Thank you. And also thanks to the organizers for inviting me to speak. So of course the theory of quantum groups and its applications needs no introduction, but maybe the theory of quantum symmetric pairs does. So for now you can think a quantum symmetric pair is like a quantum subgroup. And in the past decade it's become clear that these quantum subgroups have analogues of all the things you know and love about quantum group theory. They appear in categorification, they admit a canonical basis. There's a sure while dualities. And today I'd like to tell you about their applications in low dimensional topology. So this is by means of equivariant factorization homology. And so before I'm getting to applications I'll have to explain what all these words mean. So this is more or less the setup for the talk. So let's dive into it. So what is the geometric context that we're talking about? It's a tangent orbital and so what I mean is a global quotient orbital. So we have a smooth manifold M. There's a finite group acting on it. This action is not necessarily free. So this could have singular points in its quotient. And then so we're specifically talking about framed quotients. So what does it mean for M to be framed? Well we know what that means. It just means we've fixed the trivialization of the tangent bundle. So now you might wonder what is a framing of a global quotient. And so if you think about the orbital in terms of the equivariant geometry of M, that should be an equivariant trivialization of the tangent bundle of M. So equivariant with respect to what? We need to fix some representation of the group gamma such that we can trivialize the tangent bundle equivariantly with respect to that given representation. And that's what I'll call a row-framed global quotient. Now what are examples of these? So let's look at a sort of small group example. So we're taking Z mod 2Z, which I denote by Z2. So for example you might take the 2-disc. You rotate by 180 degrees. That gets a fixed point at the origin. And now with the normal blackboard framing you see that this framing is inverted by the Z2 action. So the sine representation is here, the framing representation. Or similarly you might take 2-disc and we have the free quotient but we've framed them with the opposite framing so that also here we get the sine representation.  So you see 4 fixed points appearing and this again is a sine-framed orbital surface. So these of course fit into a category of framed global quotients and the type of maps that we're considering are framed embeddings but these are framed only up to a prescribed homotopy. So you don't need to preserve the framing on the nose. And in fact there's a whole space of these framed embeddings so it's rather a topological category or an infinity category if you prefer. Now to obtain invariants we're going to think about these orbitals that's glued out of simple pieces. And so if you think about manifolds there's of course only one local piece that one needs namely the disc Rn. But for orbitals locally if you're around some points they might look very differently and this is completely determined by the isotropy group once we have a fixed sort of representation that controls the global geometry. So what are these local pieces? That's a full subcategory that we're going to be looking at of discs and these discs all look as follows. We take some subgroup of the finite group which receives a faithful action on the row and then we can consider this quotient by which I mean we take gamma and Rn and we mod out the diagonal i action. So this is just the amount of cosets of i and gamma copies of Rn and it naturally has one of these row frame structures that we talked about. And so we're going to be thinking about global quotients that's glued from these and we have a symmetric monoidal structure on both these categories given by this joint union. Okay so now this is sort of a natural generalization of the setup of factorization homology as introduced by Ayala Francis so we can define our invariance in the same way. Namely we fix an algebraic gadget called a disc algebra which just means a symmetric monoidal function from our category of discs into our favorite target symmetric monoidal category and then we integrate that's algebraic gadget over the orbit folds by means of a left con extension construction. So if you don't know what left con extensions are let's just not worry about the details but let me tell you some properties of what this construction has. So first by definition it's a functor so this thing is functorial with respect to the framed embeddings which were amorphisms but also the higher morphisms like isotopes of embeddings, isotopes between isotopes and so forth and it's a it's monoidal so taking the disjoint union of two orbit folds the invariance assigned is naturally the tensor product of the separate invariance. And now finally the key property that actually allows us to make computations is so-called tensor excision meaning if we have say some some global quotient that we divide up into two pieces so we've got a piece M plus here which is a gamma invariant piece we have a piece M1 and they intersect over a color gluing as such which is a product of n cross r and what's important here is that this r direction is completely received a trivial action from gamma so gamma is not doing anything on the r direction on this thing. Now what that means for us is that the invariant assigned to this color gluing is a natural E1 structure coming from the r direction so there's an associative algebra structure on this piece of the invariant and it's in fact acting on the invariance left and right just given by embedding that color gluing piece into either the left or the right chunk of this cut-up manifold and so we can compute the invariant as this relative tensor product construction maybe important to note that this is in fact a defining property so if you have some abstract function out of this category of orbitals into a nice enough symmetric monotone category and it satisfies excision then in fact it must be given by a factorization homology construction. So that's the abstract setup and in fact we don't need to think about frames you could do other structure groups but now let's just move to a specific example the one where these quantum symmetric pairs show up okay so we're going to move to two dimensions back to the Z2 group with the sine representation and so first we need to think about what's the kind of algebraic data that we need to fix in