I want to share with you a true story of humans and the earth. It was during his last weeks in office in 2008 that George W. Bush made a last-ditch, lame duck effort to fulfill his promises to the oil and gas industry by opening up a large piece of BLM land in Utah for drilling (BLM, which in this case does not stand for Black Lives Matter, but rather Bureau of Land Management). They would auction off leases covering over 22,000 acres of land. The land was a sensitive watershed area near Arches National Park and Dinosaur National Monument. If you’ve ever had the privilege of being out there, it’s incredibly beautiful – it’s all red rocks in crazy formations, like you’re in a Roadrunner movie. Of course, environmental groups and the National Park Service opposed the leases, saying that the process was too rushed and there had been no time for an environmental review of the land. Despite the protests, the auction was scheduled and the auction happened. Bush was determined to get this done before he left office. It was a time in many ways parallel to this one.

 

The auction house was full on that December afternoon in 2008 – mostly older oil and gas men wanting to get in on the good deal before Obama took over. But one young 35-year-old had slipped in as well. His name was Tim DeChristopher. (The name might sound familiar because he actually preached here last year.) He was a Unitarian Universalist and an environmental activist. He declared his intention to bid on the land and took a paddle. The bidding began. DeChristopher initially intended to just force the companies to pay more for the land by bidding the price up. But as he sat there and watched this scene unfold, something shifted in him. He was watching humans selling and buying public land in order to drill holes in the earth in order to extract oil and burn it, humans in real time creating the climate crisis, humans blithely causing the scorching of the earth, humans accelerating our own demise. He saw a fellow activist from his church across the room quietly crying. Something shifted inside him and he decided to go all the way. He kept bidding until all of the other bidders fell away. At $1.8 million, he won the land, the gavel fell, and the auction ended. It didn’t take long for them to figure out that DeChristopher had no $1.8 million dollars. He was arrested by federal agents and taken into custody.

 

This year at First U we are telling a series of stories about humans and the earth, one story from each of our Unitarian Universalist sources. Today’s story comes from the second source: “Words and deeds of prophetic people which challenge us to confront powers and structures of evil with justice, compassion, and the transforming power of love.” Tim DeChristopher is our “prophetic person” this morning. Two things happened as a result of his illegal land grab: 1. In the time it took to reschedule the auction, Obama’s administration had taken over, they declared the lease of the land illegal on environmental grounds, and the auction never happened.  2. After a long court battle, Tim DeChristopher was sentenced to prison and ended up serving almost two years. These two facts are closely intertwined. It was Tim DeChristopher’s prophetic words and deeds that were responsible for both.

 

It’s clear enough how his deed was responsible – his fake bidding led to both saving the land and to his being charged with two felonies. But his words and the indirect effects of his action turned out to be the most powerful thing of all. It took two years for his trial, conviction, and sentencing. During those two years he became defiant. He became a leader in the environmental movement. He started an organization called Peaceful Uprising. He became a public speaker calling out those in power, warning of the dangers of climate change, calling on people to follow his lead, to engage in civil disobedience with the moral authority of knowing that the future of humanity is at stake.

Kevin Jagoe, Ministerial Intern

We will explore the challenges and deep rewards of caring for others and ourselves. How does caring deepen our community here at First U and help us live our lives more fully?

Astrophysicists these days like to say that there is not just one universe, but many. That’s if by “universe” you mean everything you could possibly see, reach, know about, get to, or that could possibly affect you in even the slightest way. Anything o...

Jack Kramer is a welder. He works in a South Chicago plant where they assemble railroad cars. He’s in his sixties and he works with about 200 other people in a room full of noisy machines raising and lowering giant metal plates all day, surrounded by sprays of sparks. In the summer it’s roasting in there and in the winter, freezing cold. But Jack loves his job – so much so that he has worked there for 30 years and has turned down numerous offers of promotions. He doesn’t want to be anyone’s boss – he wants to weld. And he is extraordinarily good at it. Everyone knows him and thinks of him as the MVP of the plant. They say that without Jack, they might as well shut down right now. Jack has mastered every part of the plant’s operation. If someone is out sick, he can do their job; if something breaks, he can fix it.

 

How is it that Jack is so singularly happy and so good at what he does? So many of his coworkers are just punching the clock and counting the days till retirement. And so many people in jobs that are more prestigious and supposedly more challenging – surgeons and lawyers, for example – can find themselves bored and miserable. In my experience as a minister talking with people, so many of us feel a vague sense of stuckness -- a grating, dragging resistance as we try to move through our day. We feel like we can’t quite get the momentum to really get going in the work of our lives. What is Jack’s secret sauce?

