 Welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. My name is Kelly Crocker, and I'm one of the ministers here. And along with my colleague, the Reverend Kelly Asperuth Jackson, we are joined by the worship team of Drew Collins, Linda Warren, and Daniel Karnes. The vision of First Unitarian Society is growing souls, connecting with one another and embodying our UU values in our lives. Our community and our world. For those here with us in person, either here in the Atrium Auditorium or in the Landmark, it is a joy to be here with you. We ask that you leave your mask on the time that you're here and ask you not to sing along with the hymns, although we do encourage humming. Immediately following the postlude, we ask you to help keep everyone as safe as possible by immediately leaving the building. Kelly and I look forward to greeting you upstairs at the doors of the Atrium. Remember if you're the parent of a child in our religious exploration program, children will be picked up outside on the lawn next to the Landmark building. For those joining us virtually today, we are glad to have you here with us. We hope you will be able to join us for our virtual coffee hour immediately following the 11 o'clock service. The information for joining can be found on the homepage of our website, fussmedicine.org, as well as on a slide that will be seen again after the postlude. Our announcement slides will also be shown briefly after today's service, and we encourage you to take a moment to watch those to learn about upcoming programs and activities. And I invite you now to join me in a moment of silence to center ourselves and bring ourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. We are all longing to go home to some place we have never been, a place half remembered and half envisioned. We can only catch glimpses of from time to time, community. Somewhere there are people to whom we can speak with passion without having the words catch in our throats. Somewhere a circle of hands will open to receive us, eyes will light up as we enter, voices will celebrate with us whenever we come into our own power. Community means strength, strength that joins our strength to do the work that needs to be done, arms to hold us when we falter, a circle of healing, a circle of friends, someplace where we can be free. And I invite you now to join in the words of affirmation as we light our chalice. We light this chalice not because we must, but because we may. We light this chalice not because we have the truth, but because we each come bearing and seeking many truths. We light this chalice in connection across culture, distance, class and language. We light this chalice that our religion may be a beacon of light, hope and justice. We light this chalice to kindle our hearts and minds. Rise up, O flame, by thy light glow to us beauty vision. Broken your vows a thousand times, broken your vows a thousand times, though you've come, come whoever you are, wonder worshipper, lover of living, ours is no care of and of despair. Come yet again, come, come ever of living, ours is no care of and of despair. Our is no care of and of, come yet again, come, broken your vows a thousand times, come. I want to tell you this story that takes place a long time ago in the city of Baghdad. And at this time, the richest person in the whole great city was named Abu Kasim. And he was so rich that he was constantly worrying about his money. He was constantly worrying about what would happen if he spent even one dinar, just one coin out of all that money that he had. So he would go through life just devoting himself to not spending any of that money that he could avoid spending. So his hair got all raggedy and knotted because he wouldn't ever go to see a barber. And his clothes got worn out and frayed because he wouldn't ever pay to replace them. And his shoes, let me tell you, his shoes were the worst part of all of it. They were so heavy with nails that he'd put into them and patches that he'd put out of them, trying to have to avoid buying a new pair of shoes that whenever he went through town, people could hear him clomp, clomp, clomping from all the way down the street. They said, oh, here comes Abu Kasim. And everybody knew that sound and everybody knew the terrible appearance of his awful shoes. Well, so one day Abu Kasim had to go into the masjid, the place where people go to pray. And when you go into the masjid, you have to take your shoes off. So he found a place where he could leave them so he could make sure that they wouldn't be gone when he came out of the masjid. So he put them underneath the shade of a tree. He went into pray. And when he came back out, he was looking in the same spot underneath the same tree and he didn't see his shoes, but he did see a very nice, shiny new pair of shoes. They were so elegant and refined and clearly had cost a lot of money. And he thought someone has done me a great favor. They have gotten me a new pair of shoes. They took away my old pair and they replaced them. What a lovely gesture. So he took those new shoes. He put them on his feet and he walked