 Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Let's see how you want to do it. Our first reading today is the mystic, the scientist and the activist from the tapestry of faith, a UU curriculum. One day a religious man approached a mystic and asked, does God exist? Allow me to go within for the answer, the mystic said. After meditating for quite some time, expanding her heart consciousness to embrace the totality of existence, she answered, I do not know what you mean by the word God, but I do know that this world is more mysterious and more wonderful than I could ever imagine. I know that you and I are part of something so much larger than our own lives. Perhaps this is the something you seek. Then the religious man approached a scientist. Does God exist? he asked. Let me think, the scientist replied. And so she thought. She thought about the vastness of the universe, 156 billion light years, and the almost immeasurable smallness of a quirk. She thought of how the energy of the big bang fuels the beating of her own heart. And then she answered, I do not know what you mean by the word God, but I do know that this world is more mysterious and more wonderful than I could ever imagine. I know that you and I are part of something so much larger than our own lives. Perhaps this something larger is what you seek. Then the religious man approached an activist. Does God exist? he asked. Let me remember, the activist said. And so they remembered. They remembered all the different people of different faith and no faith, with whom they had worked for justice over the years. They had seen people in desperate circumstances who had lost everything, still willing to reach out and help one another. They thought of how working for justice had saved them from a life of despair. And then they answered, I do not know what you mean by the word God, but I do know that this world is more mysterious and more wonderful than I could ever imagine. I know that you and I are part of something so much larger than our own lives. Perhaps this something larger is what you seek. The religious man then thought to himself. He thought of what he knows and what he does not know. He thought about how he knows what he knows, and how he knows he does not know what he does not know. He thought about his experience of the world and how it is, but one infinitesimal fraction of all experience. He thought about his dependence on forces larger than himself. And he thought about the interdependence of all existence. He experienced wonder and pondered mystery. And then he knew, he knew in his soul the truth of what the mystic and the scientist and the activist said, that he is part of something so much larger than his own life. And then, only then did he think about what he'd call it. Our second reading from Women Who Run With Wolves by Clarissa Pincola Estes. A part of every woman and every man resists knowing that in all love relationships, death must have her share. We pretend we can love without our illusions of love dying. Pretend we can go on without our superficial expectations dying. Pretend we can progress and that our favorite flushes and rushes will never die. But in love, psychically, everything becomes picked apart. Everything. What dies? Illusions die. Expectations die. Greed for having it all. For wanting to have all be beautiful only. All this dies because love always causes a descent into the death nature. We can see why and we can see why it takes abundant self-power and soulfulness to make that commitment. To preach love is at best. Those are the words of prominent UU theologian James Luther Adams. Well, Dr. Adams, I'm afraid this sermon is going to be in bad taste. When I am asked how this year went for me, I can honestly say that I loved it. I snuck into this building my very first night back in Madison and stood at what would have been this pulpit. It seems like just a few weeks ago and wondered what it would be like to preach here, to preach to a crowd gathered here. And it's top notch. This sermon is about what I found here and what I found here and there and there was love. But I get where Adams is coming from. There is no word in our language, he argues, that has been so much misused and prostituted as the word love. Love may be all you need in life, but it isn't going to make for interesting sermons. Adams' response to the abuse of this word was to give to ministers the unavoidable duty to make a cool and critical analysis of the phenomenon of love and to unmask pseudo love. Doesn't that sound fun? So let's get to it. Let me start off by talking about my love of the sermon. Writing a sermon actually is a fairly lonely experience. You gather up some books, do some background reading on Wikipedia, maybe look at a few academic papers and studies if you're really trying to impress. And then you flounder around like the Dickens for something original to say. I don't know if Dickens flounder. I don't know what to say. Which mostly looks like staring out into space and heading to the kitchen for more snacks and playing a slow game of chess. But you do all of this mostly alone. On the late stages of my sermon preparation, I will let one or two people look over it to see if it is completely off. But I have yet to cultivate a sizable group of pre-serman readers, which is the practice of some. Now, this process isn't too different from most writers' methods, except their experience doesn't culminate in their writing being the hypothetical center point of a community's worship life every weekend. This mix of the solitary, the social, and the spiritual is a real unique, and at least for me, a highly rewarding experience. So, to make this process a reality when writing a sermon I, like many others, learned to cultivate a trusted group of internal conversation partners. Obvious ones are the writers of the materials you are consulting, but others come from other places in your past. I've tried to carefully craft this group of internal advisors. Seminary professors and theologians for my three years of study in