 Let's join together in a moment of centering silence. And now please join in our in-gathering hymn, number 1023, the words are printed in your order of service. Good morning. Welcome to the First Unitarian Society of Madison. This is a community where curious seekers gather to explore spiritual, ethical, and social issues in an accepting and nurturing environment, and we especially need the nurturing today. Unitarian Universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together we seek to be a force for transformation in the world. My name is Beth Binhammer and on behalf of the congregation I would like to extend a special welcome to any visitors who are among us this morning. We are a welcoming congregation so whoever you are and wherever you happen to be on your life journey we celebrate your presence among us. Newcomers are encouraged to stay for our fellowship hour after the service to visit the library which is directly across from the center doors of this auditorium. From your drinks and your questions, members of our staff and lay ministry will be on hand to welcome you. You may also look for persons holding a teal coffee mug. These are FUS members knowledgeable about our faith tradition who would love to visit with you. Experienced guides are generally available, let me see if we have one today. And we don't for this morning. But usually we have a tour guide available after the service and if you would like to volunteer to become a tour guide that would be awesome to take people through our national landmark meeting house but this morning there is no tour guide. We welcome children to stay for the duration of the service but if a child needs to talk or move around the child haven to my right or the commons are wonderful places to retire the service can still be seen and heard from those places. And speaking of noise please turn sound off of these lovely little electronic devices that might cause a disturbance during this hour. I'd like to acknowledge the people who help our services run smoothly. This morning our sound operator is David Briles, our lay minister Tom Boykoff, Usher's Dorit Bergen, Nancy Daley, Brian Chanas, Hospitality or Coffee, Rick DeVita and Sandra Plisch and the Pulpit Palms and Orchid Care was taken care of by John Twoes. We thank those people for their service to our community. Please note the announcements on the red floors insert in your order of service which describe upcoming events at the society and provide more information about today's activities. There are two special announcements that I'd like to call your attention to. The first, every year the Department of Corrections revokes or sends back to prison almost 4,000 former prisoners who were released upon condition of following rules of supervision. They are being revoked not for committing a new crime but because they broke one or more of their rules of supervision things like using a cell phone or a computer without proper authorization, missing an appointment or failing an alcohol or drug test. Does breaking some of these rules really mean that the person is now a threat to the safety of the public? Do we really need to lock these people up for years at a cost of $150 million per year? The impact of these decisions in human cost is devastating. Individual lives are destroyed, families are often torn apart and public safety is rarely improved. Our FUS Moses ministry team invites you to a presentation about the issue of the abuse of revocation in the Wisconsin prison system today after this service from 1015 until 11 o'clock in the landmark auditorium. Coffee and refreshments will be served. We hope you will join us to learn more about this problem and how we can push for reform. Turkey Drive Sunday November 20th FUS will hold our annual Turkey Drive. This marks the 25th anniversary of this Thanksgiving food drive. We will collect food from 8 30 a.m. until 11 15 a.m. Please bring frozen turkeys, frozen ham and non-perishable food items or your check made out to Saint Vincent de Paul food pantry. Look for the U-Haul truck and volunteers with Turkey Drive signs in the FUS parking lot. Help stock the shelves so that more families in our community can gather for a holiday meal just as we gather for hours. Again, welcome. We hope that today's service will stimulate your mind, touch your heart, and stir your spirit. Thank you, Teen Choir, for waking us up with a rouser this morning. Good morning. My name is Eric Severson. I am your intern minister for this academic year. Our opening words are adapted by those of Reese Williams. Coming together from our separate lives and interests, may we be joined in a common purpose of hope and renewal. May light reveal itself to us amidst the darkness we have encountered. May wisdom and judgment grow in our lives and fresh life come out of old limitations, reviving us all. Spirit of life come to us to break down barriers, to widen horizons, to make us less judgmental, to see the larger picture and the kinder conclusion. To love and let live. To embrace and forgive. To nurture and to care. May we each find our better selves that we may love more and hate less. Embrace more and reject less. So that