right back to his home. And then the great chief judge, the most important legal scholar in all of Baghdad, also came out of the masjid just a few minutes behind Abu Kasim. He went to go find his nice new shiny pair of shoes and he looked under that same tree where he had left them, but all there were were that terrible worn out pair of shoes. And he knew exactly who the culprit was. He looked up to the sky and shouted, Abu Kasim. So Abu Kasim got taken to court and he was ascribed a very significant find for stealing the shoes of the head magistrate. But at the end of that process he had less money and the same old worn out pair of shoes. Well now he was very frustrated with these shoes because they had cost him a lot of his precious money. So he threw them into the river and he thought well that's that's that. And a little bit later that day there was a fisherman hauling in his net bringing in a catch from the river and wouldn't you know it there in the net were this gnarled, ugly by this point pretty dirty pair of shoes. And one of those jagged little nails had torn the net very badly. So of course he knew who the culprit was, Abu Kasim. And again Abu Kasim got taken to court and got another large find. So here these shoes have cost him yet more money. He decided fine I'm going to burn them. They'll be gone. They'll never cause me any more trouble, but they had to dry out. First you understand they just come out of the river. So he left them in the courtyard outside of his house to dry. He went to have some tea and a dog found the shoes and dragged them out into the street where a woman was walking down, minding her own business but not looking maybe as carefully as would have been in her interest. And she tripped and fell and she injured her leg. And so again he was taken to court and again assessed a very large find, probably larger than the average person would have gotten if we're being honest about this sort of thing. And finally Abu Kasim fell to his knees pleading before the judge, please I will pay any fine triple it quadruple it whatever but please just take these shoes from me. Now when we come to this place whether we are coming here physically or coming here virtually we have the opportunity sometimes we forget it but we have the opportunity to let down those things that we carry with us unnecessarily. Those resentments those senses of the things we just can't afford to let go of because whatever might happen to us what might we lose if we were a little more generous or a little bit more patient or a little bit more kind. We can leave those outside of the door metaphorically or literally and come into this space and just experience not being weighed down by our old spiritual shoes for a little while and when we leave if we're wise in your memory we don't have to take the shoes home with us when we go. I invite you now into this time of giving and receiving where we give freely and generously to this offering which sustains and strengthens our community here as well as our outreach offering recipient. This week's offering will be shared with the Safe Skies Clean Water Coalition whose mission is to stop the basing of F-35 fighter jets at Truax Field here in Madison. FUS's sustainability team is a proud member of this coalition and has led in creating the No F-35 Caravan that will be starting from FUS in the parking lot on Sunday October 17th at 12 30 p.m. So you'll see on your screen that you can donate directly from our website FUSMadison.org you will see our text to give information there as well and we thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. There is a proposition about storytelling which is sometimes questionably attributed to the novelist John Gardner that there are only really two plots in all of fiction. A person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Any encounter with a stranger always comes with a certain amount of mystery, possibility, and risk. It is impossible to predict the outcome so perfectly as to eliminate all mystery or to defend ourselves so thoroughly as to insulate against all risk. But the possibility held by any meeting with a stranger grows the less that we rely on preconceptions and prejudices to diminish the mystery of it or a defensive guarded attitude in order to mitigate its risk. The unique promise in each encounter flourishes only through our openness and this can be hardest to remember and to practice when we ourselves are the stranger who has just arrived. When we struggle to practice forgiveness and acceptance towards our own moral imperfections. Once there were two brothers, Rabbi Elimelech and Rabbi Zusha. In their younger days after they had become scholars and teachers they used to travel the countryside together so as to share the benefit of their learnings as widely as possible. They had very little in the way of possessions and after months spent on the road they were not exactly crisp in their appearance. One evening they came to the town of Ludmir and saw a fine house with a light in the window. They knocked on the door and inquired of the owner if he could offer them a