 Hello, hello, hello, yes, doesn't, yeah I know. 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. Unitarian Universalism supports the freedom of conscience of each individual as together we seek to be a force for good in the world. My name is Elizabeth Barrett and on behalf of the congregation I would like to extend a special welcome to visitors. We are a welcoming congregation, so whoever you are and wherever you are on your life's journey we celebrate your presence among us. Please silence your cell phones as we gather today out of the routines of our week to give pause, to take a deep breath, to listen to our hearts. We give thanks for this day. Here may our minds stretch, our hearts open and our spirits deepen. We are so very glad that you are here. I invite you to join me now in a few moments of silence for contemplation, meditation, prayer as we settle in and come fully into this time and place together. Please rise in body or spirit for our in gathering hymn number 389 gathered here, which we will sing as around. So we'll sing it twice through all together and then we'll break into three groups. Group one with Reverend Doug, group two with Karen and group three with Reverend Kelly. Let's do that one more time together. Group one, if you're two, one more time. Group one, group two, one more time. I was sliding. We call ourselves together in worship utilizing words attributed to the 8th century Buddhist monk Shantideva. May we become at all times both now and forever a protector for those without protection, a guide for those who have lost their way, a ship for those with oceans to cross, a bridge for those with rivers to cross, a sanctuary for those in danger, a lamp for those without light, a place of refuge for those who lack shelter and a servant to all in need. For as long as space endures and for as long as living beings remain, until then may we too abide to dispel the misery of the world. And as Elizabeth lights our chalice, may we join together in our chalice lighting words printed in the order of service as together we say, we rejoice in the radiance of the turning season. As we kindle our chalice flame, life is a symbol of creation and of hope, of law and justice, of warmth and unity. It is a symbol of remembrance. And now I invite you to turn towards each other in exchange a greeting. Hello there. Good morning. Good morning. Oops. Good morning. Good morning, John. Good to see you. Glad you're here. We gather again here with the joys and the sorrows of recent days and weeks living in the fullness of our hearts. The sharing of those joys and sorrows is our time and a spirit of acceptance and support to share with one another some special event or circumstance that has affected our lives. We invite anyone who would like to come to the front of the auditorium light a candle using the microphone provided by our lay minister, Judy Troya, briefly share with us your message. And if you cannot come forward for any reason, raise your hand and Judy will bring the microphone to you. And we begin with lighting a candle for the three Jewish congregations who meet at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. We hold those taken too soon in our prayers even before we know all of their names. May their legacies of love and the lessons present in the way they lived bless their children, their spouses, all the people who loved and cherished them. We also hold the wounded and the living members of the Tree of Life in our hearts embrace as well as the first responders that risk much to give care and safety. May they all be surrounded by the healing power of community, prayer, care, and justice. We hold their wider circle of family and friends, those close and far away who are wrestling with the fear and wondering of just how great a personal loss awaits as the details are released. We hold all those for whom this terrible act cuts too close to the bone. All who feel and know that their lives, their homes, their houses of worship are threatened by the rising normalcy of words and deeds perpetuated in the name of bigotry, hatred, fear, and isolationism. We hold these times emblazoned in memory when love's sanctuaries are pierced by weaponized hate. And we remember that this takes place in the context of this last week where there were other hate-filled acts in Kentucky and across the nation by mail. We mingled those concerns with our own joys and our own sorrows as together we join in this time of common care. My mother passed about several months ago. She was a 50-year or 50-plus year member of UU Congregation West in Brookfield holding about every volunteer office and job there was to do in the church. I was blessed to be able to take care of her the last three months of her life and I was with her when she died. I helped with her cremation and I feel very much at peace but I do miss her and I appreciate the members of this congregation have reached out to me and provided solace. This is a joy. As I speak Bob Bell is currently running his 75th Marathon. He's 80 years old in Washington DC and I believe he's over halfway there. So Bob is a friend from way back but he really underscores the phrase survival of the fittest. This pales in comparison to others but my family recently lost one of our first pets and it was beloved to my sons and so I just want to share their sorrow and my sorrow but it was a beautiful lesson in the circle of life and the everlasting unity of our spirit and so we had we got to have ceremony and use it as a lesson of our precious time together so I offer this to our pet Pudgy. My name is Janice Knapp-Cortis and I am very happy to announce that our son and daughter-in-law are expecting a baby in March. I'm Rudy Moore and my daughter just cut her first teeth. She's got two little teeth in the bottom of her gums and at every milestone that she goes through just kind of reawakens this huge circle that we're all part of that really just makes me feel more connected with the universe as a whole. Hi I'm Brescha Berg. We celebrated my son's role in dedication earlier this month and not with us was my grandma and my husband's grandpa who passed away earlier this spring so