, and yearnings. Come into this hallowed space, open and expected, seeking not to evade, but to engage life, to meet its challenges with curiosity and with courage. And in the spirit of fellowship on this fine June morning, please turn to your neighbor in exchange with him or her warm greeting. At this time, I'd like to invite any children who are in our midst to come forward for the message for all ages. So about nine years ago, I finished writing a book, and this is the book. It's called Making the Good Life Last. I'm not trying to promote it here this morning. But in this book, I identify four keys to living well in this world. And one of those keys to living well is to exercise patience. You know, in the Dalai Lama, who is a very important spiritual teacher, says that patience of all the virtues we have is the most like a muscle, because it gets stronger when you exercise it. Okay? So this is a story about patience, and it's called Remi the Rhino Learns Patience. He had taken deep breaths, and he had counted to ten. But Remi the Rhino was charging again. The zebras this time were about to get hurt because they'd eaten the grass that he had saved for dessert. It seemed there was constantly someone to charge, because that's what you do when you're angry and large. His doctor said he had issues with rage. But his daddy told him, just please act your age. Everything always made Remi upset. The dust was too dry. The rain was too wet. He hated the heat, and he hated the cold. He wouldn't put up with the young or the old. The meerkats were jumpy. The hornbills too loud. Giraffes made him grumpy. The lions were too proud. Gazelles were too timid. Baboons made him scowl. They'd better stop bothering Remi right now. One evening, he dropped for a snooze on the ground. When an aardvark came bumbling and snuffling around, hungry for insects, she searched with her nose till she tripped on a patch of rhinoceros toes. And Remi got mad, as you probably guessed. But the aardvark did something I wouldn't suggest. She stood there waiting for Remi to charge her. She stood there and watched as he got closer and larger. And at the very last moment, as quick as can be, she dodged and Remi ran into the tree. He tried to step back, but his horn had got caught. And the more Remi struggled, the stucker it got. He groaned, and he steamed, and he moaned, and he grunted. But still that old tree wouldn't do what he wanted. He screamed like a banshee, and he stopped on the ground. It sounded like thunder for miles around. Hundreds of animals fled in confusion. And the aardvark said softly, I have a solution. Remi calmed down for a moment or two, so aardvark went on. I know just what to do. What you need are some creatures to chew on this tree. I've got some connections. Leave it to me. The aardvark left Remi alone to consider what kind of beast nibbled trees for their dinner. When the aardvark came back, with a termite parade. My termites are perfect for work of this kind, but there's one little thing that you must keep in mind whenever you struggle or jerk or get angry, it scares off the termites, and it slows down their work. And so Remi experienced strange new sensations. He took a crash course in the virtue of patience. He waited through rain, and he waited through thunder. He waited through birds climbing over and under. He waited through leopards, absurd decorations. He waited through gawkers from far away nations. He waited through elephant balancing acts, until little by little to relax. There it is. Do you remember how at the beginning of the story he got mad at the zebras and was chasing them off because they were eating his grass? What are they doing now? They're all sharing. That's what happens when you learn how to be patient. So thank you for listening to the story, and now we're going to invite you to go to summer fun and have a lot of fun while we have our own fun here singing our next hymn. Please be seated. I invite you now into a few moments of meditation and intercommunion. So let us settle in and let us be serene at this time of spiritual deepening. But aside for a few moments, let us set an eye, leave behind all fretful concerns, all troubles, the torment, all inner confusion. Put away for now all the plans to be made, the things that need to be done, the plaudits to be won. Breathe deeply. Clear the mind of all its clutter. Purge the spirit of all inhospitality. After a busy morning, sit easy and be at rest and feel your body recover its balance, your mind its bearings, your spirit its strength. Feel the presence of your companions surrounding you and find reassurance in the warmth of their welcome and the support of their caring. We who have been wanderers groping for something we know not what, here is a place for us, a temporary but welcome home for every restless and weary spirit. Let us continue on in a moment to more of silent reflection. Blessed be Adam. So I'd like to offer two commentaries on parish ministry that rang true for me when I initially ran across them. The first is from Martin Copenhagen and Martin Copenhagen is a united... a UCC minister, United Church of Christ or Unitarian's Considering Christ, as they're sometimes known. And this is from a book that he co-authored and it became one of my