place to sleep for the night. The wealthy master of the house turned up his nose at the two vagabonds on his doorstep and sent them away. So the two brothers walked on to another more modest home that also had a light in its window and there they found a place to spend the night. Many years later Rabbi Elimelech and Rabbi Zusha were traveling once again. They had each come to great renown separately serving thriving communities in different cities and offering their wisdom to pilgrims and seekers who came from far away to meet them. This tour was their attempt to make themselves available to those who could not make the journey to either of their synagogues. They traveled very differently than they had all those years ago. Now they had their own carriage and a coachman and several large pieces of luggage each. This time when they came to the town of Ludmir it was as honored guests. They preached together in the local synagogue and afterwards a certain wealthy man approached the two rabbis and invited them to spend the night as guests at his home. They gladly agreed. The man hurried home to prepare his house for the arrival of his guests but for a long while they did not come. Finally their coach arrived and the driver got down and unloaded all of their luggage. But Rabbi Elimelech and Rabbi Zusha were nowhere to be seen. The rich man asked what was going on and the coachman answered that he was only following the rabbis' instructions. He was told to bring their carriage and their other belongings to this house but that they would spend the night at a much more modest residence further down the road. Agree there would be host sought the rabbis out in that humble dwelling where they were being entertained by its owner whom they had met many years before. Rabbis what is the meaning of this? The wealthy man demanded to know. I offered you my hospitality and you accepted it but now you choose to spend your evening in far less distinguished accommodations. What have I done to deserve this humiliation? To this the rabbis responded we did come to your house. In fact we are there even now. At least the part of us which you truly invited to stay with you is there. All of our finery and possessions, our fine coach and horses. The last time we came to Lodemir we had none of these things and so you turned us away. All those fine things may stay with you for the night as for ourselves we will stay here where we have been welcomed before and belong. The writer and journalist Emily Esfahani Smith says belonging comes from being in relationships where you are valued for who you are intrinsically and where you value others as well. But some groups deliver a cheap form of belonging. You are valued for what you believe and for who you hate not for who you are. True belonging springs from love. It lives in moments among individuals and it's a choice. You can choose to cultivate belonging with others. Any welcome is false which does not embrace the truth of who the other person is. Politeness and good manners alone will often lead to treatment of another on the basis of their outward appearance or their social station or any other surface level quality. But that won't create the authentic connection which allows us to feel we belong. A trust that if you look back on your own life you can bring to mind at least one time when you were permitted or included in a way that was conditional. Coming at the price of some deep part of yourself. We stay in places like that only if we feel we cannot escape them or have nowhere else to go. Likewise we may try to return to our best selves but unless we can forgive ourselves enough to feel that we belong in a morally good condition we will not feel at home in our own bodies. Communities built on conditional acceptance manifest from and reinforce in their members. They keep us from facing wrestling with and ultimately resolving whole parts of our own identities or personalities. The traveler stands in line at a modestly priced extended stay hotel chain waiting to check in. While the clerk is helping the patron ahead of them a dog pads its way into the lobby and up to the desk where it sits nose pointed up expectantly. Barely even having to look up from the paperwork they are assisting the guest in front of them with the clerk picks up a newspaper from the pile on the counter rolled up and tied off with a rubber band unlike all the other papers in the stack. They drop this down to the waiting dog who snaps it up trots back out of the lobby and into the rest of the hotel. Now here is the background on this curious and reportedly true episode. Extended stay hotels get a lot of guests who are living in an in-between state. One such guest in this case was a woman who had just sold her home after several decades spent therein. She was in the hotel waiting to be able to move into her next home but in the interim everything was up in the air. So the front desk clerk had decided to try to help this guest maintain familiar routines in whichever way possible and one of those ways was by helping her dog to bring her paper each morning. True hospitality