this is a very belated memory of them. Hi my name is Paul Schecter and I'd like to light a candle for my cousin Johnny Haley who was more of an uncle quite a bit older than me but he passed away last week and I have fond memories of him from holidays and Thanksgiving Christmas growing up. And Judy if you would light one last candle for all those joys and all the sorrows too tender to share that live in the fullness of our hearts and we will now rise in all the ways we do and join together in singing our next hymn as our children and teachers leave for classes. Let's sing this through three times together. This morning's reading is an excerpt from How the Stars Get in Your Bones by Jan Richardson. How the sorrow in you slowly makes its own light. How it conjures its own fire. I tell you this blazing in you it does not come by choosing the most difficult way the most daunting. It does not come by the sheer force of your will. It comes from the helpless place in you that despite all cannot help but hope. The part of you that does not know how not to keep turning toward this world. To keep turning your face toward this sky. To keep turning your heart toward this unendurable earth. Knowing your heart will break but turning it still. I tell you this is how the stars get in your bones. This is how the brightness makes a home in you. In the summer before my senior year of college so the mid 80s I served for several months as a peace intern and there are various peace intern programs that often religious movements and other organizations sponsor throughout the country so I spent the summer traveling around sometimes working at camps sometimes working at meetings or in congregations to help them think about issues around peacemaking and justice and at the end of the summer a few of us from various peacemaking groups came together for a week of urban ministry in San Francisco. It was an incredibly powerful life changing week for all of us the things that we experienced together the things that we did together in that setting touched us deeply and so we tried to figure out what felt like a way to honor that time as we moved to the end of the week and knew that even though we had just met most of us a few days before that that we felt deeply close to each other and it made sense that we would try to find a place together to worship but we were all from different religious traditions so we thought for a while and we decided that the most interesting place we could imagine was to go to Glide Memorial Church now at that point I'd actually not even heard of Glide Memorial Church but let me tell you I will never forget that day Glide Memorial is a large Methodist church and when it was founded it was actually a fairly conservative congregation but beginning in the 1960s when Cecil Williams became their minister he moved them in the decidedly more radical direction so that by the time in the mid 80s I was there it was a bastion of liberality and was as eclectic and interesting a congregation as one could imagine nestled in the heart of the tinderloin every kind of human being seemed to be in that congregation that day numbering in the thousands it was a congregation of over 20,000 and so the music was so deeply inspiring and touching and Reverend Williams message somehow managed to be both incredibly comforting and also to really ask us to stretch and he wove together so powerfully substance abuse and poverty and people struggling right in the city for their lives in such a meaningful and present way that we all were just so moved at the end of the service we wanted to make our way to him and thank him for the gift especially in light of the powerful week we had shared but we noticed in the sanctuary that there was a noticeable gridlock and people seem to not be moving out of the sanctuary quickly at all and we wondered what could be up with that and finally when I was worried that I might actually need to check out of my hotel and leave before I had a chance to thank the Reverend I made my way out of side exit and out into the narthex and I discovered that the reason that the sanctuary was emptying so slowly is that the thousands of people in that sanctuary were making their way into about five different lines to step forward to some member of the church community in order to receive their hug it turns out that this congregation had a long-standing tradition an intentional tradition of a sort of receiving line ministry that was a hug ministry and when I made my way out and I watched these people come forward at first I thought what a strange choice for a large urban congregation to utilize their time and space for that but then I began to notice the people that people all the way from those who were dressed in incredibly expensive clothing to those people that obviously were likely living on the streets people of every sexual orientation people of every noticeable skin hue and nationality each of them waited in line for their hug like I have seen people wait in line for communion with a deep sense of reverence and expectancy and when they took their turn stepping forward into the arms of that person you could just feel palpably in the air that something powerful and sacred was happening I was so moved to be standing there watching that and at a particular moment I noticed that a young man who was agonizingly skinny was making his way forward to Reverend Williams line and as he stepped up closer to Reverend Williams I could tell from the lesions on his skin that he was suffering from Kaposi sarcoma and undoubtedly was a person with AIDS that was particularly powerful to me because all of the peace interns that I've been with that week had been invited because we were either allies or members of the LGBT community to come for a week in San Francisco in the mid eighties to discover what most congregations yet weren't even willing to talk about the incredible upheaval that was happening in that urban center around AIDS and so we worked for part of the time on ward 86 which was the first AIDS ward in the world helping people who still did not know exactly what was happening to their bodies and we worked out in the street