Austin stay with me well. More recently, my internship supervisors, Michael and Kelly, as well as my dedicated and appreciated ministry team have been added to that list. I also try very hard to listen to the voices of race, gender, and class theorists and activists who often have very legitimate critiques of the status quo of liberal religion and politics. But some voices you don't get to choose. One, for me, is the authoritative voice of my Mormon past, to which I spoke a little bit last month. It's hard to shut off a voice you spent the first 25 years of your life trying to obey. But that voice is starting to fade, or at least deeply shift. A voice that I would have never chosen, but yet persistently remains, find as personification in a man I met here at church several years ago. Actually, I didn't really meet him. Rather, I sat next to him in the library for an hour during services, and we never talked to each other. But he definitely talked. First to himself, and then to what I assumed was his partner on the phone, he talked about how much he hated being dragged to these hippie-dippy services, where people get touchy-feely for an hour to pat themselves on the back for being good white people. I'm not a fan of this voice, but he is almost always there in his ripped jeans and two big jacket. That day, as most days, I was actually really enjoying the service I'd chosen to give my Sunday morning to. But when he started talking, I immediately began to see things through his eyes. Like when an uninvited guest comes over to your messy home and what was cozy and eclectic becomes scattered and depressing. It's that voice that society has trained me and plenty of the rest of us to listen to. He's on the cover of rock albums and the star of many films. The person who has been, who has seen behind all of society's surface niceties to see the real ugliness underneath. Consumerism loves him, encourages us to listen to him, because when he sells us something, we know he really means it and that he would never sell anything because the man tells him to. And he sits across from me every time I write a sermon, jeering at my attempts at sincerity and insight. I've learned to tolerate this voice, learn from it, if not appreciate it. Because despite how much I dislike him, I must acknowledge that he is just a little bit right. And he is definitely not alone. We all know those people who somewhere along the line got an extra dose of cynicism and too coolism. But society makes sure that all of us got a dose of the same medicine at some points in our lives. I've seen the eyes cross. The arms cross. The arms cross. The eyes roll. The passive against the female that got sent. All with the same underlying message. I see right through you and I don't like what I see. What ripped jeans and baggy jacket taught me more than anything else is that what we have here is very fragile. So very fragile. And it is fragile not just because of the appearance of hypocrisy, but its constant unavoidable presence in our midst. I read the other day that hypocrisy has become the cardinal sin of the millennial generation. And I knew right away this guy who used to be a church. We owned the sin of hypocrisy since way before Al Gore invented the internet. Whenever I try to explain unitarian universalism, we are a value based church is most likely to slip out. But basing our whole communal lives on values is just throwing the doors right open for all the hypocrites to show up. I'm reminded of the man who was asked why he'd started attending church and said, well I heard that Jesus called the last of all sinners to come to him and I'll be darned if I've ever felt more invited anywhere in my life. I don't necessarily want the vilest of all hypocrites because there are some real nasty ones out there. But I think the time is far past that we should make our welcome of hypocrites official. I am really surprised that during my time here as an intern no one asked me to write a new motto for FUS. But if it was up to me I'd hang a big sign right out from the prow of the landmark auditorium where that old copper bell used to be. First unitarian society home of hypocrites and hippies. But mostly just hypocrites and I mean this in the very best sense because this is my story as much as it is yours like all my sermons. I once saw a cartoon graph that I adored one line rising steadily up was what I expected of myself. Another line crawled up much slower and was labeled what I actually achieved. And in this graph the increasingly large empty space between the two lines was filled with one word, beer. I think we should make a good attempt to try to fill that space with church or at least some of that space. What my 32 years and the human family has taught me is that living up to your values is a choice for almost no one. We are far too human to live up to who we want to be. I think most of us most everyone I've met is exactly 32% a hypocrite and it's going up 1% each year I'm alive. I plan on being a very cynical 75 year old. And while most of us don't get to choose to be that 32% a hypocrite I do think what we get to choose is what our hypothetical 100% looks like. This button. I do think what we get to choose is what our hypothetical 100% looks like. So low expectations for ourselves might make our 32% hypocrisy feel smaller but it also makes our 68% authenticity feel that much smaller. We are the church of unusually high expectations for humanity. The sign is getting a little long. Where we thrive is in helping people find the strength to expand their vision of the possibility inherent in human nature. But we very often fail to recognize that we are also opening ourselves up to the deep vulnerability of similarly expanding our experience of the hypocrisy inherent in that human nature. I'm not arguing that we be proud of the size of our hypocrisy but I think we can and must take pride in how and when we have forged on in spite of that hypocrisy. When the temptation comes to shrink at the dark parts of our soul to gain distance and security