requires us to meet others where they are at. To practice the platinum rule one step beyond the golden rule to do unto others as they would want done onto them. It requires a certain degree of flexibility on our behalf and curiosity about the other person we are engaging with. Similarly feeling as though our best self is the self we truly belong to that it can be the self we truly are requires an openness to explore our past failures and mistakes with the same attitude of curiosity. We have to be able to look back and see and admit that we have aired and asked ourselves why did I make that choice then and how can I prepare myself to make better choices in the future. According to tradition the Quran the holiest text in Islam was delivered through the prophet Muhammad in a series of revelations. These were striking episodes in which Muhammad would enter a trance-like state and recite a new piece of poetic verse with a length and the subject matter varying quite broadly. In the Islamic understanding these were words coming directly from God and so they arrived on God's timetable not always at times that were convenient for Muhammad. The tradition includes many stories about when where and under what circumstances a given verse or passage was revealed. In one of those stories Muhammad was talking with some rich powerful members of the community about his new religion of Islam that he was trying to get started. They weren't really feeling it but he was working hard and focused on trying to win them over. While he was engaged like this another member of the community a blind man and rather poor heard Muhammad's voice and came rushing up to him. He had heard about Islam and he was very interested to learn more. He began to pepper the prophet with questions but Muhammad focused on trying to win some powerful converts and so he turned his back on the blind man. This is when the revelation struck him. Words now incorporated into the opening verse of the 80th chapter of the Quran which very loosely translated are. He frowned and turned away because a blind man interrupted him. One who thinks they have no need to them you give attention but the one who came to you seeking with God in his heart from him you are distracted which would have been a fairly sharp rebuke if someone said it to you right after you'd turned away a blind man who wanted to join your religion. But remember according to the story God made Muhammad say it out loud about himself to everyone. The tradition holds that after that revelation Muhammad made a great point of greeting that same man warmly each time that they met and asking what he could do for him. The blind man did become a Muslim and ultimately an important political figure in the early religious community. Letting go of the pride that causes us to cling to our mistakes and failings can sometimes be the hardest thing in the world. But that overabundance of pride also closes us off from others causing us to turn away from connection and belonging. When we let go of it the feeling can be quite revelatory new relationships and new possibilities in existing relationships unfold including our own relationship with ourselves. One of the stories that Dr. Rachel Naomi Rehman collects in her book Kitchen Table Wisdom comes from her interview with a man named Yitzhak. Yitzhak, a Holocaust survivor, was attending a retreat for people living with cancer. That was the only thing the people there had in common. They were otherwise strangers. Yitzhak struggled to connect in such an environment and ultimately took that struggle into prayer. Dr. Rehman quotes him saying in his dialect, I say to him, God, is it okay to love strangers? And God says to me, Yitzhak, what is the strangers? You make strangers. I don't make strangers. How different would our world be if each of us lived each day rounded securely in the understanding that God does not make strangers? That every person is worthy of being loved and that when we say every person we have to include ourselves. The quality of kindness which opens the way to understanding and then to belonging can never be excessive in an absolute sense. The only dangers in such compassion are not to have enough of it at all or to have it too unevenly in proportion, treating some well and others harshly, forgiving others too easily compared to ourselves or vice versa. Joanna Macy, the environmental activist and Buddhist scholar, writes in her book Coming Back to Life about healthful approaches to addressing the psychological and spiritual struggle posed by climate change and ecological devastation. It is no longer appropriate to think only in terms of even my nation or my country, let alone my village. If we are to overcome the problems we face, we need what I have called a sense of universal responsibility rooted in love and kindness for our human brothers and sisters. In our present state of affairs, the very survival of humankind depends on people developing concern for the whole of humanity, not just their own community or nation. The reality of our situation impels us to act and think more clearly. Narrow-mindedness and