 My name is Kelly Crocker and I'm one of the ministers here and today I am joined by my colleague, the Reverend Kelly S. Ruth Jackson, the FUS Children and Teen Choirs, and our him leaders today are our two combined adult choirs. I'm also joined by the worship team of Drew Collins, Linda Warren, Heather Thorpe, Daniel Carnes, and Stephen Gregorius. The vision of First Unitarian Society is growing souls, connecting with one another and embodying our Unitarian Universalist values in our lives, our community, and our world. For those here with us in person, it is a joy to be with you. We ask that you keep your mask on the entire time you're here with us in the building and not to sing along with the hymns, but we do encourage you to hum. Immediately following the postlude, we ask you to come and meet us outside and we're happy to say that once again, coffee will be available after today's service, so we hope to see you out there. If you are a parent of a child in our religious education program, you will remember to pick them up on the lawn in front of the landmark. And for those of you joining us virtually today, we're so glad that you are with us and 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 home page of our website, fussMadison.org, as well as on the 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 learn more about our upcoming programs and activities. And I invite you now to join me in a moment of silence as we center ourselves and bring ourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. In this quiet hour, may our spirits be renewed. In this gathering of friends, may we be ready to extend ourselves to those in need and with trust to receive the hand that is offered. In this community of ideals, may we remember the principles that guide us and reflect upon those things that give meaning to our lives, renewing our dedication to serve the highest that we know. In this time of worship, may our minds be open to new truth and our hearts be receptive to love as we give thanks for this life we are blessed to share. And now I invite you to join with me in the words of aspiration for the kindling of our chalice flame. Blessed is the fire that burns deep in the soul. It is the flame of the human spirit touched into being by the mystery of life. It is the fire of reason, the fire of compassion, the fire of community, the fire of justice, the fire of faith. It is the fire of love burning deep in the human heart, the divine glow in every life. One moment and heart. That I'm most familiar with is a Russian folk tale, although there are versions of this story that are told in many different places and many different cultures. But in this story, there is a farming family, a father and a mother and a few children. And one day the father was out in the field tilling the soil. And he came across a very surprising and pleasant sort of surprise to get because he was digging in the soil and he found a golden mortar. Mortar is like a sort of a stone or in this case gold bowl that you might use to crush various herbs and seasoning and that sort of stuff. If you had something to crush in the mortar with, that is. Now so he had this golden bowl and he thought this is such an important and surprising thing to have found. Now I'm going to go take this to the local magistrate and that'll be a way of sort of showing my good faith and my good intentions and I'll win some points with the person who's in charge of our whole town and area. If I go give this thing that I found to the magistrate. And his daughter who it must be said was a very clever person said, Father I wish that you wouldn't do that because if you go and you give the golden mortar to the magistrate he's going to ask you where the pestle is. The pestle is that thing that you use to crush the herbs in the mortar. So it's sort of like well you have the one half whereas the other half of it. But the father didn't listen to his daughter and he went to the magistrate and he showed him the golden mortar and thought that he was going to win some points and some good favor. And the magistrate asked him, well where's the pestle? And because the farmer didn't have an answer to that he put the farmer in jail. Now eventually the family heard about this and the son went down to the magistrate and said you have my father in jail please release him. We need him at home obviously and he hasn't actually done anything wrong. The magistrate said alright I will let your father go if you can answer me a riddle. He said what is the fastest thing? What is the sweetest thing? And what is the richest thing? And the son scratched his head and he said well can you give me some time to think about it? And he went home to the family and explained the problem to them and he puzzled about it and the mother puzzled about it. But the daughter who again remember was a very clever person said I have the answer and she explained it to the son, to the brother and had him say it back to her a few times to make sure that he had it down and then she sent him back to the magistrate. And the magistrate said alright so what's your answer? He said well the fastest thing the fastest thing of course is thought because thought moves faster than anyone can run or any horse can ride from here to there and back and forth just like that. And the sweetest thing well the sweetest thing is sleep because nothing feels better than sleep when you need it. And the richest thing is the earth because everything that we have comes from it all the produce of our fields come from the earth so that's the answer. And the magistrate agreed alright you're correct and sent him back home. But the magistrate spent some time thinking about this and thought you know that young man I don't really believe that he came with those answers on his own because he seemed to not have any clue about what the answers were when I asked him the question to begin with. So eventually he asked around town and found out that really the clever person in this household was the daughter and he sent word to her and said I'm going to put you to the test. Here is a basket of eggs. I want all of these eggs to be hatched into chickens and cooked into a fine feast by tomorrow. So she received the basket of eggs she thought about it for a little while and she went to the storehouse and she got just a handful of wheat just wheat grains and she sent that back to the magistrate with a message saying I will do what you ask of me as soon as you can plant all of this wheat and grow it up into and process it into flour and make it into bread for me by tomorrow. I'll have your chicken dinner