our great effort must be in approaching that darkness and giving it the care it needs to be transformed into something else. This place from the moment I walked in was a place of life renewed of courage found of community unfolded but reflecting on my reading from Clarissa Pinkola Estes I am forced to admit that this place was also a place of great death. In love everything becomes picked apart which reminds us. Illusions die expectations die greed for having it all for wanting to have all be beautiful only. All this dies in a very welcome way the birth of a new kind of faith a new kind of religion death do led my Mormon faith to its mostly peaceful end but much more sorrowfully it also saw the death of many of my expectations about what a life free from the constraints of that conservative religion would look like. Yes I had my first coffee here yes I had my first beer here yes people were much more politically aligned with me than I had come to experience in Mormonism but the people here much to my chagrin turned out to be no closer to perfection than anywhere else. What I did find at FUS was a more perfect mirror. I often have said that I've taken the spiritual development track of all the different possible tracks seminary and an internship could take. I was and am still deeply unsure if I am a good fit for ministry or if it is a good fit for me. So I tried to look both deeply inside of myself and deeply inside of the institution I had thoughts of dedicating my life to and what I have found deep inside both is nothing but a mirror a terribly wonderfully fragile mirror. Now we all know that the best mirrors are the most fragile. I don't know if that's actually true but let's all pretend it is for the sake of this metaphor. It has been both wonderfully comforting and terribly convicting to find that there is nothing deep inside except what I bring there and what we bring there the experiences, the connections, the convictions and yes the hypocrisy. I feel like most of my life I have sought out sturdy hard mirrors that I can trust not to break like this faux polished granite and found that they reflect back only the bright parts of life and blur them into near meaninglessness. The destination, the goal I've learned is not an end but a clear picture of the journey both in its wonder and its wretchedness and while this internship has almost certainly been the year where I've seen where that 32% hypocrisy has appeared in its most awful clarity it has also been the year where I'm humble enough to admit that 68% authenticity has shown most clearly through in its soft golden hues and I wouldn't have it any other way. Yes, what I found here was a church full of hypocrites and hippies but mostly hypocrites and I fell immediately in love because I knew because I knew it was a place where my concepts of love and its limits would be challenged in a way that would help me grow into the person I knew I was supposed to be where a more perfect mirror would be held up to my life both the good and the bad because as Pema Children says when we truly confront our wretchedness and hold it in balance with our gloriousness wretchedness can soften us up considerably gloriousness and wretchedness support each other one inspires us the other softens us they go together I keep looking up at the balcony crowd and they're just not there let us recenter for just a moment in this space when Frank Lloyd Wright designed the meeting house and yes, I've been to the archives all your tour guides and confirmed this he had plans on installing multiple water features to balance the blue pools with our red floors including a large reflecting pool where our parking lot is now that's included in most drawings, most sketches but also a below ground pool that extended from the terrace outside of the loja under the floor of the loja right up to the western doors of the landmark auditorium it would have been awesome of course the pools were apparently the first things to get cut with the budget and the floors stayed certainly a wise choice if we struggled to repair the roof imagine how we would have done raising funds to repair the koi pond but since we have no physical pools to soften our backbone of stone my charge to you today is that we each of us must become those soft pools we are each one of us called to preach softness to a world that has grown so incredibly hard on this Memorial Day weekend I think we can all recognize that our country has consistently communally and most often disastrously chosen the hard appearance of strength over the soft and the lives of thousands of our men women and gender queer folks who chose or were compelled into service have suffered the life altering consequences along with countless others who have been receiving ends at the receiving ends of those shows of strength right now this line and it was a mistake right now we are actively witnessing children torn from their parents from their parents arms from their parents arms on a daily basis all in the name of border security yes our hard strength to take so many forms beyond brute military might does often in reality protect us and there is so much in this world that needs real protecting but it is not it is not our hardness that will save us but our softness that strength and hardness will not do and not a softness that comes despite our hypocrisy but the softness that comes from learning to hold our hypocrisy and our lust and our sloth and all our failings and the tender embrace of our full selves the great pseudo love of unitarian universalism to get back to James Luther Adams is the love that says when you're good enough when you're right enough then you will be worthy of love the great temptation of the liberal church will always be to use our machinations of moral strength to attempt to turn our soft parts hard but the great redemption will be when we are but the great redemption will be when we are able to use our soft parts our weaknesses to turn our hard spots soft only this tender embrace will save thank you before we go on I'd