a bond of understanding might be forged that can sustain us through trial and tribulation, through disappointment and disillusionment. When better to begin than with this bright new day, I invite you to rise in body or in spirit for our chalice lighting printed in your order of service. For every disappointment from which we have new growth. For every disillusionment after which we have a re-lighting of hope. For every disaster after which we have a resurrection into new birth, we light this chalice. And I invite you to say hello to those around you. And I would invite any children who are ready and willing to come to the front for the message for all ages. Well, that's willing. You always sit close. You don't want to be, you don't want to be too far away from your mom, do you? That's not it. So this is a story that I wanted to tell because it's going to be Thanksgiving pretty soon. And we're all going to be having these wonderful dinners on Thanksgiving, I would think. And hopefully all of us are going to have plenty to eat. And this is a story about a little boy and his grandmother who is called Nana and something that they did to help some people who don't have very much to have a good meal. So the little boy's name is CJ. And CJ pushed out of the church doors and he skipped down the steps and the outside air smelled like freedom. And it also smelled like rain, which freckled CJ's shirt and dripped down his nose. He ducked under his Nana's umbrella and said, how come we got to wait for the bus in all this wet? Well, trees get thirsty too, his Nana told him. Don't you see that big one over there drinking through a straw? CJ looked for a long time and he didn't see a straw. From the bus stop, he watched water pool on the flower petals. He watched water patter against the windshield of a nearby car. His friend Colby climbed into the car and gave CJ away and he drove off with his dad. Nana, how come we don't have a car? The bus creaked to a stop in front of them. It sighed and it sagged and the door swung open. What's that I see? Mr. Dennis, the bus driver, asked and he pulled a coin from behind CJ's ear and put it in his palm. Nana laughed, her deep, deep laugh and she pushed CJ along into the bus. They sat right up front and the man across the way, he was tuning a guitar. An old woman with curlers had butterflies in a jar. Nana gave everyone a big, big smile and said, good afternoon. And she had CJ do the same. The bus lurched forward and it stopped. And it lurched forward and it stopped. Nana hummed as she knit. How come we always got to go here after church? CJ said. Miguel and Colby, they don't ever have to go anywhere after church. I feel sorry for those boys, Nana told him, because they are never going to have a chance to meet Bobo or the sunglassman. And I hear Trixie, she's got herself a new hat. CJ stared out the window of the bus, feeling sorry for himself. He watched the car zip by on either side, watched a group of boys hop the curbs on their bicycles. A man climbed aboard the bus and he had a spotted dog. CJ gave him his seat. How come that man can't see? Boy, what do you know about seeing, Nana said. Some people watch the world with their ears. That's a fact. And their noses too, the man said, sniffing the air. That's a mighty fine perfume you're wearing today, ma'am. Nana squeezed the man's hand and laughed her deep laugh. The older boys moved on to the back of the bus and CJ watched them as they stood in the back. Sure wish I had one of those, he said. What for? said Nana. You got the real live thing sitting right beside you. Why don't you ask that man if he'll play us a song? CJ didn't even have to ask. The guitar player was already plucking the strings and beginning to sing. I feel the magic of music. The blind man whispered, and when I do, I like to close my eyes. Nana said the same thing, and she closed her eyes, and so did CJ, and so did the spotted dog. And in the darkness, the rhythm lifted CJ out of that bus, out of the busy city, and he saw sunset colors and swirling and crashing waves. He saw a family of hawks slicing through the air. He saw the old woman's butterflies dancing free in the light of the moon, and his chest grew full, and he was lost in the sound of that music, and it gave him a feeling of magic. He was using his imagination, wasn't he? The song ended, and CJ opened his eyes. Everyone on the bus clapped, even the boys in the back. Nana glanced at the coin in CJ's palm, and he dropped it into the guitar player's hat. Last stop on Market Street, Mr. Dennis called. CJ looked around as he stepped off the bus, crumbled sidewalks, broken down doors, graffiti tagged windows, boarded up stores. He reached for Nana's hand. How come it's always so dirty here? He asked. Nana smiled and pointed up to the sky and said, sometimes when you're surrounded by dirt, CJ, you're a better witness to what's beautiful. CJ saw that perfect rainbow arcing over the soup kitchen, and he wondered why his Nana always found beautiful, where he never even thought to look. He looked all around them again, at the bus rounding the corner and going out of sight, at the broken street lamp still lit up bright, the stray