favorite books in the last few years called This Odd and Wondrous Calling. Copenhagen writes, wisdom may be the one distinguishing quality of pastors because all people have an equal opportunity to demonstrate the same integrity and faithfulness that good ministers exhibit, but ministers have been given a unique opportunity to become wise. Of course, not all pastors are wise, God knows, and often the wisest people are not pastors. But the nature of the pastoral life is such that it gives a person an extraordinary shot at becoming wise. But then I need to pause to say a word about what I mean by wisdom. It has been called the woolly mammoth of ideas, big, shaggy, and elusive. Philosophers, theologians, and social scientists have all found wisdom notoriously difficult to define. In part, this is because wisdom is more than a single attribute. It's more like a cluster of attributes, including a clear-eyed view of human behavior coupled with keen understanding, a certain tolerance for ambiguity and what might be called the messiness of life, emotional resiliency, an ability to think clearly in circumstances of conflict or stress, a tendency to approach a crisis as an intriguing puzzle to be solved, a gift for seeing how smaller facts fit into the larger picture, a mixture of empathy and detachment, a way of suspending judgment long enough to achieve greater clarity and an ability to act coupled with a willingness to embrace judicious inaction. Again, it is not all pastors who are wise in this sense. Nevertheless, the kind of experiences one has as a pastor are just the kind of experiences that can help to nurture whatever gifts for wisdom one might have. The second reading is a bit of a meditation from a UU minister named Elizabeth Mugen, and she is a Vietnamese American and a strategist with our headquarters in Boston, the UUA, and she also happens to be a graduate of the University of Wisconsin. Elizabeth writes, This is for when you want to write the resignation letter. When you want to skip town, give up on this job, this congregation, this community, this family, this faith. When you want to start a new life slinging brunch on a beach, definitely on a beach. Specializing in sunny-side-up eggs on buttered toast and mango smoothies. Never think about justice and covenant and love and heartbreak, just about all the yellows of the sun and the egg and the mango. Spirit, give us the long view. Because we are only here because someone else refused to give up on this congregation, this community, this family, and this faith. Give us perspective, humor, a break. Give us teammates who we can tell the truth to. Give us faith and honesty and mangoes. May we dig down past the giving up and find the grit to get through. A U-Haul truck in the driveway. The day it was suddenly real. But you saw the truck, a real-life truck in your driveway. We let you sit behind the wheel. A truck that will take you to the parish in May of 1987. My predecessor, Max Gabler, provided a summation of services he had rendered to the First Unitarian Society during his distinguished 35-year pastorate. His records indicated that Max had presided at 1,112 weddings. 236 memorial services, child dedications totaled 356, and 1,789 people had been welcomed into membership. Max did not divulge in that report how many sermons he had written and delivered, but I would guess it was somewhere in the vicinity of 900. Now from my own clergy logbook and a few back-of-the-envelope calculations, I figured that around 2,800 people have joined the society during my tenure, and listeners were subjected to 750 of my sermons. I presided at fewer weddings than Max Gabler, only 540. He married half of Madison sometimes, I think. But I've also presided at far more memorial services, 347. Between us, Kelly Crocker and I have probably dedicated in the neighborhood a 450 infants and children. So these are, perhaps, who will agree, some rather impressive numbers, but they do not tell the whole story, and if they did, this would be the shortest sermon on record. In the May FUS newsletter, I listed other developments that were related to the society's financial progress, construction and restoration projects, increases in staffing and in programming, extended outreach efforts into the larger community, advanced reforms. I don't intend to repeat today what has already been published. If you are interested, you can check out this newsletter on our website. So what I prefer to share with you today is a bit more squishy, a bit more subjective, something that is less a historical overview and more of a personal testament, a summary of some of the insights that I have gained over my three decades among you, and whether they will strike you as significant insights remains to be seen, but at the very least, you will have a brief glimpse at one Unitarian Universalist minister's inner life. So at the risk of indulging in a cliché at the outset, let me begin by acknowledging that my missteps have generally proven more instructive than any successes that I enjoy. And fortunately, there have not been too many pratfalls in 30 years, because if there had, my career path probably would have unfolded a bit differently. You know, most men and women who enter the ministry do not stick with it. The