ready for you by then. So the magistrate knew that he'd been outsmarted. He asked one more time he sent word to her he said you must come attend to me because I am the magistrate I'm in charge of this town you have to come and see me but I will require of you that you cannot walk here and you cannot ride a horse in order to get here and you cannot show up naked but you also can't be wearing any clothes and so that was the message that the daughter received and she thought about it for a little while and she got the family goat which is not a horse and also isn't walking she got the family goat and she got a fishing net from her father and she wrapped herself up in the fishing net and she rode to the magistrate and she looked rather silly but she did complete his requirement so at the end of all this out of all of these tests out of all of these different things that had been asked of her she had answered everyone successfully and done such a brilliant job that no one could question that she was the most clever person in that town now there's a traditional ending to this story and the traditional ending to this story is that as a reward for how clever she was the magistrate married her but I think that we could probably imagine for ourselves a better reward for this woman than to be married to someone who, well, among other things was very mean to her father and seemed to be troubling her a lot with unnecessary questions and you know what? I bet that she could think of a better reward than that too 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 and this week that recipient is the Urban League of Greater Madison whose mission is to ensure that African-Americans and other community members are educated, employed and empowered to live well, advance professionally and contribute to the common good in the 21st century the Urban League's services include after-school and summer programming for low-income youth and potential first-generation college students as well as free job training, placement and coaching for adult-seeking employment and an award-winning program for supporting low-income families and becoming homeowners so you will see on your screen that you can donate directly from our website fussmedicine.org and you'll see our text to give information there as well for those of you here in person there are baskets located at all the doors we thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together This little... A plucky little program run by dedicated teachers on a shoestring budget that was committed to teaching important ideas and concepts in a hands-on way and each year the faculty would somehow scrape together the funds needed to take a class of public school kids who as a group were no more privileged or academically distinguished than any other group of school children in the city where I grew up out into the country for a weekend we would go up to a camp in the forested hills of upstate New York and we spent our time there experiencing the natural world and studying it recording everything that we could about it during the day we would measure the distance of forest paths and survey the hillside surrounding the cabin where we were staying we would collect newts, little salamanders from the pond nearby and record their length and weight and number of spots before returning them to the wild we were practicing collecting data and processing it finding out what was the median, what was the mean, what was the mode and at night one of our instructors would get out his telescope we would look at the stars far enough away from the city lights that we could actually see a good number of them I have never been a great stargazer I don't make it a point to stay up nights and marvel at the vault of the heavens but I am drawn to the truth that the stars represent that we are sitting on a planet spinning around a great nuclear furnace adrift in a vast sea of almost emptiness that this void is somehow also filled with an impossible, uncountable number of other such furnaces so far away that some which burned out hundreds of years are still gracing us with the light that they cast before dying that the great swirling cloud of gas and dust that flew out from the force of the universe's beginning and congealed into our sun also provided the stuff of the planet on which we live and the tiny fragments of matter that make up every part of every one of us has always spoken to me since those nights looking out at space now I have a good friend who hates that sort of thing contemplating the vastness of the universe revealed to us in the night sky thinking about it makes him feel insignificant and unimportant a speck on a speck circling another speck in an infinite sea of specks he is not alone in that feeling the renowned biologist Ursula Goodenough talks about the struggle she had with stargazing after learning about the history and nature of the universe in her first physics courses camping in the Colorado wilderness she looked out at the stars and was so overwhelmed with terror that she had to turn over and bury her face in the pillow the scope was just too big to handle and the inevitable truth that one day a real but incredibly long time from today our own sun will go out as all stars do that idea filled her with despair Ursula's solution to this feeling was to embrace the mysterious character of the universe seeing existence as a question that could not be answered left her feeling free to live in and enjoy it and learn what she could about its laws and composition but her experience is just one expression of a common dichotomy in the human reaction to the deep and sometimes incredibly weird insights of modern science as we come to understand life, the universe and everything the human response, the feeling that follows from that knowledge moves back and forth between a sense of wonder and a sense of meaninglessness as Unitarian Universalists our faith commits itself to scientific inquiry and is long held that reasons should be employed in all elements of human life including religion our tradition articulates seven principles and six sources and the fifth source is humanist teachings which counsel us to heed the guidance of reason and the results of science and warn against idolatries of the mind and spirit considering anything in the light of reason requires us to admit the limits of what we know and the places where we are uncertain in a world where many people associate religion with absolute truth our willingness to embrace mystery and tolerate doubt can seem like a weakness but our loyalty to reason and our willingness to be changed