cat shadows moving along the wall, and then he spotted those familiar friendly faces in the window, and he said, I'm glad we came. He thought his Nana might laugh, her deep laugh, but she didn't. She just patted CJ on the head and said, me too, I'm glad we came too. Now come on. So what are they doing? Where did they end up? They ended up in what the story calls a soup kitchen, but it would be a place where people who don't have enough money to eat in a restaurant go and they're provided with free food so that they have something healthy to eat, and CJ and his grandmother Nana are helping to serve, and every Sunday after church they go and help to serve these men, probably some of whom don't really even have a home of their own. So as we think about Thanksgiving coming up, remember people like these, that CJ and Nana really want to help to have a good meal as well. And we're going to sit right here as our choir sings us another song. Thank you, choir. And now Linda will be playing a little traveling music as our children depart for their classes. Have a good time. Our bit of published wisdom this morning comes from a deadly sin reconsidered, Envy by Joseph Goldstein. Of the seven deadly sins, only Envy is no fun at all. Surely, it is the one that people are least likely to want to own up to, for to do so is to admit that one is probably ungenerous, mean, small-hearted. It may also be the most endemic. So widespread is it, a word for Envy I have read exists in all known languages, that one is ready to believe it is the sin for which the best argument can be made that it is part of human nature. Most of us could still sleep decently if accused of any of the other six deadly sins, but to be accused of Envy would be seriously distressing. So clearly does such an accusation go directly to character. The other deadly sins, though all have the disapproval of religion, do not so thoroughly, so deeply, demean, diminish, and disqualify a person. Not the least of its stigmata is the pettiness implicit in Envy. The Envious tend to be injustice collectors. Envy, among other ingredients, has a love of justice in it, William Haslett wrote. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good fortune. Envy asks one leading question, what about me? Why does he or she have beauty, talent, wealth, power, the world's love and other gifts, or at any rate a larger share of them than I? Why not me? Dorothy Sayer writes, Envy is a great leveler. If it cannot level things up, it will level things down. At its best, Envy is a climber and a snob. At its worst, it is a destroyer. Rather than have anyone happier than itself, it will see us all miserable together. Resentment is often behind Envy, but the similarities and distinctions between the two states of mind need to be made clear. Envy usually has a specific object, and should it be obtained, then Envy is put to rest. The same is true of revenge. Once it is acquired, the books are closed. But resentment is of greater endurance, has a way of insinuating itself into personality, becoming a permanent part of one's character. It is a state of mind, one that leaves those who possess it with a general feeling of grudgeness toward life. Those who suffer from it, feeling their impotence, do not believe that much, if anything, can be done about the source of their resentful feelings. I would hazard that at one time or another in our lives, nearly all of us have felt that peculiar combination of Envy and impotence. A debilitating emotion that confers the dark and heavy feelings of hopelessness made permanent. Please rise in body or in spirit for our next hymn, number 299. Please be seated. In a recent essay that appeared in the New York Review of Books, Retired University of North Carolina History Professor and UW Madison grad, Christopher Browning, he described the prevailing mindset in Protestant and Catholic Germany, a mindset that set the stage for the Holocaust. Jews in Germany and Austria in the 1930s were not universally successful, but enough had acquired sufficient wealth and status to arouse feelings of enmity and envy. And as a result, a broad swath of lower and middle-class German gentiles grew increasingly resentful toward these historically marginalized and religiously suspect people in their midst, and many reached the conclusion that Jewish wealth had been acquired at their own expense. But as Joseph Goldstein observed in the preceding reading, Envy is not a sentiment that people want to express openly because it reveals this shameful flaw in one's character. No other deadly sin, he said, so deeply demeans, diminishes, and disqualifies a person. So what to do with this sense of grievance? To conceal their invidious feelings, Germans aided and abetted by Nazi propaganda, they promulgated this racial explanation for these perceived inequities. Jewish economic success, it was said, reflected an odious biological trait. Jews were natural-born parasites prone to engorge themselves at the nation's expense. And so on the basis of race theory, Jewish economic acumen was turned inside out when applied to Jews what formerly might have been admired was now despised. You see, the resentment didn't