drop-out rate after 10 years of service is 50%. And so it is the rare individual who enters this profession as young and as green as I was, and keeps plugging away until Social Security kicks in. Because for many people, it's very easy to get discouraged doing this kind of work. So while pondering what I wanted to share with you this morning, I returned to a file that I had been keeping from the time that I left Binghamton, New York to come here to Madison. And in that file was the last sermon I delivered to my former congregation, and the sermon was entitled Parting Shots, which gives you an indication of the ambivalence that I felt after seven years in that community. So in that discourse, I also shared some of my learnings during the seven years that I had been in Binghamton. I said back then that I had gained some really important self-knowledge, and particularly about my rough edges. A career in the parish ministry was for me something of a stretch, I confessed, a role that from a temperamental standpoint I was really not all that well suited for. From time to time I had been informed by members of my congregation in Binghamton, well usually secondhand, that I could be intimidating, standoffish, overly cerebral, lacking warmth. In other words, since coming to Madison I have undoubtedly mellowed just a bit, but as they say the leopard really doesn't change his spots. Similar comments have reached my ears here as well. And I will allow that there is some measure of truth to them. And while these may be impeccable flaws, I have gradually figured out how to compensate for most of them most of the time. And having colleagues like Kelly Crocker and Karen Gustafson and Mary Ann Macklin, that has helped me a great deal and I have appreciated them for the balance that they have brought to our clergy team. One of the secrets I think of long-term ministry is the ability to recognize your own limitations and bring on board co-workers to exhibit strength in those very departments. Of course that also means that you are obliged to share the limelight to give your colleagues encouragement, opportunities to shine. And then when they do so to offer them commendation, all of which I have tried to do. And it also helps if you do not take yourself too seriously and can make peace with your own deficiencies. The admonition of an enlightened Zen master that he once shared with his own students is one that I have also taken to heart. He told them, you are perfect just as you are and you could also stand some improvement. A second insight I have gained and one that Don Miguel Ruiz highlights in his little book The Four Agreements is not to take most things personally. Because often it's not when someone takes you to task, someone declares that you have let them down something in their own life experience or in their unspoken assumptions about you is probably contributing to their displeasure. And that's not to say that I as an object of their displeasure am always blameless. There may well be something in the complaint that deserves sober reflection. And if so, I have found that nothing does more to mollify my critics than to simply admit I missed the mark. And in fact if that has truly been the case to offer a mea culpa. And I've also learned over time that a person can do this without losing their intrinsic sense of worthiness. As Catherine Schultz points out in her book Being Wrong, which I recommend to you, in our culture most of us are terrified of public speaking, but also of making mistakes. We take the mistakes that we make too personally presuming that if we admit to being fallible we will forfeit our credibility, our trustworthiness, and the respect of others. But in fact, my experience has been just the opposite. That in dropping our defenses and owning up to our mistakes we can actually gain respect. And we can also develop greater sympathy for the world's other fallible people. And if we honestly do think that we are being seriously misjudged, well rather than go into a defensive crouch, we would do much better by pausing, listening quietly, seeking clarity through questioning. Be curious in other words, rather than argumentative. Have I always succeeded in dispelling negativity in this way? Well of course not. Because when someone comes on to me strong and without warning or provocation I feel that surge of adrenaline and the old reptilian brain gets a jump on my better judgment. We're all familiar with that. And in such instances the outcomes are often, if not always less than ideal. That leads to a third insight, one that I had already alluded to in my message to the children. The value of patience. Early in my career this was hardly my strong suit. And by the time that I got around to writing that book, Making the Good Life Last I had kind of turned a corner in this respect. And I did not remember when I was writing that book that at the time of my departure many years earlier from Binghamton, New York my colleague and mentor up the road in Ithaca had written a letter, a kind of a farewell letter in which he offered me some pointers about succeeding here in Madison enjoying a long and prosperous ministry here in Madison. And chief among the pointers he gave me was exercise patience. He says you will encounter