 

When Jack works, he gets into a state known as “flow.” Flow is an experience that hopefully all of us have at least occasionally. It’s where you get completely lost in what you’re doing. You are 100% focused on it; you lose track of time. You are bringing your full focused energy and skill to an activity that requires exactly that amount of energy and skill. In other words, you are having to try as hard as you can and you’re succeeding. You can experience flow in just about any activity – not something passive like taking a bath, but anything where you’re actively doing something. Flow can happen in playing basketball, it can happen at work solving problems, it can happen in playing the piano or singing or performing surgery. It can happen through intense conversation. It can happen in teaching. It can happen in cooking dinner or cleaning the house. It can happen in sex. It can happen, as we’ve seen, in roller-skating. In can happen playing video games. And it can definitely happen through meditation, ritual, or prayer. I experience flow sometimes when I’m writing and I used to experience it when I was rock climbing. The whole world would vanish except for the warm rock face in front of me – its tiny cracks and bumps and little bugs and weeds drifting downward as I slowly worked my way up the cliff. It was amazing.

 

The most important aspect of flow from a spiritual standpoint is that in flow you lose yourself. You become completely absorbed. If you think about a sponge absorbing liquid, you are the liquid. The sponge soaks up a spill on the kitchen table and the liquid vanishes and dissipates into the fibers of the sponge. The liquid is still there, but it’s no longer a discrete entity. When Jack Kramer is asked how he learned to repair complex machinery, he explains that he’s been fixing things from the time he was a little kid. If his family’s toaster was broken he would get a screwdriver, open the toaster up, look at all the parts, and ask himself, “If I were this toaster, what would be wrong with me?” He would then become able to see the problem and repair it. He had to empathically identify with the toaster, lose himself into the being of the machine, in order to access flow and fix it.

 

The guy who coined the term “flow” is a Hungarian psychologist named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. You can see the spelling of that name in the attribution of the quote at the top of your order of service. He built a career on researching the experience of flow – what it is, what it does for us,

Who here likes mosquitoes? Anybody? I don’t either. If there’s any mosquito within a mile, it’s going to find me and bite me. Most people don’t like them. But most people can’t do anything about them. In fact, in Florida and Puerto Rico, people really, really want to get rid of them right now because they’re carrying a dangerous disease and it’s hard to figure out what to do about it. But on a little island in Maine, called Cranberry Island, a hundred years ago, they got rid of their mosquitoes. Cranberry Island is called Cranberry Island because it has cranberries growing on it. Or at least, it used to. Cranberries grow in bogs. Cranberry bogs. A bog is a kind of a swamp and mosquitoes love to lay their eggs in swamps. So it used to be that Cranberry Island had lots of cranberries and lots of mosquitoes and people were very fed up (with the mosquito part). A reporter in 1928 wrote, “They have become so prolific that to venture from one's house after dark was a sure means of returning covered with lumps.”

 

So one day, along came an ex-army major named Edwin M. Skinner who told them, “For $12,000 I will solve your mosquito problem.” The people said, “you’re hired!” So Major Skinner proceeded to empty all the water out of the cranberry bogs. Now unfortunately cranberry bogs don’t come with a built-in drain, like a bathtub, where you can just pull a lever and let all the water out. Major Skinner had to dig hundreds of ditches using a machine which they say, “cut through roots and turf with the precision of a razor blade swiping through a sheet of paper.” Once these ditches were dug deep enough, the water from the cranberry bogs would run out to the sea. The reporter wrote that he once watched “literally thousands of mosquito larvae being carried on a miniature torrent” out of the bogs and “to the broad sweep of the Atlantic Ocean.” And it worked. No more mosquitoes. No more cranberries, but no more mosquitoes.

 

Meanwhile the fishing industry was booming. Generations of lobstermen, crabbing, giant trawlers catching cod and millions of fish every year. People made a lot of money over the last hundred years catching and selling all those fish and lobsters.