like to thank our volunteers for today our sound operator David Briles am I saying that right David Briles? I'm sorry Dorit Bergen is our worship associate our greeter is Pamela McMullen our usher is Tom Dolmage and Ostrom, Marty Hollis our coffee is being made today by Nancy Kosiff Sandra Plisch our flowers today are offered by Joanne and Alan Heitman and our tour guide is John Powell and if you'd like a tour of this building I don't know if John's here do I see him? I think I did well you can gather here underneath this window and the tour guide may or may not I'll show you around the building our offering today our offering today goes to a group that even in my poor days of seminary I tried to support 100% of the gifts received today's offering will be given to the Unitarian Universalist Association to help fund their promise and practice campaign for the black lives of Unitarian Universalism this nationwide campaign asked congregations to take the lead in the effort to collectively work to dismantle white supremacy culture and connect our finances with our theological values please be generous I presume he's coming back for the benediction there he is so T.K. is the 10th and the last of the ministerial interns that I have had the pleasure and the honor of supervising during my time here at First Unitarian Society and each of these men and women have been distinctive in their own right and each has brought to us here at FUS fresh ideas, innovative ways of conducting worship and of educating members of the congregation while I as the supervisor and you as the congregation have provided these interns with opportunities to find their footing as prospective ministers they in turn have served us with a rich assortment of gifts and talents as someone who found his way into our faith tradition via First Unitarian Society and who then decided to prepare for a possible career in ministry as the result of that experience it was especially gratifying to have spent the last 10 months working with T.K. Browning there is no doubt that T.K. has a mind of his own and he has exhibited a willingness perhaps even an eagerness to take calculated risks of time like calling out our hypocrisy for instance and as a result there have been a few surprises along the way these past 10 months and in this respect you know what I recognize myself at the tender age of 32 and for the most part I found at his age that a little audacity served both me and my congregations well it's too easy to get trapped in the tried and true patterns that can lead to a bit of stagnation now as an intern however we all have the benefit of sympathetic in-house mentors and observers who can provide you with invaluable feedback and I hope that's been true for you that is not always true when you have been called to serve your own congregation nevertheless I will miss the rich conversations that T.K. and Kelly and I have had weekly in the course of this internship I will miss the collegiality that I have enjoyed with T.K. as he gained confidence and took on more and more serious responsibilities I will miss Caitlyn and the kids I will miss T.K. and his millennialist challenges to my own baby boomer sensitivities although my own son will easily fill that void and so T.K. you shall be missed while here you have helped to validate the importance of First Unitarian Society as a teaching church, a teaching congregation and at some point in your own work life if life carries you in this direction I hope that the experience of working with the next generation of UU ministers will mean as much to you as it has to me thank you and now Lorna I'd like for her to step forward Lorna has served on our ministerial intern support committees for the last five years maybe even before that but we've had a succession of five interns T.K. being the last in recent history I'd first like to introduce the intern ministry team the Unitarian Universalist Association requires that in addition to professional mentors and supervisors interns have a lay group that gives them the experience of getting feedback of all sorts as T.K. will as he becomes a minister and to learn how to listen to lay people and the feedback that we all give so generously to to our ministers Michael and Kelly can attest to that so I'd like to acknowledge a couple of people who couldn't be here today Ann Gullickson and Luke Anderman are not here Katie Beam, Andy Levy and Kirsten Sieber and I'm Lorna Aronson the presentation of the notebook is one of the rituals that we've developed with our interns for the last five years in case you haven't had an opportunity to leave a message for T.K.'s notebook these sheets will be out at a table in the Commons and I hope that you'll leave a message that he'll carry with you first of all it's our tradition to leave you with these messages that really represent just a few of the people whose lives you've touched over the last ten months and so I hope that as you go on your journey and you begin to reflect back on what this was for you that you will take a look at the notebook and read a message of a few of the people whose lives you've touched for the last year and now Kirsten so we also would like to give you a little bit of the meeting house to take with you you're gonna be my Vanna inside is a chalice that was made by Dave Weber and it was made from some stone from the meeting house and then Lorna made the lovely box with some iconic FUS images and I hope that you think of all of us every time you fire that thing up please turn to 685 and the gray hymnal for the unison reading and rise in body or in spirit what we call a beginning is often the end and to make an end is to make a beginning the end is where we start from we shall not cease from exploration and at the end of all our exploring we will arrive where we started and know the place for the first time hymn number one please stay standing thank you for being here our service here has ended but our service to the world is beginning once again please be seated, go in peace and enjoy the poster