self-centered thinking may have served us well in the past, but today will only lead to disaster. I believe in the purpose of spiritual communities such as ours to put into practice such as sense of universal responsibility, rooted in love and kindness. And among the chief requirements of that practice is a deep and rich hospitality to greet and welcome the stranger in our midst in order that they might come to feel that they belong. To re-greet and re-welcome the person who is estranged from us or from whom we are estranged in order to help rebuild that lost sense of belonging here. And finally, to practice that same deep hospitality upon ourselves. The Jesuit priest, John Veltrie, offers this prayer. Teach me to listen, oh God, to those nearest me, my family, my friends, my co-workers. Help me to be aware that no matter what words I hear, the message is, accept the person I am. Listen to me. Teach me to listen, my caring God, to those far from me, the whisper of the hopeless, the plea of the forgotten, the cry of the anguished. Teach me to listen, oh God, my mother, to myself. Help me to be less afraid to trust the voice inside in the deepest part of me. Teach me to listen, Holy Spirit, for your voice in busyness and in boredom, in certainty and doubt, in noise and in silence. Teach me, Lord, to listen. Amen. The author and Unitarian Universalist, Kurt Vonnegut, makes the case even more succinctly. Near the close of his novel, The Sirens of Titan, Malachi Constant, the richest man on earth, who has spent the story swept up in vast intergalactic machinations about the fate and purpose of human life on earth, contending with robots, aliens, time travel, and a new religious movement called The Church of God, The Utterly Indifferent. At the end of all this, being manipulated and bounced around the solar system by forces far beyond his reckoning or control, Malachi comes to a place of relative peace, observing the hard-learned lesson that a purpose of human life, no matter who is controlling it, is to love whoever is around to be loved. Any encounter with a stranger always comes with a certain amount of mystery, possibility, and risk. It is impossible to predict the outcome so perfectly as to eliminate all mystery or to defend ourselves so thoroughly as to insulate against all risk. But the possibility held by any meeting with a stranger grows the less that we rely on preconceptions and prejudices to diminish the mystery of it or a defensive guarded attitude to mitigate its risk. The unique promise in each encounter flourishes only through openness, and this can be hardest to remember and to practice when we ourselves are the stranger who has just arrived when we struggle to practice forgiveness and acceptance towards our own moral imperfections. Each week we gather with hearts that are heavy with sorrow and hearts filled with joy. We share these here in community knowing that we are held in love. This week a member asks us to light a candle of gratitude for our dedicated facilities manager Tom Miskelly who kept the lights on and the rain out during the time when our buildings were closed and also for our faithful guardians of the grounds crew led by Chuck Evenson who have been weeding and watering and planting and keeping our grounds looking beautiful. We light a candle for Jeremy who has been experiencing a bout of depression for several months. We send our thoughts for healing and relief and hope for a positive turn to come. Sandy Wysock asks us to light a candle for her father who passed away peacefully this week one week after his 97th birthday. We send our love to Sandy George and their family especially Sandy's mother who lives with short-term memory issues so is reliving the grief and shock of her husband's passing over and over again. We are holding all of you in our hearts and we light a candle of celebration for the birth of baby Fortier Cordes who arrived October 1st a week late at 9 pounds 15 ounces. All are doing well and the grandparents Janice and Martin Nabcordes are overjoyed. Let us be together for a moment in silence and in prayer with these words from Mary Oliver. Be still my soul and steadfast. Earth and heaven both are still watching though time is draining from the clock and your walk that was confident and quick has become slow so be slow if you must but let the heart still play its true part. Love still as once you loved deeply and without patience. Let the holy and the world know you are grateful that the gift has been given. In silence we light one final candle for all the joys and all the sorrows that live within us all. May we know that we are held exactly as we are in gratitude in love and in hope. Blessed be and amen. Please sing together our closing hymn break not the circle those worshiping in person oh please hum. Ignore the circle that serve this love that comes to themselves stand on as drops of rain that find each other and build to become a track a rivulet a stream a river a sea so we are drawn together so are we fortunate to find each other so are we bound together on this shared passage toward an unknown ocean and eternity