 The First Unitarian Society! My name is Kelly Aspruth-Jackson and I'm one of the ministers here. Today I'm joined by the worship team of Drew Collins, Linda Warren, and Daniel Carnes, and by the special guest musicians Philip Delacuese and Joyce Carey. The vision of FUS is growing souls, connecting with one another and embodying our UU values in our lives, our community, and our world. For those worshiping with us in person, either here or in the atrium, here in the atrium or in the landmark auditorium, it is a joy to be with you in time and space. We ask that you wear your mask so long as you are indoors with us, and that you not sing along with the hymns, though we do invite you to hum. Immediately following the postlude, we ask you to help us keep everyone as safe as possible by not lingering here in the atrium or in the building in general. You are welcome and invited to socialize outside, and if you're the parent of a child in the Religious Exploration program, please note that you'll be meeting them outside of the landmark area. For those joining us virtually today, we are so glad that you are with us. We hope you will be able to join us for our virtual coffee hour immediately following worship at 11 o'clock, the 11 o'clock service on Sunday. The information for joining can be found on the homepage of our website, FUSMadison.org, as well as on the slide that we 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 about upcoming programs and activities. I invite you now to join in a moment of silence to center yourselves and bring yourselves fully into this time as we join together once again in community. We are here as we are. Mortal, concerned, life-affirming, turned towards joy, facing our woes. To worship, to behold the mysteries of life and death without shield of creed or comfort of credulity. May our celebration in word, in silence, sign, and song help move us into the company of that great cloud of witnesses who lived to unveil ever deeper truth, who yielded the wine of faithfulness when history's hard press was upon them, who honed their lives no less fragile or strong than our own on the whetstone of your demands and ecstasies, oh love. Life of our own lives. We begin again, intent on the good. I invite you to join me in the words for the kindling of our chalice flame. 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, may we be loving, and in loving may we find peace. Let us join together in singing hymn number 134, Our World is One World. If you're worshiping in person, we invite you to hum. Our world is one world. What touches one affects us all. The seas that wash us round about, the clouds that cover up, the rains that fall, affect us all. This is a story from the Haudenosaunee Nation, the indigenous people of most of New York State, parts of southern Ontario, the land where I grew up. There are many different versions of this story and I am going to do my best to tell you one that is as authentic as I can make it to the people who told it to me in the first place. This is the story of how the world began. A long time ago, all of the people that there were lived up in the sky. There were no people on earth. There wasn't even any earth yet, just the great unbounded water. The people that lived in the sky did not ever get sick or die. They just went on living the same as they had always been and no new people came to join them. And one day, one particular woman became the first person ever to be sick and she was very ill and her parents were very afraid on her behalf what would happen to her. No one had ever been sick before, you understand. And her father had a dream and in this dream, he saw the great tree of light that stood in the center of the sky because there wasn't a sun, of course, yet. So there had to be light that came from somewhere and it came from this great tall tree. And in the dream, it seemed to him that his daughter might get better if he cleared a space for her down at the roots of the tree and let her lie there next to the roots, next to where the tree of light drew its strength and ability to exist up out of the ground. And so he did just that. He dug a hole, he made her a little bed there, nice and comfortable, down among the roots, and he just let her rest there for a while. And it may be that if that is all that had happened, she would have gotten better and everything would have been fine, but there was someone else in this story who was not happy with the situation. He was jealous in some way or perhaps, like I said, there are many different versions of this story. Perhaps he thought that as she was getting healthier, it was going to diminish the tree and the light that all of them depended on. So whoever he was and for whatever reason he chose to do it, he came to her while she was lying among the roots of the tree, trying to get better, and he pushed her down further into the hole that her father had dug by those roots. And she fell through the hole down towards the waters below, down out of the sky. And all the animals, all the animals that like the water but don't live entirely in the water, so not the fish or the sharks or the octopus, no, the animals like the duck and the goose and the heron, the turtle, the muskrat and the toad, they were all wading down there on the water and they saw this woman fall out of the sky. And the ducks and the geese flew up and helped her come down safely towards the water, but human beings aren't like ducks and geese. We might like the water okay, but we can't just hang out on it indefinitely. So they gave her a place to rest on turtle's back. Turtle was a pretty big turtle, you understand. And she found that when she came to rest on the back of the turtle, she was a lot better than she'd felt for days, for weeks. She didn't feel nearly as sick anymore, but she did need a bigger place to stay than just the back of this one admittedly large turtle. So she had an idea. She said, there must be some earth down here. It can't all be up in the sky. Maybe there's some earth that you go down all the way to the bottom of the water. And she explained her idea to the animals and they thought about it, and they sort of took turns diving down deep, duck dove down and toad dove down. There's disagreement about which one of them did the best job, but I like the version of the story where muskrat went all the way down as far as he could as long as he could hold his breath and finally came back up to the surface and he had just a little bit of dirt just under the fingernails of one of his little claws. I like it because