to help get out information to people and to help them come to be tested and to get help when they were sick and as this young man stepped forward towards Reverend Williams I thought about just the day before on the ward where for the first time one of the patients had stepped forward towards me with his arms open just wanting to be held for a moment and while I did not refuse that embrace what resulted when I stepped forward towards him because of my own fear and inhibitions reminded me so much of the first time as an adult I tried to hug my brother and it looked like the beginning of a wrestling match between the two of us what could have been a tender moment turned into an awkward one and as I watched this young man step into Reverend Williams arms and be held by him and for just a moment the two of them rocked together and he placed his head on Reverend Williams shoulder and I could tell how deeply healing and powerful that moment was to that man and I knew that I needed to do some powerful work in my own life to be ready to offer that same gift when I needed to as we move full circle to think about what it means to be a people of sanctuary I think about that preparation and believe that all of us have our own preparation our own work to do in our lives to become more comfortable within ourselves to know what it is that scares us about really connecting with each other the power that intimacy can have in the ways that we get in the indirect blockage of that power as we explore what it means to be a people of sanctuary we are asked again and again to step into the places that scare us and the deep places that both connect us and prevent us from connecting to each other and to share together the endure humaneness and to make all of the places that we inhabit including the very earth itself a sort of spiritual home for us all it is holy and powerful in life changing work that we try to do week after week when we seek to make not just this space but our connection with each other a sanctuary a place of deep connection of deep power of deep knowing about our common humanity and what happens when we share it openly with each other as we work together over the months into years to continue to make this space sanctuary we do the complicated work of identifying in our diverse community what signifies for us that which is holy the ideals that unify us enlarge us that sustain us it is powerful and difficult work what beliefs do you have about yourself that stop you from finding your truest places of connection in your life what sort of people are hardest for you to wholeheartedly welcome in this place and elsewhere in glide memorial they did very intentional work to decide in that urban space how they could embody a sense of welcome and so they worked with their leaders to think about what it would be like to invite each and every person who wanted to receive a ministry of being held for a moment what was necessary to do that authentically and bravely and respectfully we do that powerful work as we explore together what it means to really connect with each other to really soften enough so that we can know ourselves and each other in a transformative way it takes me back to the reading from Jan Richardson when she says to us that it comes from the helpless place in you that despite all cannot help but hope the part of you that does not know how to not keep turning toward this world to keep turning your face toward this sky to keep turning your heart toward the unendurable earth knowing your heart will break but turning it still after I left I needed to do work to be more comfortable in my own skin to be more comfortable with being with people who were very very sick I never believed that by touching a person with AIDS I would contract AIDS I had been on a unit where people were so clearly comfortable with that contact but I had not yet really faced the primal power of my own mortality to really be able to touch people in difficult places we face powerful things in ourselves again and again and the real gift is that when we do that we are so much more at home on this planet and with each other but it is difficult work as we work to be a sanctuary congregation we have work to do to prepare ourselves even if we never receive a guest of someone who may be in the process of being deported we need to think about what it would mean to welcome that person into this space and really help them feel at home and even if we never receive a guest by saying yes to being a sanctuary congregation it's important that we know what is happening in Madison now in terms of immigration in terms of what ice is doing in terms of deportations that never make the news being a people of sanctuary asks powerful things of us as I've been working with congregations and thinking about our relationship with race and how difficult it has been for us to be a more diverse movement over and over again I've explored the ideas of Tema Oaken and so I invite you to look at some of her ideas about the dominant white supremacist right supremacist culture that tends to stop us from really connecting in terms of race she speaks of the importance of culture because it is always present but often is difficult to name explicitly and how the characteristics that she has as part of her white supremacist culture as you look at the slide here as we think about these ideas the real reason that they're so damaging is that they become norms and standards without us proactively and intentionally choosing them we've let them shape who we are and let them do damage in our ability to connect with each other what's important about this is not that necessarily we overturned all of these traits many of them actually speak powerfully to us but that we understand the power and bring intention to the ways that we create a culture when people ask me what would be necessary for us to change enough so that we could be more racially diverse I look at this list and know that we actually need to change the very culture of our congregations so that we can really make a welcoming space for instance we need to examine our defensiveness that when we are given a critique about