by it is actually one of our greatest strengths because sometimes study and exploration and experiment lead to conclusions we might never have expected the turn what we had previously thought about the world on its head now and in ages past our religious tradition has attracted people committed to the study of the natural world one of these ancestors was a woman named Mariah Mitchell who practiced as both a Quaker and a Unitarian and was an early female pioneer in the modern field of astronomy she made a name for herself by discovering a comet and went on to become something of a world traveler talking her way into the observatory in the Vatican despite authorities there who did not want to allow a woman onto the premises as a traveling intellectual and instructor at Vassar College then a women-only institution Mariah championed the cause of women's rights her study made the basic equality of women to men apparent to her as both possessed similar faculties and capabilities this gave her unshakable confidence in her own rights and the rights of women our faith has not always held has not always been so committed to feminism in the way that it is today it's a position arrived at over time under the influence of insights like Mariah's we can trace our movement's commitment to the rights of women and of people of color, of lesbian, gay, transgender and bisexual people and indeed to every cause any of us has ever taken up as a matter of social justice to the influence of people like her as human beings in particular as Unitarian Universalists we have a responsibility to be willing to change our assumptions when they are proven to be wrong whether wrong in the empirical sense or more importantly in the moral sense our reverence for reason has not only caused people with questioning minds to join with us it has strengthened us by creating the possibility and indeed the requirement that our religious practices and values must change and grow according to reason's demands I spent a lot of my time moving in circles with folks who are not in the religious mainstream of American life, shall we say and when a Muslim or a Jew or a Hindu or a Buddhist or an atheist finds out that I have this fancy academic degree called a master of divinity the single most common question that I get is can you explain the trinity to me? the trinity of course is the doctrinal position held by almost all forms of organized Christianity that there is one God who has three parts the father, the son, son being Jesus and the Holy Spirit so then I have to explain to them that the Unitarian in Unitarian Universalist originally means someone who doesn't believe in the trinity so I'm probably not the best person to explain and justify a theological position that my own tradition has historically opposed though when I explain this to classes of new perspective you use I also hasten to point out that because our faith has expanded its own boundaries over time it is not impermissible to be a Trinitarian Unitarian Universalist and there are some few of them out there they exist this is largely due to the influence that reason applied to our most cherished values has had on who we are we have become more tolerant and inclusive under that influence even of some positions which were once our very antithesis now when in our tradition we talk about the arguments against the trinity it's usually brief and straightforward it just doesn't stand up to intellectual reason one plus one plus one equals three not one I bring this up because I think it's a very clear example of the difference between intellectual reasoning and moral reasoning the intellectual argument against the trinity is persuasive enough to me it's not a doctrine that I believe in but it also doesn't really matter to me all religions entail belief in things that are either contradictory or impossible to verify as fact and when I say all religions understand that I do very much include our own the inherent worth and dignity of every person is something I believe in and neither a product of nor subject to change by factual evidence alone but the process of reasoning of questioning assumptions and changing positions based on logical argument and new information applies to moral questions as well as to intellectual ones and there are moral arguments against the trinity these are the ones that actually matter to me personally the most famous is what is called the scandal of the incarnation basically if the teacher Jesus was God made flesh and his brief life two thousand years ago was the only time that this has ever taken place then that unavoidably implies that God has some special preference for everything about that one life a preference for a certain point in time a certain place on earth a certain language to teach in and most troubling of all a certain gender to experience the idea of a God who would prefer being a man to being a woman is morally troubling and morally offensive to me hence the scandal of the incarnation the intellectual versus moral reasoning is even clearer on the other side of our name universalist historically has meant someone who believes either that there is no hell or there is a hell but nobody goes there or there is a hell and some people go there but nobody stays there forever and a fairly common argument against hell among us today is that the idea of an afterlife itself doesn't make sense or at least can't be verified so no belief in hell because no belief in any particular afterlife at all this is an intellectual argument that a universe in which the natural order of... this is an intellectual argument, a head centered argument but there is also a heart based argument that a universe in which the natural order of things is that at least some people will spend an eternity experiencing inescapable torture is an evil universe it is a morally abhorrent way for existence to be ordered and the belief that the cosmos is ordered in that way can be used to excuse and justify the most heinous sorts of wrong towards anyone you might imagine to be destined for hell anyway when we say as a movement that we heed the guidance of reason it is not only an intellectual commitment to seek to understand the universe through science it is also a declaration that we are morally accountable to the principles we espouse and the values we claim to hold and that what we do and what we say and even what we believe is always subject to being reappraised and reexamined on the basis of our highest shared good in 1633 the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei was summoned to Rome by the Inquisition to defend himself