 Please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. And now let's get musically present with each other by turning to the words for our in-gathering hymn, which you'll find inside your order of service. In the harmony, good morning everybody, a cheerful Labor Day weekend welcome to the 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. Speaking of things that are different in this world, I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud member of this congregation. And I'd like to extend a special greeting to any guests, visitors or newcomers. If this is your first time at First Unitarian Society, I think you'll find it's a special place. And if you'd like to learn more about our special buildings, we're offering a guided tour after today's service. Just meet over here by the windows and we'll take care of you. Speaking of taking care of each other, I think you know the drill by now. This is a perfect time to silence those pesky electronic devices that we just will not need during the service. And while you're doing that, I'll remind you that if you're accompanied this morning by a youngster, and you think that young person might prefer to experience the service from a more private space, we offer a couple options for you. One is our child haven in the back corner of the auditorium. And we also offer some comfortable seating just outside the doorway in the commons from which you and your youngster can see and hear the service. And one of the reasons you're able to see and hear the service today is because we've got a great group, as always, a great group of volunteers whose names I'll read to you now and just think, if you join this group someday, your name will be read from this microphone as well. Our volunteers include Operating the Sound System today, David Brails. Thank you, David. Special thanks to Tom Boykoff for serving as our lay minister. Thank you to Pamela McMullen, who served as our greeter this morning. Thank you to our ushers, Marty Hollis and Ann Ostrom. And the hospitality and coffee are hosted by Biss Nitschke and Sandra Plisch. So, end of the announcements. I ask you to sit back or lean forward to enjoy this morning'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. We're here this morning seeking a reality beyond our narrow, isolated selves. A reality that binds us in compassion, understanding, and cooperation with all other men and women, and to the community of all sentient life. May our spirits be open and receptive this hour to the insights conveyed by music and poetry, which weave together the scattered threads of our experience, which help us to remember the wholeness to which we belong and to which we all owe, our health, our happiness, and our very lives. I invite you to rise and body your in spirit for the lighting of our chalice. And as Steve kindles the flame of our faith, please join me in reading the words printed in your program. We gather as a community of memory and a community of hope to celebrate life and its never-ending promise of love. We kindle this flame as a symbol of the light within every human heart. May our individual sparks meet and merge, bringing the warmth of love and a beacon of hope into the world. And in the spirit of that love and hope, I invite you to turn to your neighbor in exchange with them a warm greeting. And if we have some children that would like to come to the front for the message for all ages, I would welcome your company. Don't everybody move at once? Ah, thank you. Here we go. It always takes one and then a little motivation. And so you'll need to listen, but then also look up because there's going to be some pictures that are going to go with the story I'm going to tell you. So this is a story that's entitled cooperation. Does anybody know what that word means? Cooperation. It means to work together. Is that what you're going to say? Yeah. It means if you've got some work to do, something that you want to achieve, something you want to get done, you can do it more easily and better. Sometimes faster if you try to do it together than if you just do it by yourself. So this is what this story is about. So one morning the sun got up and the sun doesn't have a frowny face, but the sun was in a bad mood that morning. And the sun said to himself, I'm really getting tired, sick and tired of getting up every morning, giving light to the whole earth day after day after day. And what does the human race, what do people ever do for me in return? And so the sun said, I've been hanging around up here and I've been growing the corn and I've been melting the snow and nobody ever says thank you. And the sun was still thinking about this in a bad mood when the rain arrived. And so the sun said, Lady Rain, you water the earth all the time. You make the flowers grow and you turn the fields green and you fill up the rivers. So you tell me what the human beings, what do people ever do for you, Lady Rain? And hearing this, rain furrowed her brow. And with a terrible cry, she fell headlong onto the earth. And as she pounded into the ground, she said, listen, Mother Earth, you let human beings work with you, you let them rip you open and scratch you and scrape you. And what does the human race ever do for you in return? In the earth, she turned to her own furrows and she murmured to the grains of wheat in the ground. Hey, little grain of wheat, you let yourself die so that human beings can make and eat bread. What does humankind ever do for you in return? And so they were all in a pretty foul mood and so the sun stopped shining and the rain stopped falling and the earth stopped holding the grain and the grain stopped germinating and growing to feed human beings. And what do you think happened? There was what? The humans went extinct. There was no more life on the earth, including