it has a nice message about how there's a purpose to that dirt that gets under your fingernails. And the woman who fell from the sky, she took that little bit of dirt and she spread it out on the back of turtle's shell. And turtle grew and the dirt grew with it and spread out so wide and so far as to make the whole land of the entire world on the back of turtle's shell. And she took the little bit of dust that was left in her hair from her place in the sky and she threw it up above herself and made the stars and the sun and the moon and everyone in the world so the story goes came from that one woman who fell through a hole in the sky. The stars came from her, the moon and the sun and the earth spread out on turtle's back. I invite you 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. This week's outreach offering will benefit Freedom Inc, a Black and Southeast Asian nonprofit organization that works with low to no income communities of color. They work to couple direct services with leadership development and community organizing for social, political, cultural, and economic change. Freedom Inc is challenging the root causes of violence, poverty, racism, and discrimination. They believe that people who are most affected by these issues must have a voice, power, resources, and choice in order for true social change to happen. Please give generously. You will see on the screen that you can donate directly from our website, fussmedicine.org. You will also see our text to give information there as well. We thank you for your generosity and your faith in this life we create together. Thank you for sharing your gifts with us today. The earth, the planet on which all of us live, is a little over four and a half billion years old. About three and a half billion years ago, something happened that neither religious thought nor scientific inquiry has been able to fully and comprehensively explain yet. The first life began. We are all descended from that first early blossoming of microscopic life. Not its only, its final, or its most important manifestations, but a part of the vast interconnected web of all living things, nonetheless. The molecules that compose our bodies are made up of this planet whose waves and storms, seasons, and tectonic shifts all shape our lives. In a material sense, we are expressions of the earth, and in a practical sense, we exist in dialogue with it. The character of our planet shapes us, and what we choose to do shapes that same character in turn. In the 39th chapter of the Dauda Ching, we read, the clarity of the sky prevents it falling. The firmness of the earth prevents it splitting. The strength of the spirit prevents it being used up. The fullness of the valley prevents it running dry. Clarity, firmness, and strength. The experience of the natural world, watching the clouds, running sand through our fingers, splashing in river, can replenish us with these and other qualities. But as not all of us can equally access it, some creativity and imagination are called for. The line between what is natural and what is unnatural is actually a wavy thing, an arbitrary one, in fact. I don't mean to say that asphalt is as good as a meadow field or that plastic trees are suitable substitutes for real ones, but that fragments of the irrepressible force of nature can be found almost anywhere if we look closely enough. In the water from our faucets, the sprouting shoots in the window box garden or the sleeping murmurs of a companion animal. There is a poem which speaks to the healing and replenishing power of reconnecting with the natural world we too often imagine ourselves to be cut off from by the farmer and poet Wendell Berry. If you have been a Unitarian Universalist long enough, I am nearly certain that you have heard it before, but it's worth considering again. So here are his words. When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water and I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world and am free. Wendell Berry, who is famous for his poetry, but always describes himself as a farmer first and a poet only somewhere after that, speaks wonderfully and beautifully about the renewing quality of nature. But this is only one dimension of what it means to experience care and reverence for our earthly home. And it is by far the easiest dimension. Our dialogue with the earth is not always a happy one, caught as we are in the grinding gears of an economic system which treats everyone and everything as a commodity to be exploited. The same farmer and poet puts the choice between fundamental human ideals grounded in care for each other and our planet and the convenient falsehoods of the modern economic and political system in very stark terms. His poem, entitled Questionnaire, is written as a form for the reader to complete with five numbered entries. Number one, how much poison are you willing to eat for the success of the free market and global trade? Please name your preferred poisons. Number two, for the sake of goodness, how much evil are you willing to do? Fill in the following blanks with the names of your favorite evils and acts of hatred. Number three, what sacrifices are you prepared to make for culture and civilization? Please list the monuments, shrines and works of art you would most willingly destroy. Number four, in the name of patriotism and the flag, how much of our beloved land are you willing to desecrate? List in the following spaces the mountains, rivers, towns, farms you could most readily do without. And number five, state briefly the ideas, ideals or hopes, the energy sources, the kinds of security for which you would kill a child. Name please the children whom you would be willing to kill. We see more clearly now in the second poem, the despair that Wendell Berry spoke of in the first. Perhaps, like me, it makes you long for the comfort of the wood-drake and the day-blind stars. That the grace of the world would take away our anguish at its brokenness. After he attained enlightenment and began teaching others his spiritual insights, it is said that Gautama Buddha had a practice of trying to speak to his audiences in terms he believed that they could best understand. So it was in one example when the Buddha addressed an audience of 1,000 monks. These monks had all been practitioners of Agni Hotra, a particular ritual involving building and praying over a sacred fire. So the Buddha addressed them through a subject he knew they were already familiar with. His address, the Adita Sutta, or fire sermon, begins like this. Everything is on fire. What