 

My family and I, not knowing any of this history, rented a house for a week on Cranberry Island this summer. We took the ferry over, noticing all the buoys marking lobster traps on the way. We arrived at the dock and got into the car that the owners had left for us there with the key in it since the island was so small, even if someone wanted to steal a car, there would be nowhere to put it and nowhere to drive it. It was beautiful there. Woods, ocean, big sky, three beaches, one with no waves, one with small waves, and one with wild waves crashing on the rocks. There was only one road on the island, one little general store and one café, open a just few hours a day. Best of all, there was almost no cell reception on the island. This was a paradise. We went to bed that first night and it was a little chilly but we decided to open the windows. We expected that when we opened them, all the night sounds would pour in. But there was silence. Complete silence. No crickets. No cicadas. No seagulls. Silence. It was kind of strange. We looked out the window and after watching in the dark for a few minutes, we saw a firefly. A single, lone firefly and no others. Usually where there’s one, there’s a whole sparkling field of them. We didn’t think much about it. We went to sleep and slept deeply.

 

The next morning we went to the beach and my kids and I went off to look for tide pools. I had been telling them about all the amazing creatures we might find in the tide pools – starfish and sea anemones and crabs and iridescent seaweed. But we looked and looked in one tide pool after another and there was nothing. Occasionally some little snails called periwinkles, but no other life. And then we saw a seagull soaring overhead and we realized that it was the first one.

When I’m trying to get my kids to taste a new food, I often give them the following speech: “Life is like Coney Island. There are all different kinds of rides. Big rides, small rides, fast rides, slow rides. Some of them go up and some go down and some...

An hour before my husband Jeff’s high school graduation, he was nowhere to be found. He had left the house that morning, informing his parents that he would not be going to his graduation. He had just gotten the news that a friend of his had been in a terrible accident and was very badly hurt. Jeff had no interest in sitting through some endless ceremony, listening to maudlin speeches, and feeling sad. So he went out and found a nice tree to sit under instead along with his girlfriend at the time.

 

Meanwhile, two friends of his stopped by his house to pick him up. They learned from Jeff’s mother that he was planning to skip his graduation and she didn’t know where he was. But they quickly guessed where he would have gone. They drove over to his special, favorite tree, and sure enough, there he was, lying on his back in the grass, gazing at the sky. Jeff looked over and saw his two friends approaching. He thought to himself, “They’re going to try to talk me into going. Fat chance!” But they didn’t. They simply picked him up. One grabbed him by the ankles, the other by the arms and they carried him to the car. They said, “You idiot. You’re not missing your high school graduation. And your mother is in tears, by the way.” And so it was that Jeff attended his graduation after all.

 

I can certainly relate to what Jeff was feeling. Some of the most boring hours of my life have been the hours that I spent in the three graduations that I’ve been a part of. I remember the sinking feeling each time when I realized that yes, they really are going to call the name of every single one of the millions of people here and wait for them to walk across the stage to get their diploma. They’re really, actually going to do that. And my big moment will be being handed a piece of paper. Please tell me I’ll get these hours back at the end of my life?

 

I bet some of you feel the same way about these things. And some of us love these things. Either way, we do them. And generally, when we look back, we’re glad that we did. Graduations, bridging ceremonies, new member ceremonies, weddings, memorial services. They mark a moment of transition – a moment when we are changing from one thing to another. They say to us, “okay, from now on, you’re not what you were before, you’re something new. You’re no longer a youth, you’re a young adult. Boom. You’re no longer a visitor to First U; you’re a member of the community. Boom.”

 

But we all know that it doesn’t exactly work that way. We don’t become something new all at once, at any one moment, one day, even one year. Almost everything is a gradual process. Those of you who joined the congregation today – Diana, Daniel, Sofia, Matt, Frank, Kristina, Jason, Robert, Chelsea, Clare, Matt, Kermit, and Lindsey –

your process of becoming part of this community started long before today and will continue long after today. Those of you who are bridging – Ethan, Marco, and Ben – your process of growing from a youth to a young adult started long before today and will continue long after today. And it’s always been like that. When it’s your birthday, you know that you’re not suddenly a year older. It’s so annoying (at least it used to be to me) when people say, “So how does it feel to be 9?” And you want to say, “It feels exactly how it felt to be 8.”

 

But think about a life without any ceremonies. Without any way to celebrate growing up or changing. Think about how a caterpillar turns into a butterfly. It’s a process. It takes over a week, which, for a caterpillar is a long time. It happens so gradually, I wonder if the caterpillar is even aware of the change as it’s happening. I wonder if it senses some magical moment inside the chrysalis when suddenly it gets its butterfly soul. And by the time it’s a butterfly, I wonder if it even remembers having been a caterpillar. It’s kind of sad to think that it would go through this incredible change without even realizing it.

Until just now, there was really no natural and obvious way for me to introduce the topic of how Microsoft Word relates to the First Principle of Unitarian Universalism. There was no nice segue that I could think of from any hymn to software. No humoro...