against the charge of heresy he stood accused of holding Copernican views the then quite radical idea that the earth revolves around the sun and of trying to convince others of his same position through his writings in Europe in the 1630s this was a very serious crime the church still taught that the sun revolved around the earth and the contradiction of that doctrine could be answered with imprisonment or even death of this crime he was convicted and found vehemently suspect of heresy Galileo was ultimately sentenced to house arrest for the remainder of his life prohibited from publishing any further writings and required to recite the seven penitent Psalms at least once each week for the three years following his conviction even before he could begin this punishment before he would be released from prison Galileo first had to officially recant declaring the view of the cosmos he had articulated and championed in the past to be both odious and wrong this he did in order to preserve himself against any further punishment including the very real threat of torture Galileo declared before the court that the sun revolves around the earth while the earth remains perfectly still and so the story goes that once he had been released and his jailers were out of earshot he made a small addition to what he'd said of the earth in court and yet it moves it is fitting perhaps that this story is most likely apocryphal there's no contemporary record of Galileo's ever having said and yet it moves still the phrase does seem to have been associated with him even before his death people whether they'd heard the words from him or not had by then already come to associate him with the plight of facts before the power of political authorities it is well attested however that he did say I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use Galileo was not a Unitarian or a Universalist so far as history records but in this statement he was perfectly in line with our tradition we human beings have the capacity to observe our surroundings to inquire after the causes of our circumstances to advance ideas and to test them whether we have the capacities, whether we have these capacities by the grace of the natural processes of life by the gift of a divine architect or purely by indifferent chance we ought to use them to better understand ourselves and our world and to better our world and ourselves from the significant if passing success of flat earthers, moon landing conspiracists, and the QAnon cult there would seem to be something in our species also that is ever ready to ignore the facts before us Upton Sinclair observed it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it while Thomas Paine wrote to argue with a man who has renounced the use and authority of reason and whose philosophy consists in holding humanity in contempt is like administering medicine to the dead or endeavoring to convert an atheist by scripture Jane Austen expressed both ideas even more succinctly how quick come the reasons for approving what we like yet just because it seems unpopular in these days to bring reason to bear on our ideas and our beliefs does not mean we should shirk our religious duty to do so it only makes it all the more important that we do Oliver Cromwell once wrote to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland saying, I beseech you in the bowels of Christ think it possible you may be mistaken the American jurist Billings learned hand a pined centuries later I should like to have that written over the portals of every church every school and every courthouse and may I say of every legislative body in the United States less the extremely distinctive and colorful metaphor this describes one of the pillars of the scientific method a willingness to entertain the idea that one could be wrong in order to test and retest hypotheses remain open to new evidence I can live said the famous 20th century physicist Richard Feynman with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong passage in the Rig Veda one of the sacred texts of Hinduism which translates as who knows for certain who shall hear declare it whence was it born whence came creation the gods are later than this world's formation who then can know the origins of the world none knows whence creation arose and whether he has or has not made it he who surveys it from the lofty skies only he knows or perhaps he knows not the Rig Veda is a collection of hymns religious songs of praise and transcendence and contemplation so take heart that ours is hardly the first or only religious voice to admit uncertainty and the unanswerable nature of certain questions nor is ours the first or the only to continue to contemplate those questions anyway choirs it is so very good to see their faces and hear their voices again each week we gather here bringing with us the cares and the hurts and the joys of recent days we share all these knowing they are held in love and support and community we light a candle of joy and celebration for Chuck Zuprinsky who joins his wife in the gladness of their son Craig's remarriage to the same wonderful woman in Nashville last week and Chuck tells us this remarriage is a COVID thing so congratulations once again to you all we light a candle for Mary Bergen and her brother Fred Mary asks for our positive thoughts for Fred who at the age of 81 broke a hip three days after moving to Madison Fred remains hospitalized 25 days later because of rehab facility rejections Fred's Medicaid status and lifelong cognitive challenges are working against him and we're sending Mary our love and support and a candle of gratitude from Marla Shoup for all the love and concern that people are holding for Joy Wiggart as we love and support her now in hospice care Joy our hearts are with you today and always and we light one last candle for all the sorrows and all the celebrations that live in the sanctuaries of our hearts may we hold them all in love in gratitude and in hope from one another let these be our thoughts of that which is most holy lies within the human person and if the greatest power in the world shines flickering and uncertain from each individual heart then it is easy to see the value of human associations dedicated to nurturing that light, the couple, the family, the religious community for the power of good in any one of us must at times waiver but when a group together is dedicated to nurturing the power of good it is rare for the light to grow dim in all individuals at the same moment so we borrow courage and wisdom from one another to warm us and keep us until we're together again