human beings. That's right. But then what happened? The sun began to feel bored because there were no longer any children dancing around in its warmth and its light. And the rain began to feel sad because the rain never saw the smile of the gardener working in his garden. And the earth became really weary because the earth never heard the joyful step of the farmers out in the fields. And the grain, the grain just rotted in the field because there was no one to pick it and to turn it into bread. And so together, the sun and the rain and Mother Earth and the grain decided that they were going to have to call on the Creator and say, what are we going to do now? And so they said, author of the universe, everything in the world is dying. Everything in this wonderful world that you have created, that you have made so fruitful, help us. Give life back to the earth. We beg you. And the Creator replied to the sun and to the rain and to the earth and to the grain. My friends, I've given you everything that you need to support life on earth. Life cannot be born except of you and between the four of you. And life will be reborn if each of you shares of your nature, the nature that I have given to you that allows you to fill creation with life. Because life, said the Creator, is born of sharing, the sharing of each of your lives. And where there is no willingness to share or to cooperate, to work together, life cannot exist. And so even for we as human beings, each one of our lives is better when we learn how to cooperate, to work together and to share with each other, which I think is a good lesson for all of us to ponder as we begin a brand new school year. So thank you for listening and now we're going to sing you out to summer fun with our next Tim, number 134. Please be seated. And so we continue our service with this selection from Scott Russell Sanders, Professor of Professor Emeritus of Humanities and of English at Indiana University. Ever since the eclipse of our native cultures, the dominant American view has been that we should cultivate the self rather than the community and that we should look to the individual as the source of hope and the center of value while expecting hindrance and harm from the larger society. And what other view could have emerged from our particular history? The first Europeans to reach America were daredevils. They were treasure seekers, as were most of those who mapped out the interior of this continent. Many colonists were renegades of one stripe or another, some religious nonconformists, some political rebels, more than a few of them were fugitives from the law. The trappers, hunters, traders, freebooters who pushed the frontier westward, they seldom recognized any authority beyond the reach of their own hands. And our religion, our religion has been marked by an evangelical Protestantism that emphasized personal salvation rather than social redemption. To get right with God, as signs along the roads here in the Midwest gravely recommend, that does not mean to reconcile your fellow citizens to the divine order, but rather to make your own separate peace, to look after the eternal future of your own singular soul. And so this cult of the individual shows up everywhere in American lore, a lore which celebrates drifters and rebels, loners, while pitying or reviling the pillars of the community. And so when society begins to close in, making demands, asking questions, our heroes, they hit the road. Like Huckleberry Finn, they are forever lighting out for the territories where nobody will tell them what to do. And in our literature, when community enters in at all, it's likely to be seen as a conspiracy against the free soul, the hero, the heroine. And yet for all of that, we can see around us the fruits of our concern for the common good, the libraries, the museums, the courthouses, the hospitals, the orphanages, the universities, the parks, and on and on. And born as most of us are into places where these amenities already exist, we may take them for granted. But they would not be here for us had our forebears not cooperated in building these institutions. No matter where we live, our home places have been benefited by the granges, the unions, the volunteer fire brigades, the art guilds, the garden clubs, the charities, food kitchens, homeless shelters, soccer and baseball teams, the Scouts, the 4-H, the girls and boys clubs, the Lions, the Elks, the Rotarians, the countless gatherings of people who saw a need and then responded to it. Ralph Waldo Emerson, he preached self-reliance, but he knew the necessity of having neighbors. He lived in a village, he gave and received help, and he delivered his essays to fellow citizens whom he hoped to sway. And if you will visit Emerson's home and conquered, you will find leather buckets hanging near the door because Emerson belonged to the village fire brigade. And even in the seclusion of his study, even in the depths of thought, he kept his ears open for the alarm bell. We need to make of this common life of ours not merely a metaphor, not merely a story. We need to make this common life a habit and a fact of the heart, because today so many alarm bells are ringing that we may be tempted to stuff our ears with cotton. But better, we should keep our eyes and our ears open and to take courage as well as joy from our common life and work together for what we love. I think we're just showing appreciation for the beauty of the organ and the piano together. Diana and Linda so much. Well, among the cast of quirky characters in the 1990 sitcom Northern Exposure, we find this abrasive misanthropic fellow who is known simply as Adam. Adam dresses in fatigues, his long unkempt hair kept in place by a stocking cap. And he tramps barefoot through the Alaskan backcountry, popping up from time to