order to get invariance so the question is what does it mean to have a symmetric monoidal function out of this category of disks? Well there's only two types of orifold disks in this case we have three quotients and we have the singular quotients at least for this given representation now D and D star which are the names for these orifolds we'll get assigned something and so we're going to be taking our invariance with values in k linear categories so that means one of these functors assigns a category A to D and a category M to D star and the question is what are the structures categories need to have in order to define one of these Z2 disk algebras okay and so the monoidal structure I've made a comment there it's kind of basically what you would imagine it to be it's like a k linear tensor part of k linear categories okay so just let's just look at some embeddings and some isotopes to see what kind of structures appear so one thing you could do well we can take this free quotient and then flip the two disks okay that's an equivariant embedding from this thing to itself and so it's a morphism in our category so that should get assigned a functor which goes from A to A we could also do something else we might take two copies of this D and embed it into D again which results in a functor from the tensor part of A with itself to A okay and then I invite you to think of that as a tensor product functor or we might take a copy of D and a copy of D star and embed that into a bigger copy of D star and what results is a functor from M tensor A to M so these are some of the embeddings but of course there's also higher morphisms so there's also certain isotopes we might look at so for example we might compose the flip embedding twice but that's just a normal embedding the identity embedding so in particular there's an isotope between this composition and the identity embedding given by the trivial isotope and what results then is a natural isomorphism between the square of this functor phi and the identity functor on A otherwise we might take this embedding for the tensor product we can rotate these two disks and what results is a braiding natural isomorphism between the tensor product and the opposite tensor product so this of course reminds us very much of an E2 algebra and now what's interesting here is when we rotate these actions sort of embeddings around the singular points what we notice is that once we end this rotation which is like a half twist the colors red and blue are interchanged which for us was exactly that embedding corresponding to phi so this doesn't get back to the action tensor but actually we're twisting the A component by this functor phi now of course there's a lot more data you might draw like wild embeddings and worry what is corresponding to this but it turns out that all the data you need can be expressed in a small finite list of functors and natural isomorphisms which have summarized here as follows so you well so I've shown a coherence theorem that says if you want to have a z2 disk algebra in this two category of categories actually this is the data that you need you need a braid monodic category with an anti-involution and you need a module category which has what I call a z2 cylinder braiding I'll leave the coherences out at the moment but I'll draw some pictures later so you see what kind of axioms this cylinder braiding should satisfy but then of course the question is where do I get examples of such and this is where the symmetric pairs enter so let me remind you so what is a symmetric pair well I have some semi-simple Li-algebra G with an involution, a Li-algebra involution on it and I'm looking at the sub-Li-algebra fixed points so this is what is called a symmetric pair I've given you some examples and classically these were studied as the infinitesimal data corresponding to a symmetric space so the symmetric space here so think of G theta as the complexified Li-algebra K the complexified Li-algebra of G now people were interested in studying quantum symmetric spaces but they didn't know how to define those and so a natural idea was to try and quantize this infinitesimal data because of course the quantum group was well known so then the question becomes how does one quantize that sub-Li-algebra and interestingly it turns out it doesn't quantize to a sub-hope-algebra of the quantum group rather it's slightly more subtle the thing is you can indeed quantize these which is done in the work of these various people but the sub-algebra B that quantizes U of G theta is actually a co-ideal sub-algebra we'll get back to the relevance of this later now as I promised quantum symmetric pairs should have all the cool stuff quantum groups also have so what do they have that is particularly nice well the quantum group of course has the universal R matrix there is an analog for quantum symmetric pairs called the universal K matrix so what is this so this is due to Balagovic and Kolb and they say every quantum symmetric pair is quasi-triangular by which they mean there is a universal K matrix which solves in every B module this particular equation called the reflection equation and so here I've drawn a topological picture which explains what that equation is saying and so this is the equation corresponding to the braid group of a cylinder and so this K as you can see is appearing here literally as a K in the picture which explains its name and well and so that's more or less all there is to say but there is a subtlety so in fact if you study what the quantum symmetric pairs solve it's not quite this equation rather it's the following equation so there's twists appearing in this reflection equation and this is the actual equation being solved by the quantum symmetric pairs so here phi is some involution on the quantum group and somehow the R matrix is being twisted throughout this equation so if you look at this picture it's not quite clear how to interpret this and in fact I'm proposing we should rather look at some other picture so this was a picture of the braid group of the cylinder which we can think of as the fundamental group of points in a plane but rather I want to propose we need to look at the fundamental group of points in the orbit fold plane so think about this D star then we can draw the following picture so this is a picture of the configuration space of two points in D star this singular orbit fold where this black line is now representing the singularity rather than just drawing the points themselves I've also drawn their Z2 orbit