critics and adversaries and your best weapon for dealing with the people you want to see gone is the knowledge that your ministry is more lasting than their dissatisfaction. I call this patience Jack said. Others call it stubbornness. And so Jack described the president of his board who had gotten under his skin. But he did not let that conflict distract him from his core ministerial responsibilities. This too shall pass he reminded himself. The key to staying centered when work becomes a struggle is the exercise of patience. And as I quickly learned patience is also called for when one is stepping into a parish that has been served so well by your predecessor the distinguished Max David Gabler. You have to be tolerant of those who even after your decade of service still want to refer to you as the new minister or those who will react to something that you have done some decision that you have made and they will tell you reprovingly that is not the way Max would have done it. Patience tells us not to resent statements like that not to personalize them but rather to see them as a sign of honor for your much esteemed if you can if you can stick it out if you can perform well the congregation will in all likelihood come to embrace you on your own merits not just because you're a clone of Max Gabler. Fourth know how to claim your authority without throwing your weight around. A few years ago I was asked to deliver the sermon at the annual General Assembly Service of the Living Tradition which is a very big deal that's an honor you speak before 5,000 UUs from all over the country and the topic that I decided to speak on was the topic of clergy authority which has been in rather serious decline in recent decades the office of parish minister which in an earlier era was a source of considerable influence in the larger community today it enjoys very little prestige nevertheless despite this within any given faith community a minister can over time win the confidence of the congregation and become someone whose opinion and judgment carry considerable weight and boy was that ever true of my predecessor Max Gabler and I like to think that it's been true for me and probably it has been because one of the comments about my ministry often is that if Michael wants something to happen it is going to happen or words to that effect and frankly I don't think that there's anything terribly wrong with that to be called into leadership entails and requires the granting of a certain amount of authority the trick in a democratically governed system such as ours is to exercise that authority in a way that compliments other people's efforts and respects the influence to which they also engage for me it has always been important to recognize that there are natural and appropriate limits to any persons authority including mine and thus to use it sparingly and at times when it can produce a positive institutional outcome I like to think of it less in terms of authority which is kind of a turn off for a lot of people but rather as accumulated social capital that I can then invest in building and expansion projects in social justice initiatives in organizational realignment for most purposes however I've tried hard in these 30 years not to step on the rightful prerogatives of our leadership of the congregation as the governing body or coworkers who have been empowered within their own spheres of influence and that's what it means to exercise proper authority without becoming authoritarian a fifth point use your authority but don't over invest in outcomes for much of my ministerial career I had this bad habit of over functioning I always had the nagging feeling that I had not done enough and there was always something else that needed to be done that it was my sole responsibility to do I did not need a supervisor breathing down my neck or giving me marching orders I was pretty much my own taskmaster Parker Palmer calls this kind of behavior functional atheism the belief he says that ultimate authority for everything rests with us that if anything decent is going to happen here we are the ones I am the one who must make it happen functional atheism now the pattern for this particular behavior was set a long time ago way back when I was in undergraduate school after a less than stellar academic performance in my freshman year a year in which I spent a good deal of time on more pleasurable pursuits I decided after that disappointing year that a more disciplined approach to study was in order so what did I do as a sophomore I began taking course overloads five or six courses instead of the mandatory four today I reasoned to myself there would not be any time left over for extraneous pursuits and pleasures except visiting Trina in her campus 250 miles away and that worked my grades went up and they stayed right up through my master's program and through my doctoral program and so I became a certified workaholic always afraid that if I did not keep my nose to the grindstone I would not measure up I would not make the grade and it wasn't so much a fear as if not succeeding at the highest possible level so as a parish minister I developed this false feeling that it all rested on my shoulders and over time predictably this became an unhealthy state