something that we think of as our standard operating procedure instead of reacting with a sense that that critique is telling us that we are wrong and brings up emotions of shame or anger or that we blame the person offers the critique that we do the work to see it as an opportunity sometimes to identify the damage that we are doing and to stop that damage to let critique lead us into new and powerful places we need to bring intention to instead of turning to paternalism a belief that we who have power can make decisions for people with less power at least culturally without even asking them about their lives and what matters to them we can move into conversations that involve everyone in the decision-making that is significant within this place instead of being afraid of conflict believing that conflict is a signal of our failure that we could choose to see that the moments when we engage in heated intense conversation are often moments of powerful change and transformation and the people that invite us into those conflicted powerful conversations are inviting us into greater truth we need to do powerful work important work and thinking about the culture that is often so much the sea in which we swim that we don't see it not out of shame but out of a deep sense of love and of joy in changing our culture so that we can not only be more racially diverse but as importantly we can realize our fuller potential as unitarian universalists when we do the work of sanctuary we do important powerful things together sanctuary invites us again and again to live into the things that create sustain and strengthen the very spirit of life and there is something for each of us to do in living into that space if you are an extrovert then when you feel up to it you can be an incredible greeter of people but if you are an introvert you are the perfect person to reach out to another introvert you get it how awkward it is to be in a new place and to feel like you don't know quite how to break that barrier or if you are just not a people person at all there are thousands of tasks that create welcome space that involve databases and information and there is a place for you to help transform this space into a welcoming one whoever you are wherever you are in life William Cronin reminds us we go to sanctuaries to remember the things we hold most dear the things we cherish and love and then the great challenge to return home seeking to enact this wisdom as best we can in our daily lives on that day all those years ago in San Francisco I spent several minutes watching those people in line and I realized that I just could not remain a bystander in life you have to get in line and move into life itself and so I took my place in line and as I walked forward I thought about what had happened that week not with shame or regret but the wonderful gift of all of those people who were so sick and so afraid who opened themselves up to me and even though in that particular moment I was not able to realize my full potential of connection I knew that I could do the work to do better and what I didn't know is that eventually I would work for years as a chaplain with people with AIDS and hospice and get a chance to explore more deeply that redemptive and life-saving ministry and so as I stepped forward to the front of the line and found out that my huggy was this young Latina woman whose name tag announced that she was a member of the board of trustees of that congregation when she saw me she gave me the most engagingly sweet smile I've ever seen in my life and said perhaps politically incorrectly come on big boy come in for your hug and let me tell you I did with everything in me all of my humanity all of who I was I reached around her and bent down so that I could actually hold her she put her arms around me and she whispered very sweetly into my ear you are held by the arms of love and in that very human to human moment I was how are we called to create spaces of sanctuary how are we each able to find those powerful places of connection what changes are we willing to make to make a difference in the lives that come through our doors how will we find our own way to make brightness a home in us that's the work ahead of us amen and blessed be every week we do that transformative work in a variety of ways and as we move into the time of the offering we are given the opportunity to think about all of the gifts that we have and to discern for ourselves how we will share those gifts this week I remind you that our 5050 recipient for the offering is the YWCA of Madison you can find out more about the work that we are supporting but as we give and receive this offering may we be inspired by a spirit of generosity but most of all an enduring spirit of love with the gratitude we thank you for all the ways that you give to this community each worship service is a collaborative effort so we especially appreciate those who helped today including our greeters Joan height men and then scoby on sound is Richard scoby our lay minister Judy Troyer our usher Douglas Hill our hospitality is provided by Richard DeVita and Jean Hills and Karen Rose Gretler is at the welcome and information table today I also want to let you know that we have an opportunity this evening at 7 p.m. the Madison Jewish community and the Wisconsin faith voices for justice will be having an interfaith vigil here in morning for the victims of yesterday's shooting in Pittsburgh it will start at 7 here at First Unitarian Society I invite you now to join in singing our closing hymn number 1020 boy yeah yeah please rise and body and or spirit the hymn is four pages long there's a repeat from page four back to page three at one point knows where we go and we will get us how we will get and now as you leave the sanctuary may your hearts remain open may your voices stay strong may your hands and arms remain outstretched we extinguish this chalice but not the light of wisdom the warmth of love or the fire of our commitment to justice these remain until we gather in this place again before we move on with our day I invite us to share a few more moments together as we receive the gift of the postlude