 Now that we have your attention, please join, please join in a moment of centering silence so we can be fully present with each other this morning. And now so we can be musically present with each other this morning. Please turn to the words for our in-gathering hymn which you'll find in your order of service. And so will this morning's program. Good morning everybody. And welcome to another Sunday here at First Unitarian Society where independent thinkers gather in a safe, nurturing environment to explore issues of social, spiritual and ethical significance as we try to make a difference in this world. I don't know where mama is. But I do know that I'm Steve Goldberg, a proud member of this congregation and it is my pleasure to welcome not only those of you who come here on a regular basis but those of you who might be visiting First Unitarian for the first time, visitors, guests and newcomers, including our visiting minister Roger Birchhausen from Appleton who is trading places with our own Michael Shuler who was up in Appleton this morning. So Roger, we're glad to have you here. We're also glad to have any newcomers who would like to learn more about our wonderful buildings. This is a special place, starting with but not excluding or not limited to our special buildings. If you'd like to learn more about them, please gather over here by the windows after the service and we will provide a guided tour for you. And speaking of the service, this would be a perfect time to silence all those pesky electronic devices that might interfere with your enjoyment of the service. Take a moment to perform that task right now and I'll demonstrate it for you. You just press a button and you're all set. Thank you for doing this. And if you are accompanied by a youngster at this morning service and that youngster would prefer to enjoy the service from a more private space, we offer two options for you. One is our child haven at the back corner of the auditorium. And we have some comfortable seating out in the lobby outside the doors from which you and your youngster can hear and see the service. As is the case every weekend, this service is brought to us by a wonderful team of volunteers, a team you can join someday if you would like. And that team includes our lay minister today as Tom Boykoff, our greeter upstairs who smiled at you as you arrived this morning, Mary Elizabeth Kunkel. Our team of ushers includes the foursome of Caroline Ben-Ferrado, Marty Hollis, Allison Brooks, and Anne Ostrom. Hospitality is hosted after the service by Nancy Kossoff and Bliss Nitschke. The flowers you see behind me were donated by Tracy and Mark Bailey. Okay. I just read what they tell me. And our tour guide after the service today will be John Powell. So if you see these volunteers, please thank them. And just a couple announcements before we get on with the service. Just a couple announcements as we get on with the service. Parents of our childless children preschool kids, please remember this one thing. Today, your child's class will be sharing a snack and some games with you following the service. So if you fall into this category, if you have a child enrolled in the childless children preschool kids program, head straight to their class when today's service is over or else they will be very disappointed and you'll hear about it all day. We are gearing up for our annual family to family holiday giving program, which in past years has brought smiles to more than 550 people in our community. So if you have a couple of hours to play elf during this holiday season, please check the Red Flores Bulletin for the opportunity to sign up online. Speaking of volunteering, if you're interested in mentoring people from throughout the community, if you'd like to form a relationship with them and help somebody in need, next Sunday we will host a mentoring fair from 10 until 1.30. 10 community organizations will be on hand during the 10 o'clock to 1.30 period with tables in the commons and give you a chance to sign up for mentoring opportunities. And lastly, did you lose a little bit of sleep last night worrying that the Select to Connect events were all full, not awful, all full, that they were filled up to capacity? Well, fret not because although some of them did fill up and one of my favorites was soup and scrabble, these are creatively designed events provided by fellow members of First Unitarian Society giving us a chance to connect with each other and you'll have that opportunity after the service today. So speaking of the service, so end of the announcements, please sit back or lean forward to enjoy this morning's service. I know that it will touch your heart, stir your spirit and trigger at least one or two new thoughts. We're glad you're here. Fantastic. Greetings, everyone. I'm Roger Birchhausen, Senior Minister at the Fox Valley UU Fellowship in Appleton and I always feel a sense of gratitude when I come here because really my congregation owes a lot to yours. 59 years ago next month, your then-Minister, Max Gabler, drove up to Appleton and spoke at the first service at my congregation. Nine people showed up plus Max and today we have a congregation of 700 and it would not have happened without Max making that trip and Snowstorm actually started during the service and he was stuck there overnight too. So humble beginnings. We're very, very grateful. Thank you to all of you. So when I was a kid in the church I grew up in, we had a Halloween parade much like we're going to have here in a moment and when I was in middle school, for two years we had Joseph Campbell come and do the sermon that day. The great expert on mythology and he loved that parade. One of his stories I always think of this time of year, he talks about when he was in San Francisco and he pulled into a parking space and he got out of his car and this little boy, maybe six years old, said to him, you can't park here. And he looked and there's no yellow line on the curb, there's no sign saying no parking and he said, well it looks like I can park here. And then the little boy said, no you can't. I'm a fire hydrant. And Joseph Campbell got in his car and moved to a different spot. He