time in the small town of Sicily for reasons mysteriously his own. Beholden to no one, Adam is in fact a culinary genius, a man who in former times had prepared unique gourmet dishes and some of the world's finest restaurants. Uncompromising in his pursuit of excellence and utterly devoted to his discipline, Adam claims to be self-taught, self-taught, the sole arbiter of his success. Having retreated to Alaska, he continues to create gastronomic masterpieces but only on his own terms and only on occasions of his own choosing. I thought of Adam the other day while I was perusing a recent issue of the New Yorker. One article, a personal profile, focused on a man named Damon Barrow. And Damon Barrow is a character right out of Northern Exposure's playbook. Barrow runs a tiny out-of-the-way restaurant a half hour south of Albany, New York and he has gained in fact an international reputation as an extreme locavore. A master chef who creates eye and palate pleasing dishes out of such humble ingredients as milkweed, cat tail stems, the bark of trees, pine needles, acorns and golden rod. And apart from the small amounts of meat and milk and fish that he procures from local suppliers, every ingredient in Barrow's recipes comes from the twelve acres on which he lives and works. Even the three dozen varieties of cheese which he prepares using nettles and carrot top hay as coagulants. Unassisted, Barrow harvests four, prepares, serves, clears and cleans up after each meal that he creates. As one experienced reviewer enthused it is the most memorable meal I have ever had and I have never been anywhere where one person does everything. Barrow's establishment caters only to small parties who have made reservations well in advance. His waiting list he claims is ten years long. Some say that he belongs among the top tier of the world's most innovative and accomplished chefs. Like northern exposures Adam, Damon Barrow professes to be a self-made professional. Generally speaking he says I was inspired by Native Americans but he maintains that he has never read anything specific about indigenous cuisine. Now as a teenager he had worked for some French restaurants in the area but he averse they only taught him what not to do. He cites no instructors, no mentors as sources of influence. Barrow insists that he acquired his abilities through close observation of the surrounding natural terrain and by trial and error experimentation. The New Yorker's Nick Palmgarden says that Barrow has concocted a canny fulfillment of a particular foodie fantasy and eccentric hermit rings strange masterpieces from the woods of his scrabble backyard. And of course this particular story fits snugly into that old hoary tale of the self-made man. The individual who has parlayed his own acumen industry and perseverance into a winning formula for success and that particular narrative is as old as the winning of the West thought to have been accomplished by those hardy pioneers who alighted from their Conestoga wagons to bust the prairie sod or to prospect for gold in the Colorado foothills. Nineteenth century romantic writers some of them with Unitarian connections contributed to the popularization of this particular American fable. It figures prominently in Henry David Thoreau's Walden and it is also one that finds expression in a series of best-selling juvenile novels by one Horatio Alger who served as a Unitarian minister. The mass of men live lives of quiet desperation Thoreau once complained but in a woodland glade on the banks of Walden pond he would demonstrate what it meant to really live to live free unencumbered self-reliant responsible to no one but himself. Here he wrote I intend to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life living so sturdily and spartan-like as to put to route all that is not life. Thoreau applied his famous dictum simplicity simplicity simplicity not only to furnishings and diet and apparel but also to relationships which he tried to keep to an absolute minimum. Toward his admirers Ralph Waldo Emerson once observed Thoreau acted superior didactic and scorned their petty ways. His hometown of Conquer Massachusetts he dismissed as on a very low level culturally were the only of pygmies and mannequins. Thoreau was deeply distrustful of all communal enterprises and for Thomas Jefferson's observation that government is best which governs least Thoreau substituted that government is best which governs not at all. Now Henry David Thoreau has earned a deserved reputation as a nature writer and a clear-eyed observer of natural phenomenon but as Catherine Schultz points out he was also self-obsessed adamant that he required nothing beyond himself in order to understand and to thrive in the world. Now for his part Horatial Alger Horatial Alger won a wide audience for his so-called rags to riches stories tales that featured disadvantaged boys who used their native abilities to overcome adversity and rise through the social ranks. As a youngster Ernest Hemingway was smitten by these stories there was one summer his sister Marceline remembers when he could not get enough of Horatial Alger a passion that was equally shared by many readers of that particular era and this proposition continues to carry considerable weight for any number of Americans the self-reliance self-made individual who doesn't require any sort of subsidy from the social system that is still a model that many people hope to emulate. It was a theme that Mitt Romney revisited in the 2012 presidential campaign when he extolled America's business elite saying you built that you didn't need any help from anybody else you built that. As you may recall this was a direct rebuttal of a statement President Obama had made some days earlier in which Obama stressed the principles of interdependence and shared