is on fire? The eyes are on fire, the ears, the nose, the tongue, the body, and the mind, all are on fire. Everything that these organs can sense too is on fire, sights and sounds, smells and tastes, the sensation of touch, and all the thoughts of the mind, these are also on fire. The very capacities of the senses themselves, seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking, even these are on fire. They are all burning with the flames of desire, aversion, and illusion. They are consumed by the fires of birth, old age, sickness and death, and scorched by the flames of pain, anxiety, frustration, worry, fear, and despair. Pleasure, pain, and the absence of both, these too, burn with the fire of want and fear and delusion. With this opening, the teacher has just laid out a very hard line for his students. The world is burning. By seeing or tasting or even just thinking about an object, we innately come to desire or fear that thing according to whether we expect from it pleasure or pain. Our fears and desires distort these perceptions. We cannot understand what we see, trust the report of our own eyes, or even appreciate what it means to see anything at all because each of these is shaped by the wants of the body and the mind. So what is the student to do? The sermon's conclusion is that to overcome this predicament, the student must become aware of the fire. They must recognize it and so become disenchanted with all these burning things, letting passion for them die away. This is the only way to be released from the cycle of desire and fear. In our current age, we might quote the Buddha's first line in the Adita Sutta and accurately observe, everything is on fire. What is on fire? The cars that we drive are on fire. The money we spend is on fire. The places where we work, play, worship, and live are on fire. The food that we eat is on fire. On fire with the literal burning of fossil fuels and the consumption of the natural world into profits and public waste. On fire also with the exploitation of human beings, with the many overlapping and interlocking structures of oppression by which some are diminished and others exalted, by which over long centuries the wealth of this and many other nations, and in particular the very wealthiest people in this and many other nations has been built up at the cost of countless precious living things, including and especially whole races and cultures of human beings. All of this is profoundly sad and that feeling should not be pushed aside or ignored. It's a sadness that deserves to be experienced. When faced with a situation that is objectively sorrowful, we should not run from our grief to try to push it down or wish it away. Our feelings need the space to be felt, just as people and other living things need the space to live. But when we open ourselves as we must to the feeling of grief, the accordant risk is that we will lose track of our capacity to feel anything else because as sad as the world can be, it is always more than just sadness. Getting lost in our grief is ultimately as incomplete and disconnected from the fullness of reality as trying to ignore hard truths to begin with. This often happens because we become focused on what we cannot change. The warming of our planet is already happening. Damage to our ecosystems has already taken place and we know from dependable scientific analysis that more such detrimental change is going to take place even if the entire global economic systems and structure of the industrial world changed overnight. The effects of what's already been done would continue to reverberate but this does not mean that we have no ability to make change or responsibility to act. It is not possible to turn back the clock but it is possible to reduce harm being done and to begin to move our planet towards a more stable equilibrium after a process of major disruption. To say that because the situation is painful and sad we can't stand to do anything about it only doubles the loss. Compounding everything we cannot get back with everything else we will lose by not acting. According to the Talmud, that central text of the wisdom of rabbinic Judaism, whoever destroys a life destroys the whole world but whoever saves one life, saves the whole world. As individuals or even as a community it may not seem possible to us to turn back the tide of ecological change but it is possible for us to take action, to do more of what we know to be right and less of what we know to be wrong. It would be a terrible mistake to let grief that we could not save the world all on our own stand in the way of action that could save even one single life. To slow the destructive reconfiguration of our planet's weather and avoid the worst effects in a very real sense to save current world civilization which weaves together the lives of more than seven and a half billion people. We will have to stop burning fossil fuels. The clock is running and by several reasonable estimates we have only so much carbon-based fuel we can use before crossing over into a world whose storms and temperatures and sea levels will completely upend the current society. The estimates say that we know of almost five times as much gas and coal in the earth as we can afford to burn. To protect the world we have we will have to resolve as a species not to burn most of that carbon by the same token the unjust structures that shape our relationships a person to person community to community and nation to nation are so long ingrained and deeply rooted that when we face them honestly it is easy to be flooded by despair. As I say these words to you I am standing on Ho-Chunk land a patch of earth that was stolen from the Ho-Chunk nation who are an indigenous people whose territory touches parts of what are today commonly called Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois and Missouri. The site of our sacred space is just one of countless places stolen in the process of colonization of this continent by white European settlers taken from an ancestral responsibility to become a thing which could be bought and sold over and over again for the profit and advantage of a select few correcting the massive wrong of the colonial history of this country of Indian removal and the closely related evil of transatlantic slavery of the intense legal racism that followed the end of explicitly genocidal policies and of the ongoing systemic injustice we live with still again it is easy to look at the terrible mess and become paralyzed or numb but also again the only greater tragedy would be