was never one to mess with the mythic imagination. So in that spirit we'll begin our service today. And if you will rise now and body your spirit to join together in our words of chalice lighting. We light our flaming chalice to illuminate the world we seek. In the search for truth may we be just. In the search for justice may we be loving. And in loving may we find peace. And before we join together in song if you'll take a moment to turn and greet your neighbor. And it is time for our and for helping with the music. And now if there. I have two readings today on this topic of duty which I understand is your theme for this month. The first is from William Wordsworth. It's his poem, An Ode to Duty. This is kind of a dense poem which is not easy to hear on the first listening and to pick up everything. So I'm going to interject a couple points of explanatory commentary. And he begins this poem with some words from the Roman philosopher Seneca. I am no longer good through deliberate intent, but by long habit have reached a point where I'm not only able to do right, but an unable to do anything but what is right. So Wordsworth's poem. Stern daughter of the voice of God, oh duty, if that name thou love who art a light to guide, a rod to check the airing and reprove, thou who art victory and law when empty terrors over awe, from vain temptations dust set free and calms the weary strife of frail humanity. And then Wordsworth admits that following the dictates of duty seems a bit more difficult for him than it must have been for the saintly Seneca. And oft when in my heart has heard thy timely mandate, I deferred the task in smoother walks to stray. But then Wordsworth renews his loyalty to following the dictates of duty. But thee I now would serve more strictly if I may. Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong and the most ancient heavens through thee are fresh and strong. To humbler functions awful power I call thee. I myself commend unto thy guidance from this hour. Oh, let my weakness come to an end. Give unto me made lowly and wise the spirit of self-sacrifice, the confidence of reason give, and in the light of truth thy bondman let me live. And the second reading is from Ogden Nash, and it is called kind of an ode to duty. Oh duty, why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie? Why glitter thy spectacle so ominously? Why art thou clad so abominously? Why art thou so different from Venus? And why do thou and I have so few interests mutually and common between us? Why are thou 50% murder and 51% tartar? Why is thy unfortunate want to attract to people by calling on them either to leave undone the deeds they like or to do deeds they don't? Why are there, why are thou so like an April postmortem on something that died in the autumn? Above all, why dost thou continue to hound me? Why art thou always albatrossly hanging around me? Thou so ubiquitous and I so iniquitous. I seem to be the one person in the world thou art perpetually preaching at who or to who, whatever looks like fun there, thou art standing between me and it calling you. Oh duty, duty, how noble a man should I be hest thou the visage of a sweetie or a cutie. But as it is thou art so much forbiddinger than a whole, a wodehouse hero's forbiddingest aunt, that in the words of the poet, when duty whispers low, thou must. This erstwhile youth replies, I just can't. I invite you to rise in body and spirit and join in singing together hymn number 83. Remember the scene very vividly. I was enjoying the rest and rejuvenation of a Unitarian Universalist minister's retreat when I got an unexpected cell phone call from the then president of the UU Ministers Association. Now at the time, maybe five years ago, the Ministers Association was reinventing itself to be a more serious and substantive organization. And at the centerpiece of this was a commitment, a new commitment to offer really excellent continuing education for ministers. I had been aware of this change and I applauded it and I was ready to pay more in dues but I didn't expect to do much else. So the Ministers Association president reviewed these plans with me and then he noted that the continuing education piece would only work if the committee overseen it, which we call the center committee, would be staffed by ministers who not only were dedicated to the work but had wide respect from the colleagues. Buttering me up, right? So he wondered if I'd be willing to serve a four-year term. Absolutely not, I thought. I needed another huge commitment like a hole in the head. The president's flattery got him somewhere so I didn't immediately turn it down and we talked a little and I wound my way up to say no and then I said yes. What? Why did these words, this one word yes, out of my mouth instead of no? Serving on center I knew would be mundane, it'd be time consuming, there would be very little glory in this work. Duty, as Agda Nash points out, has the misfortune of generally not being very attractive. Certainly true in this case. So why did I say yes? Well in a word, duty. A sense of duty to my colleagues, to the minister's association, to our Unitarian Universalist faith. I understood that ministers who are inspired and instructed by excellent continuing education will help our congregations thrive and our world needs thriving Unitarian Universalist congregations. So where did this sense of duty come from? For me, partly it's hard-wired, my parents had that value and seemed to one way or another have instilled it in me. But I also embraced the idea of duty to colleagues from early on in my career. I was really lucky early on to meet a minister, Rupert Lovely, who since his died. Rupert Lovely was the minister who worked with my congregation and me in our kind of settlement dance. And he talked a lot about duty to colleagues. Even late in his career, when a lot of us might kind of step back and let other colleagues do the work, he kept on serving. Now I remember one time he pulled me aside and he said, I don't even like what I'm doing for the minister's association now, but it's a sense of duty that makes me want to do that. So maybe it was my internalized Rupert that caused me to