achievement. Much the same position has been staked out more recently by Donald Trump who has taken almost exclusive credit for his own financial and political and even his literary accomplishments. Trump's self-portrayal as a Horatial Alger figure has buttressed his popular appeal Jane Meyer wrote recently. But how much credence if any should we give to claims such as these? Is it really a myth a fantasy that we're talking about here or is there something in these perennially popular narratives that somehow rings true? Well a closer look at some of the individuals just mentioned may provide us with a bit of a reality check. So let's return first to Horatial Alger's hackneyed stories about all those underprivileged youngsters who make their own breaks and get ahead in the world. Now a few people today read these books but Alger's name is still frequently invoked in support of this whole principle of self-reliance. The suggestion that a person can and should pull him or herself up by their own bootstraps. But was that really the author's outlook? Not so much. It is true that a fictional character like Alger's ragged dick. Ragged dick did rise from the grinding poverty of being a boot black in New York City to a position of respectability. But Alger's heroes, they typically had patrons who recognized in these waves certain noble qualities and initially at least they took those poor boys under their wing. Strive to be honest, strive to be a decent human being, Alger, a former minister said, and success will find you. Or as the book of Proverbs puts it, misfortune pursues sinners but prosperity rewards the righteous. Henry David Thoreau Henry David Thoreau's brief in favor of independence and self-sufficiency was less subtle. The superior man, he believed, needs no patrons. And so like Anne Rand, the progenitor of 20th century's Objectivist School of Philosophy, like Anne Rand, Thoreau dismissed society as a sham and as an impediment to individual expression and individual achievement. That's what he believed, but his behavior wasn't always of a peace with his ethos. Because in the first place, Walden wasn't exactly a frontier wilderness. It was park-like, a popular destination for picnickers and swimmers and hikers and ice skaters from nearby Boston. This is where Henry David Thoreau constructed his shack, 20-minute walk from the village green of Concord. He made the easy trip to town frequently, drawn by his mother's homemade cookies and the Emerson family's dinner table. Relatives and friends often visited Thoreau at Walden, bearing with them additional victuals as well as the latest community news. And so only by a very elastic measure can Walden be regarded as non-fiction, Catherine Schultz writes. Red charitably, it is a kind of semi-fictional meditation featuring a character named Henry David Thoreau. And then what of Damon Barrow, the country chef who shares some of Thoreau's eccentricities? Well, it happens that his own parents sold him his original six-acre homestead at the bargain basement price of $160 an acre. And he admits that he acquired his own early knowledge of native plants from his mother, an amateur horticulturalist. And moreover, Barrow did work for a time at an Albany-area restaurant under the supervision of a well-known chef named Rene Facetti. I introduced Damon to all those ingredients that can be found in the woods, Facetti insists, and his wife, Corinne, is perplexed. Why can't Damon acknowledge us, she asks, because there is no such thing as a self-educated chef. So despite the debunkings of this popular myth, it can certainly be argued that it can and does make a difference. The myth can make a difference in some people's lives. The comedian Groucho Marx, son of Jewish immigrants, he too grew up poor in New York City. His dreams of becoming a doctor ended when Groucho had to drop out of school at the age of 12 to help support his family. But Marx at that point was an avid reader, and he was a consumer of Horatio Alger's stories, to which in later life he attributed his motivation. These books, he said, conveyed a powerful message to me and many of my young friends that if you work hard at your trade, your big chance will eventually come. Aim high, keep plugging away, make your own luck, and the odds are you will be rewarded. But as we all know, it doesn't always work out that way. Because talent doesn't always tell, and the rewards we receive are not always commensurate with the effort and the hours that we happen to put in. And in fact, the claim that anybody can go it alone and be successful, that claim can severely limit one's overall life opportunities, one's chances of getting ahead. But this is the kind of argument that has traditionally been offered by so-called right to work advocates who say, why should anyone belong to a labor union? Why should anyone be forced to pay those dues? Individual workers are better off on their own, acting autonomously, bargaining one-on-one with their employers. Besides, they say, unions are job killers, chasing manufacturers to places where labor is cheaper and less adversarial. Unions of course are hardly above criticism. But there is in fact ample evidence that as the strength of unions in this country has declined, so has the quality of life for hundreds, thousands, millions of workers. The Economic Policy Institute has just released a major study out of Washington University with data attesting to the positive effect that unions can have on workers' fortunes. It turns out that union members not only enjoy superior wages and benefits and working conditions and job security, but the mere presence of unions in a given locale raises the bar for all employers, whether they employ union labor or not. Private sector union membership has declined from 33% to less than 7% in the past 40 