of affairs Trina will agree that I worked far too many hours at the expense of her and Kyle the expense of my own emotional and mental well-being the tasks that I could well have delegated to others to capable staff or volunteers I insisted on carrying out myself to ensure that they would be done just right and during all that time there was a lot of feedback there because FUS was doing very well we were thriving but it was not a sustainable proposition for any of us the harder I worked the more my people skills deteriorated then in 2005 I took a much needed sabbatical in good workaholic fashion I used those four months away to crank out the first draft of that book but that was not my most enduring achievement for the entire time that we spent in Tucson, Arizona Trina and I did not darken the door of a Unitarian Universalist Church we took a complete break from institutional engagement so as the weeks slipped by it dawned on me that I needed to stop obsessing about outcomes just let my co-worker do their jobs practice ministry in the best way I knew how and then just let the chips fall where they may and that was like getting a new lease on life and these last 12 post sabbatical years have been without a doubt the most enjoyable and the most fulfilling of my career I've weathered some choppy waters I've had interpersonal and institutional challenges these haven't gone away but as I practiced detachment it was easier to maintain a non-anxious presence even when things were not going particularly well so I kind of came to the same place as Edward Everett Hale who famously declared I am only one but I am one I cannot do everything but I can do something and I will not let what I cannot do let me from doing what I can sixth and finally and related to the previous point in the end it's really not about me the position of lead minister carries with it the occupational hazard of conflating one's own interests with those of the institution one serves over time you do become very closely identified with the church when people thought about first unitarian society during the 1970s and 1980s the first thing that came to mind even before Frank Lloyd Wright was Max Gabley before that the outspoken Kenneth Patton became the face of this congregation and whether or not Reverend Patton and Gabley in some way sought celebrity status I have no idea, I can't say but I do know that there is something very very seductive about the amount of attention that has the senior minister at First Unitarian Society it can be a real ego trip and it can also be very problematic ministers who stand on pedestals can also become lightning rods as my colleague from Schenectady Charles Slap once observed people do not join UU churches because they agree with our doctrines because we don't have any and we have no creeds we have no Book of Common Prayer we have no papal marching orders so what are we left with? Moi, the minister who then becomes the symbol of all that is right or all that is wrong with the church it can be very flattering, Slap says to be the minister but it also means that all too often our congregations polarize around their leader having been in this business for quite some time I fervently believe that our society the largest society needs strong, dynamic, generational, activist, faith congregations like First Unitarian Society of Madison we're very important in this world small as we are and I have done my best to ensure that the people of FUS have always had a sense of ownership for this establishment always given the opportunity to perform its most important work in other words I have sought these past 30 years to be a good steward of this enterprise not long ago one of our members expressed unhappiness with the decision that I had made and she reminded me that she was a member before I arrived and she was going to be around after I left just so she's right I've never pretended to have a proprietary interest in the First Unitarian Society it doesn't belong to me and I have served always at the congregation's sufferance I have however done the best I could to build upon a distinguished legacy to increase FUS's human and material assets to secure its future and to make it a more effective force for good in the world this I have tried to do as stewards the organizational consultant Peter Block writes as stewards we serve our organizations and we are accountable to them without taking control we honor what has been given to us we use power with a sense of grace we pursue purposes that transcend our own self-interest and that has been my intention and I hope that it has at least in some measure been fulfilled one last comment a few days ago Trina shared with me a recent kindness ranking of major American cities apparently it appeared originally in the Readers Digest and several different criteria were used to create this ranking on kindness and when all the scores were tabulated Madison, Wisconsin led the pack a refreshing contrast to another recent report that ranked Madison as the nation's fourth drunkest city there may be some correlation there I'm not sure my own experience generally has supported the kindness finding some of them tell Scott Walker that Madisonians are as a rule pretty darn considerate and helpful and fair-minded