say yes when I meant to say no. So I went on to serve on the center committee for four years and I have to say it was the most difficult work I've done outside of my parish and also the most rewarding. I can see the impact of this continuing education on my ministry and the ministry of hundreds of colleagues. So fulfilling duty, it's a good thing, right? That's the moral of the story? Sermon over? Let's change the picture in our mind to an older couple. They've been together for many decades. One partner has relatively good health. The other is suffering from Alzheimer's. I can picture in my mind such a couple. The healthier one feels a keen sense of duty to keep the ill spouse at home at all costs. The stress of caring for someone with such profound chronic needs takes an enormous toll on the healthy caregiver to the point where that partner's health also collapses. Perhaps when all is said and done, the partner with Alzheimer's would have received better care at a facility specializing in dementia and perhaps moving that partner into such a facility would have preserved the other partner's health. So was the healthier partner's fidelity to duty a good thing? It might have been noble, but arguably it resulted in a lower level of care and certainly exacted an enormous cost on the caregiver. So maybe it's a matter of trying to interpret how best to fulfill our duty, perhaps in this case, duty to a partner's well-being and to maintaining one's own health would have been better served by moving the beloved to a care facility, assuming, and this is a big assumption, that they could afford it. Staying with the family theme, picture now a parent with an adult child who is a drug addict. Drug dealers are coming after your kid for a payment as they have off and on over the years. You've given your kid money, maybe helped save your kid's life, but in doing so you realize you are continuing to enable the addiction. So what do you do? What does duty to your child's well-being look like? Maybe it's also a matter of figuring out correctly what the appropriate object of our duty should be. Picture Robert E. Lee in the Civil War in choosing duty to his state and the institution of slavery that was at the heart of the rebellion. Choosing that over duty to nation or freedom, he made the wrong choice. Or how about the soldier who remains faithful to the chain of command but in so doing follows orders which may be unethical or even war crimes. Or the person working for a company who knowingly follows unethical directives from above. Is devotion to duty always a good thing? To what should we be faithful? My dictionary defines duty as the binding or obligatory force of something that is morally or legally right. So what happens when we determine that the moral right and the legal right are not the same thing? Toward what should we feel duty bound? Here's another real world example. I heard a story a few years ago about a man in Arizona who served in prison for 38 years for heinous crime he did not commit. Another man admitted he committed the crime in a confidential conversation many, many years earlier with his lawyer. Now the lawyer was bound professionally by professional duty not to share this information even after the man who actually committed the crime died. The lawyer felt a sense of duty to justice and so he helped steer the case to the Arizona Justice Project. And after 10 years of effort on the part of that project the innocent man was finally released from prison at the age of 77. What was the dutiful thing for that lawyer to do? So duty is an ambiguous concept. That's why I paired Wordsworth Poem with Agna Nash's Poem. Duty is a slippery thing. I think it's a value worth upholding but figuring out how and when is extremely difficult. In another poem by Agna Nash called The Portrait of the Artist as a prematurely old man he writes again about duty. I think the guy had something about duty. In this case he writes that that sins of omission failing to do what you should have done is actually worse than doing things that you oughtn't to have done. Partly in Nash's view this is because sins of commission at least have the chance of being fun and sins of omission are not. So he writes, you didn't slap the lads in the tavern on the back and loudly cry, we let's all fail to write just one more letter before we go home. This round of unwritten letters is on me. Now you never get any fun out of the things that you didn't do. So as usual Nash, tongue firmly embedded in cheek has some truth as well in what he's saying. Often I do think the worst failures of duty are silence and inaction in the face of injustice. These failures to fulfill your duty are the ones that really can corrode the soul. Whites in the Jim Crow south sitting in front of the bus and eating at Whites only lunch counters and sending their kids to Whites only schools and never saying anything about these privileges or Germans during the Nazi regime quietly going about their business even as they know innocent gypsies and Jews and gays and political prisoners are being gassed outside their village. These are dramatic variations of sins of omission. So a tenderness to avoiding sins of omission to me is a really important part trying to figure out how to fulfill our duty. Another important element to fulfilling duty is imagination. It takes imagination I think to work our way sometimes through the thicket of possible interpretations of our duty. In a little bit we're going to be asked by the youth of this congregation to support a project, several projects, for water justice. And I think that this work on the part of your youth really is an expression of imagination. Instead of walking away from those who have a need for safe and reliable water which would be indifference, instead of sending money to buy some bottled water which would be charity, the youth of this congregation have found a pathway to justice. They're saying let's work to help create water supplies for people that are safe, abundant, let's do this fairly. And what I'm thinking is that if you live here in Madison where you're surrounded by beautiful freshwater lakes where you can go to any faucet and turn