disappear. It just went underground, reemerging as a righteous mission to rid European society of this fatal pestilence. Biopolitical social science disguised hatred as insight, browning rights, and provided justification for acts of legal discrimination against others permitting millions of Germans to delegate their own resentment and aggression born of feelings of inferiority and shame, delegate all those feelings to the state, and the government thus acquired the latitude it needed to press forward with its murderous campaign. I begin today's reflections with this appraisal of pre-World War II German sensibilities to indicate how powerfully envy and resentment often camouflaged to preserve our self-esteem can alter our estimation of one another and tear apart our social and political fabric. Now in the days that have elapsed since Tuesday's elections, we've been exposed to a whole lot of commentary on the outcome. How could the pollsters have misjudged the country's mood so badly? What was in the minds of 50 million voters who cast their ballots for a candidate described by every major newspaper and magazine in the country as unworthy of the nation's highest office? Early surveys indicated that President-elect Trump was most popular among white males lacking a college education, but a majority of college-educated whites voted for him as well. Donald Trump also prevailed among white women who for a variety of reasons overlooked the clear evidence of his misogyny. These were not all Tea Party types. They were not all alt-right reactionaries. Many self-identified as political independence. A significant percentage were Gen Xers, millennials, a cohort reported to be more progressive and accepting than their elders. Overall, Mr. Trump won almost 60 percent of the white vote. Did these election results reveal a previously undetected current of racism and ethnocentrism among white Americans, a casual indifference to male misbehavior? For some segment of the voting public, that is almost certainly the case. But others hankered for a truly anti-establishment figure. They did not want another Bush in the White House, and they didn't want another Clinton either. And whether the man that they elected fits the bill, that remains to be seen. But this was the promise that Mr. Trump made throughout this long and painful campaign. Any number of people were simply ready for a bonafide agent of change, to which we are tempted to ask, be careful what you wish for. In any case, it is difficult, even at this point, to come up with a simple, consistent account for Tuesday's revolution. But there is this one variable that has often been mentioned, and that is resentment. It's hardly a new phenomenon, because resentment has been nibbling away at the edges of our political culture for decades. But with this election cycle, its scope has widened, its expressions have become much more overt, its objects are several. Yes, racial minorities, immigrants, refugees, high-achieving women, environmentalists, public employees, knowledge workers in general. But if these are the targets, what is it about the people that belong to these categories that stirs up so much negative feeling in others? Well, even as white Americans have seemingly become much more accepting of African Americans in our schools and our workplaces and our neighborhoods, there is still this strong undertow of purely racial resentment. A significant percentage of whites still deny the link between skin color and privilege. And studies show that such people who reject that linkage are particularly prone to resentment. In fact, a lot of Americans fiercely maintain that those with a white skin have been put at a disadvantage. Affirmative actions, social welfare programs, they argue, these have given African Americans unearned advantages and opportunities that are being denied to white people. For poor and working-class whites, Wa Su recently wrote, their whiteness is in fact the very reason that they suspect that they are now under siege. And as Tim Wise observes, racial resentment has been fed by media portrayals of black Americans as the primary consumers of safety net programs. It was only after media imagery of the poor switched from mostly white to mostly brown and black beginning in the early 1970s. Wise writes that anger about social spending among whites began to explode. Recent immigrants and refugees have also become convenient targets for resentment and not just among white Americans. Many members of the working class are convinced that these newcomers receive preferential treatment that while honest citizens in rural and small town America struggle on their own to stay afloat, these people have been given a life raft. Richard Ojeda is a West Virginia. He's a Mexican American heritage, an army veteran, and he probably speaks for many when he says that we bring refugees into this country. And when they arrive, they get medical, they get dental, they get set up with funds, and what do we get? So when someone says they're going to take benefits away from people who come here illegally and give them to people who work, that sounds pretty darn good to me. Now one might be skeptical of