and appreciative and perhaps it's just a reflection of our surrounding culture because I have experienced this kindness in your midst here at First Unitarian Society and I have felt very blessed by it perhaps it is a reflection of the Madison culture but I think really that there is more to it than that but this is a very, very special community and so I have moved to say thank you so much you can have to do that again next week you know so we do gather each week as a community of memory and of hope and of friendship and to this time and place we bring our whole and sometimes our broken cells and we seek here a place where these might be celebrated and shared and so now we would pause to acknowledge Pamela Johnson whose brother died last week and the funeral will be held shortly in Dallas, Texas and then our hearts and prayers are with Phoebe Yancey Phoebe and her family as they await surgery for Phoebe who is 11 years old at Children's Hospital she will have this surgery on Tuesday morning to remove a mass that was found in her brain and so we send her our strength and our hopes for a successful surgery and quick healing and recovery and Jennifer and Phoebe both have sung in our choirs for quite some time so you may recognize them from now and then finally our thoughts are with Bill Wharton longtime member of FUS one of our most generous supporters Bill has been struggling with congestive heart failure and pulmonary problems he was hospitalized last week and is now receiving hospice care at the Egrace Hospice Facility in Jamesville so we wish Bill our best so in addition to those mentioned we would acknowledge any other unexpressed joys or sorrows that remain among us that as a community we hold with equal concern for our hearts let us sit silently for just a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and hope and so by virtue of our brief time together today may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded I now invite you into the giving and receiving of our offering for the second week 100% of your gifts will be shared with the Unitarian Universalist Association it's promised and practiced campaign for the black lives of Unitarian Universalists you can read more about them in your program I'm not afraid of spiders I'm not afraid of snakes or things that gall bump in the night I don't believe in monsters under the bed I leave the closet open when I turn out the light I've made my peace with dark I never carry whistles I never carry mace what if it goes off in your purse I'm learning to love all I look for the better instead of the worse I've had my share your gifts to support the good cause also those individuals who have helped with our service today as volunteers David Brows is working on our sound this morning Steve Goldberg as you know is our lay worship associate Lois Evanson our lay minister Patty Witte and Claire Box were greeting us as you came in and Liza Monroe Dick Goldberg, Brian Chanis and Dan Bradley were ushers this morning Bissnitchke and Sandy Plisch are preparing our coffee today there will be a tour afterwards for visitors today if you would like to see our facilities meet over there by the large windows and then in terms of opportunities that are coming up there is a party today honoring our four graduating teens who have served as child care providers in recent years three of these teens will have their last day as a child care provider in the month of June this party is today begins at 1245 and is around two cake and lemonade will be served so please come and help them celebrate if you have the time and the individuals who will be graduating as child care providers are Erin Albin Gwen McKekney Josephine Putnam and Nicole Fond and we thank them for their service these years and then another opportunity unbeknownst to most folks the FUS campus now boasts a brand new feature a paved memorial path through the wooded area west of the Gabler living room plans for developing this area into a meditation and memorial garden have been ongoing more than a decade progress has been slow and finally enough memorial gifts were received to allow us to hire a paving company and the results are really quite lovely so take a walk through the woodland before or after the service today well after after but if I was speaking to the 11 o'clock people if any of you are here and playing sticking around you can do it before 11 but after the service today and if you see any of the following individuals you can thank them for pushing this project forward with an admirable assist from facilities manager Thomas Skelling so Elaine Lohr, Bob Radford, Nick Schweitzer and Bob Ault have been working diligently on this project and we owe them our thanks and so now I would invite you to rise as you are able and body and spirit for a closing hymn number 89 please be seated for the benediction on the post loop from the Dao De Ching timeless wisdom when the master governs the people are hardly aware that he exists next best is a leader who is loved next one who is feared the worst is one who is despised if you don't trust the people you make them untrustworthy so the master doesn't talk he acts and when his work is done the people say amazing we are ourselves bless it be strike a careless deception