not to do what we can not to answer the moral demand of our hour with every ounce of our creativity and grit the hard news is that all the great evils of our world are deeply interconnected and the good news is that all the great evils of our world are deeply interconnected so that addressing one will ultimately mean challenging all of them messages like this one often end with some sort of pitch for personal change drive less recycle more stop eating red meat all those are fine things to do and should not be neglected the effort to fundamentally change humanity's relationship to our planet will however also require change in public policy we and others like us those who care about the world and particularly about the people who live upon it and at the mercy of it will have to make it a central mission of our age to see a dramatic shift in the organization of society the individual and the collective goals here should not be seen as being in competition both are sorely needed so i want to close with a specific invitation members of the f us sustainability team have planned or helped to plan two different but complementary events for next week on next sunday the 17th there will be a caravan protest and community celebration organizing opposition to basing f 35 fighter jets here in madison a choice with profound environmental consequences including and especially its impact on the people who live closest to the airbase and one week from monday the 18th there will be an interfaith prayer vigil at the state house as part of a two-day global call to action for climate justice as part of that international action will be displaying prayer squares with messages of aspiration and calls for change to be sent on the upcoming un climate change conference in glasgow scottland if you've been at all persuaded of a sense of moral urgency and are looking for something concrete to do i hope you'll join me in attending either or both of these events and as an even easier first step towards deeper engagement from those of you here in person there's going to be a table waiting for you outside at which you can create one of those prayer squares if you like we cannot truly revere and appreciate the world without facing the pain and the brokenness of it too but falling into the trap of powerlessness would be just as much of a mistake as ignoring the planet's problems entirely ultimately our best defense against the quicksand of despair is to find ways to collaborate and cooperate with each other to connect and share our vision of the world as it could be in order to strengthen the process of positive in order to strengthen the process of positive change so that it can outlive us all and survive our grief no matter how deep or how real to live out the deep truth that we are of the earth each of us and all of us and inescapably connected by both our past and our present time so let us pursue a future that fully appreciates and expresses that connection each week we gather with hearts that are heavy with sorrow and hearts that are filled with joy we share these here in community knowing that we are held in love this week we light a candle for the commemoration of indigenous people's day this coming monday we call forward in our hearts powerful anger and grief over 529 years of colonization and genocide and we are also called to mind the persistence and power of the indigenous people of this continent of turtle island holding in profound tension the catastrophic injustice that we all still live in the midst of and the beauty and creativity of a vast family of cultures religions and languages still being lived and kept and practiced by very real people determined to survive and to thrive as we hold this tension together let us share in this prayer written by michael l adams mike is a lilwat indian whose ancestral lands are in a place more widely known today as british columbia he is also a second generation unitarian universalist and a member of the unitarian church of los alamos new mexico for those of us who like me are not native to this place or to this part of the earth i ask you particularly to listen to mike's words with a special care he speaks on behalf of a community that you and i do not belong to you bound by ancestry culture and experience at the same time that he also speaks from our collective community bound together by our shared religious tradition here are his words for the generations who survived being hunted who endured the theft and destruction of our people's lands and who preserved through the theft and indoctrination of our children we are grateful that you survived and for the resilience you have passed on to us because you did these things we are still here for the activists who stood against corruption and who forced a spotlight onto our people's mistreatment we are grateful for your commitment because of it we are still here for the people who never consented to the sacrifices that were forced from you we remember you we mourn your suffering and loss we honor you as best we can we do this because we are still here for the future generations we ask that you remember we look to you to keep our people's future alive after we're gone we ask you to find strength in your ancestors and use the resilience of your people to create your future and that of your children we ask you to ensure that when we are gone through you we are still here we also light one candle for all the joys and all the sorrow that live within the sanctuaries of our hearts may they each be held gently in gratitude in love and in hope I offer you these words from the poet Joy Harja remember the sky that you were born under know each of the stars stories remember the moon know who she is remember the sun's birth at dawn that is the strongest point of time remember sundown and the giving away tonight remember your birth know your mother's struggle to give you form and breath you are evidence of her life and her mother's and hers remember your father he is your life also remember the earth whose skin you are red earth black earth yellow earth white earth brown earth we are earth remember the plants trees animal life who all have their tribes their families their histories to talk to them listen to them they are alive poems remember the wind remember her voice she knows the origin of this universe remember you are all people and all people are you remember you are this universe and this universe is you remember all is in motion is growing is you remember language comes from this remember the dance language is that life is remember