Mr. Ojeda's claim that refugees and undocumented immigrants receive all these freebies that he describes. The vast majority secure employment fairly quickly and they begin to pay taxes. But what we are talking about here are perceptions and not provable facts. And the perception is that the playing field has been tilted at the expense of white and working class Americans. And that causes resentment, not only toward the foreign born that are supposedly feeding at the government trough, but toward a government that supports and enables this perceived injustice. Now economic unfairness is a common theme in all of these complaints, but George Saunders proposes that they reflect a more comprehensive fear that he calls usurpation anxiety syndrome. Usurpation anxiety syndrome. That's a mouthful. People's resentment reflects their belief that the country has been steadily moving away from us, that the country is being taken away from us. With increasing racial and cultural diversity, mainstream and mostly white Americans begin to feel that the mantle is passing to strangers that they neither understand nor trust. And when important public figures confirm and reinforce those anxieties, well it leads to the kind of election results that we saw last Tuesday. The seeds of resentment are sown over long periods of time, UW Madison's Kathy Kramer's writing. We see the weeds grow as people sow them in each other's minds. And we also see, she says, how certain contexts create a bounty harvest as politicians fertilize certain resentments for their particular political purposes. Kathy Kramer spent seven years researching her book, The Politics of Resentment, and during those years she sat in conversation with scores of Wisconsinites in small town and rural settings. She approached her subjects with an open receptive attitude, eager to hear what they had to tell her. And many of them, when she first entered these conversations, were very skeptical about her intentions, but they were also very surprised and somewhat pleased that someone from Madtown and from the University of Wisconsin would seek out their opinions. And once they became convinced of Kramer's sincerity, they spoke candidly about their resentments and the reasons for them. Kramer herself had to overcome these deep-seated suspicions because she was from Madison, she was a state employee, and she was an academic. And so she had to work hard to gain her subjects trust because as she discovered in these conversations, in the politics of resentment, issues can be secondary to identities. Issues are secondary to identities. Now expressions of resentment surfaced again and again, but strangely very little of it had a racial flavor. Oh yes, there were some complaints about Native Americans in the region, but residents mainly focused on lifestyle issues, especially deservedness and its relationship to hard, honest work. Physical labor, working with one's hands, economic independence. These were highly prized values for these rural and small town folk. Public assistance programs were almost universally frowned upon. The proper role of government these folks set is to create jobs, not to provide charity. Professionals and knowledge workers also came in for criticism. They were thought to have cushier jobs for which they were overcompensated. One of Kramer's blue collar respondents probably spoke for many when he said, being a school teacher, teacher, I know that can be hard, but hey, they got such great benefits. And if you've been there 15, 20 years, you're making 50 grand a year. There's nobody in this town that makes 50 grand. The guys at the local sawmill, they only make 20 grand. The people in the communities that Kramer visited, unless they were public employees seldom had the luxury of pensions, paid time off or health insurance. Many said that they could not afford health insurance premiums, even under the Affordable Care Act. Others said that if they could, well, the co-bays and the deductibles were so high that they were forced to choose between health care and heating oil. Public employees were resented not just because they were better off, but because rural people's tax dollars paid for their privileged lifestyles. So in the end, three overarching themes emerged from Kramer's conversations. One, a belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers. Two, a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources. And three, a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles that are misunderstood and disrespected by city folk. Not everything that she heard rang true for Kathy Kramer. Some of what people told her was based on misconceptions or partial truths. But again, it's perceptions that matter here, perceptions that are hardly unique to the state of Wisconsin. In interviews with white Louisianans, early Haas child heard similar expressions of resentment. And what we are dealing here with are what scholars call the deep stories, people's deep stories. And such stories are always partially supported by observable inequities. But they are also stories that are fiercely resistant to disconfirmation. You can throw facts at them, but it's not going to make any