on the faucet and there is freshwater, that it takes some imagination to find this course, to be called to this duty, to people you don't even know somewhere else in the world. I admire and appreciate this. For me, I didn't have the imagination to think about water justice until I was in the Philippines. In a village, a Unitarian village largely which had very little water and then they took me to the water source and it was abundant and it was clear that other villages were getting more of the water. I needed that literal picture to become active in this movement. I admire your kids for figuring this out with their imaginations. The only other spiritual advice I have for figuring out what our duty is is to try to engage both our minds and our hearts as we try to figure out our duty. Discernment always includes a head component and the more complex and ambiguous the question, the more we need to use our brains to try to figure out what to do. But heart is important too and maybe one of the best guides is to determine if you have heart and what you're contemplating doing and fulfilling your duty. This is the reason really that I said yes to serving on this Continuing Education Committee for the Ministers Association. It is because I could put heart into this work because I give my heart to Unitarian Universalism. When Olympia Brown preached her last sermon at the age of 85 at the Universalist Church in Racine, she exhorted the members of her church to stand by this faith. Stand by this faith she said work for it and sacrifice for it. There's nothing in all the world so important is to be loyal to this faith which is placed before us the loftiest ideals which has comforted us and sorrow, strengthened us for noble duty and made the world beautiful. Her last sermon was an an exhortation to fulfill the duty to this faith. I feel duty to this faith very strongly. I look at this world and I see people who are not allowed to be who they truly are because of their skin color or their class or their gender or sexual orientation or their gender identity. I see African Americans in our nation, young boys growing up with prison being more likely than college in their life. I see teens who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer feel such a deep and pervasive sense of rejection that they contemplate suicide. My heart gets broken over and over again and I am convinced that our faith is part of the answer to making this world better. Our faith can change the world. It can stop at least a few hearts from being broken. So I give my heart to this faith. I fulfill my duty to unitarian universalism with love and joy because this faith makes a difference. This is why I volunteer. This is why I write checks to my congregation. It's why I stand up for this faith. So one last thought trying to figure out how to fulfill our duty is never easy. I know that for me I make all sorts of mistakes. We all do. Sometimes with good heart I misread or I misinterpret how to fulfill my duty. Sometimes I'm asleep at the switch and in spite of my best intentions I remain silent or inactive in the face of injustice. I try not to judge my failures too harshly and I definitely try not to judge others' failures too harshly. How can I judge someone who's trying to figure out their duty to a partner with Alzheimer's or to a child who's as an adult is now addicted to drugs? All I can do is learn from my mistakes and keep on trying and learn from others. That's all I can do. It's all any of us can do. And here's the great secret. It's enough. It's enough. Good morning. My name is Celia and I'm one of seven interns from our high school youth group working on a new water justice project along with adult advisors from the water-sensional team and from our own youth group. This important multi-generational project is working to heighten awareness about water issues throughout the world. Living in Wisconsin, a state with abundant water resources, we sometimes forget that many people in other parts of the world are not so lucky. Our research has discovered some sobering statistics. For example, we learned that half of all schools in the world do not have access to safe drinking water and basic sanitation. Or that 1,400 children die every day from diseases caused by unsafe water or inadequate sanitation. And the problem is only going to get worse in many parts of the world due to increased drought caused by climate change. As UU Youth, we believe in working to make a difference, so we ask you to join us today in funding specific small-scale projects that we will select from a list of water charity organization projects proposed and managed by Peace Corps volunteers. We ask you to consider donating to our Water Justice Project through today's Share Outreach offering. Also, please stop at our information table after service and look at our posters and talk to one of us if you want more information. At the table, you can also donate directly to the project, or we can give you information for mailing a check later. Thank you for your generosity. We gather each week a community with joys and sorrows written on our hearts. We come together to find strength and common purpose, turning our minds and hearts toward one another and seeking to bring into our circle of concern all who need our love and support. This week, we hold in our hearts Fran Bicknell, who fell recently and has now had surgery at Meritor and will soon be headed to rehab to begin the long road of recovery and Paul Berge, who is recovering from pneumonia. We wish them both healing and we hold them in our hearts. We send them good wishes for very successful recoveries. May we remember that we are part of a web of life that makes us one with all humanity, one with all the universe. May we be grateful for the miracle of life that we share and the hope that gives us the power to remember, to care, and to love. And if you will rise now in body and for spirit to join in our closing hymn, number 124. And it nudges us toward a path that is life-giving. May we ignore the call of duty when it nudges us toward something that's destructive and may we have the wisdom to know the difference. May you go in peace.