years. And during that time, workers' annual income has fallen by as much as $3,200 in constant dollars, $3,200 a year. And so even the libertarian economist Dan Ikinson agrees that the erosion of union membership has had a deleterious effect on wages and benefits in the United States. Banding together in a mutually supportive organization that does deliver benefits, witness the fortunes of the mostly female unionized workforce in Las Vegas' hospitality industry. As Brittany Bronson reported in The New York Times recently, a poor girl who grows up in that city, Las Vegas, will make 7% more than she would elsewhere by the age of 26, whether or not she belongs to one of the powerful unions in Las Vegas. And income mobility is better in Las Vegas, particularly for female workers than in 71% of communities nationwide. The one thing we know, Bronson writes, not just from the data, but from the experience of thousands of culinary workers, is that unionization makes an enormous difference in women's lives. So the next time you're in Las Vegas, just ask your cocktail waitress. Union members understand that as a part of a collective, speaking with a single unified voice, they can exert far more influence than if they acted independently. Yes, globalization and labor-saving technologies, they have made unions' tasks that much more difficult. But one would be very hard pressed to argue that today's workers, from teachers and nurses to carpenters and laborers, are better off as independent contractors. But unions aside, any objective person with even an ounce of humility would be disingenuous in attributing their success solely to their own enterprise. A hundred times a day, Albert Einstein once wrote, a hundred times a day I remind myself that my inner and outer lives are based on the labors of other people living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure that I have received and am still receiving. This summer, I took the time to read Walter Isaacson's lengthy biography of Apples late founder and CEO, Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs, here is a man who possessed one of the larger egos in corporate America. A man who was notoriously prickly and demanding. A man who routinely dismissed other people's ideas with the words, it stinks. Yet even Steve Jobs was self-aware enough to recognize his own limitations. As a teenager, he worked as a lowly intern for Hewlett-Packard, and Jobs gained, in that time period, an important insight that a properly run company can spawn far more innovation than any single creative individual. And in the year 2000, having reversed Apple's flagging fortune, Jobs returned to this insight saying, I discovered that the best innovation is sometimes the company, the way you organize the company. And so when I got the chance to come back to Apple, I realized that I, Steve Jobs, would be useless without the company. And that's why I decided to stay and to rebuild it. Steve Jobs was a passionate proponent of what he called deep collaboration, whereby all sectors of the Apple organization continuously support and cross-check each other. And so in today's world, a world threatened by climate change, porous borders, a growing gap between rich and poor. In today's world, there is really no place for another generation of self-deluded loan rangers. What we require are a lot more people who recognize the urgent need for community and a greater level of collaboration. As Rebecca Solnit, echoing John Muir, recently wrote, we are nodes on an intricate system, synapses snapping on a great collective brain. We are in it together for better or for worse. And in the spirit of collaboration, you will know from your program that we are resuming our outreach offertories in the month of September. And this week's outreach offering will be used for the benefit of ICWJ, the Interfaith Coalition for Worker Justice. And there should be a table outside in the comments after the service. We invite you to take a look at their literature and see what kind of great work they're doing. Please be generous. We gather each week as a community of memory and of hope. And to this time and this place, we bring our whole and sometimes our broken selves. We carry with us the joys and sorrows of the recent past, seeking here a place where these might be received and celebrated and shared. We have two joys to announce this morning. One is, is that later this afternoon I will be performing the wedding for FUS members Allison Brooks and John Mix. Allison Brooks is Hathaway Hasler's daughter. This will be her first marriage and she is of my generation. So we extend to both the man and the woman our congratulations into their whole family. Looking forward to celebrating with them. And then also a happy birthday to my own mother Nancy, who turned 93 yesterday and we celebrated with a lunch over at Labry Ocean. Hopefully she'll be here for the second service today. And she's doing very, very well for 93 years old. And so in addition to those two joys just mentioned, we would acknowledge any unexpressed joys or concerns that happen to occur to any of you as a community. We hold these with equal concern in our hearts. Let us sit silently for just a moment or two in the spirit of empathy and of hope. And so by virtue of our brief time together today, may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. I invite you to rise one final time in body or in spirit as we sing together him number 157. And so we conclude with these words from Barbara Wells. Oh spinner weaver, seamstress of our lives, your loom is love. May we who have gathered here be embraced by that love and empowered to weave new patterns of truth and justice. Together may we create a web of life that is strong, that is beautiful, and that is everlasting. Please be seated for the post loom.