difference. A deep story, John Judas explains, is based on emotion. And in these instances, the painful sensation that one is being left behind, it's a feels as if story, he says, told in the language of symbols rather than facts or objective analysis. And if nothing else, Tuesday's election exposed the powerful hold that this deep story has on many of our fellow citizens. That's the unpleasant reality that we face. And what it portends for our nation's future isn't pleasant to contemplate. In their book, authoritarianism and polarization in American politics, Mark Hetherington and Jonathan Wheeler found this surge of resentment among Americans that has been taking place since the turn of the 21st century. And they point to the growing power of this deep story that people are telling themselves. But then they go further than this saying that many of those who have embraced this story and feel resentful also share a common cognitive style that they call authoritarian. And what this means is that some people events a greater need for order than others. Some people have more trouble with nuance and ambiguity than others. Some people are drawn to black and white explanations and are more hostile to outgroups that are believed to threaten the interests of their own cohort than others. That's the authoritarian cognitive style. And those whose thought processes operate this way have a propensity to submit to authorities, but only those authorities who promise a black and white understanding of the world. So what to make of all this? What we're dealing with here is not your average problem. It's what Harvard's Ronald Haifetz calls an adaptive challenge. The storyline has to change, which will prove difficult because the story and the resentment that it's fostered is so deeply rooted now in the American psyche. And circumstances make the challenge even more formidable because the forces of globalization and technological change together with the impotence of organized labor, this means that the fortunes of aggrieved white citizens are not likely to improve. Nor is it likely that opportunistic politicians will stop playing us off against each other because that strategy has proven so effective in the past. So it's really up to us. We city folk, as it were. This adaptive challenge is a challenge we all must face. Do some of our fellow citizens hold deeply repugnant views? Are some of them racist, misogynist, xenophobics? Yes, indeed. But as Catherine Kramer discovered in Outstate Wisconsin, many are hurting and many feel abandoned and feeling powerless. They look outside of their communities for the sources of their problems and they come up with a short list of scapegoats, which is an assessment that we city folk have done very little to disconfirm. Unfortunately, no governor and no president has the power or the know-how to bring prosperity back to rural and small-town America. So perhaps, as Joseph Goldstein observes, resentment is fated to become a permanent fixture in Americans' consciousness. But maybe that's not inevitable. As our country turns this hard corner, yes, we all need to take our civic responsibilities more seriously than ever. But we also need to find ways to create a crack in those deep stories by following Kathy Kramer's lead, trying to connect with curiosity, openness, and a degree of sympathy for our resentful fellow citizens. Because, as the late Leonard Cohen once wrote, it's through the crack that the light gets in. Blessed be and amen. I invite you to participate now in the giving and the receiving of our offering. This is the second week in which we are sharing our offering with dry hooch that provides a safe and loving environment for our veterans. We gather each week as a community of memory and of hope and to this time and place we bring our whole and on occasion our broken cells. We carry with us the joys and the sorrows of the recent past, seeking here a place where they might be received and celebrated and shared. And Smiley has entered in our cares of the congregation book, this message, a silver lining to the elections, at least for our family. To forestall potential visa complications, my son Will and his Indian fiance, Madhvi, they plan to marry in New Hampshire, where she's a professor at the University of New Hampshire, a bit prematurely, before their elegant January deli wedding, doubly blessed, legal and safe. In addition to that joy I just mentioned, we would acknowledge any other unarticulated joys or sorrows and I'm sure there are a few that remain among us as a community and 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 time spent together this morning, may our burdens be lightened and our joys expanded. And now I invite you to join your voices with mine in our joyful hymn number 1020 in the Teal hymnals. Sometimes you wake up in the morning and it's raining and you say, oh no. And sometimes you wake up and you say, oh yeah. And sometimes you wake up and you read newspapers and newspapers and newspapers and then after all of that, even after all of that world abounding in fears, always you say, come on. Yeah, come on. We will go on in love and in tears. Please be seated for the postlude.