in a different color so a configuration of points in the orbit fold is now a Z2 orbit of points within the orbit fold and what we can see now is that the R matrix is just a double R matrix happening on the points and their Z2 orbits but the K matrix is exchanging the blue braid for its red Z2 orbit braid and so if you think about coloring these pictures by representations in the quantum group we would color the blue braids with normal representations but their Z2 orbits are colored by the twisted representations by phi and so now if we do K2 and then we apply the R matrix we see we need to twist one leg of the R matrix by phi and similarly there twist this one by phi twice and here once which is exactly capturing this twisted reflection equation okay so this is not just some funny way to reinterpret that equation this is actually a profound connection between quantum symmetric pairs and orbit folds namely let us move back to the observables that we discussed before so on the one hand we have the quantum symmetric pair with the various sort of structures that are naturally present and on the other hand we have the local observables for these Z2 disk algorithms as we discussed before so now if we imagine we take the quantum groups category of modules and denoted A and we take the category of modules for the symmetric pair and denoted M then we see that we perfectly match up the structures present between the local observables on the one hand and those present in a quantum symmetric pair on the other so what does that mean? That means that if we take the following notation that the pair rep QG and rep QK is exactly the type of data of a Z2 disk algebra in categories in particular this means we obtain invariance of two dimensional orbit fold surfaces by integrating this Z2 disk algebra and so the question is what do we get? So let's go back to my favorite example of an orbit fold surface we want to understand what is the categorical invariant associated to this orbit fold or rather maybe let's not do this orbit fold but the one I actually computed namely we remove two points on the end and there so we're only left with two fixed points and think about this orbit fold quotient so we are puncturing the torus twice and considering the orbit fold like so now what is the neat thing? Now I can take two copies of D which was this free quotient here and there and I can embed them together with this punctured torus into itself just by drawing back that torus a bit okay? Well by functoriality if I have an embedding as such on the assigned invariance I get a functor as such where D is now my shorthand for this invariance that we are trying to understand So what does this mean that we have a functor as such? Well D is appearing as a module category Now module categories if you're lucky are much easier to understand because there's a lot of structure present in fact we'll make use of the following slogan module categories should be categories of modules so we are supposed to understand what is the algebra object for which this category is appearing as a category of modules now rather than running you through the computation let me rather just explain to you what the algebra is okay so the particular algebra that we're interested in is the algebra of quantum differential operators so let me recall what that actually means so think of differential operators on a group G what should that be? Well we have functions on the group we have sort of this enveloping algebra of vector fields on our group and there's a cross relation because if you want to move the vector fields past functions they're going to take derivative you could write that as a certain specific cross tensor product of UG and OG which is actually a very general hope algebra construction known as the Heisenberg algebra in particular this just generalizes to the quantum setting by replacing UG by UQG and OG by OQG the dual quantum group okay so that's what I mean by this algebra of quantum differential operators so this isn't just an algebra in vector spaces rather it appears naturally inside a certain category so the group G has a natural right action on itself and a natural left action and so this algebra of quantum differential operators is equivariantly quantizing the differential operators with these two actions okay so where should this DQG live it naturally lives in rep QG tensor rep QG which is encoding this left and right action that is naturally present well if DQG is an algebra object in there then in particular we can look at the category of modules for this algebra object internal to rep QG tensor rep QG now this allows us to formulate our results namely if you want to compute the categorical invariance of this punctured torus we get the category of modules for DQG but not in rep QG tensor rep QG rather in rep QK tensor rep QK now recall rep QG acts on rep QK in particular if you have an algebra object inside rep QG it makes sense to look at modules for the algebra object inside rep QK so in particular or similarly if you have an algebra object in the tensor part of rep QG tensor rep QG then this expression makes sense as well but so if we try to sort of unwrap what does that mean well we're looking at modules of this algebra DQG which are equivariant for a left and right K action so those are K cross K equivariant D modules on the group G or if you like those are exactly the quantum D modules double quotient K mod G mod K okay so this is the main result let me maybe say something more because I see I still have some time left so this is interesting and it's quite nice now what can you do with this so this is some category of modules that appears from this equivariant factorization homology construction but that means that this category in particular has lots of extra structure because it is coming from factorization homology so let me maybe try to draw a picture to see what kind of things we can do oh and meanwhile if there's any questions about anything this would be a good time to ask where is the relation double point algebra that's an excellent question let me answer it immediately okay so what can we do so we take our punctured torus now let us take so that's T prime and let us take some copies of D maybe let's take one of those and let's take two copies of D star these clearly embed into T prime just by mapping in these disks in various places so the result is a factor from rep q g n times rep qk two times into this category of D qg modules okay now this factor if we start moving around these disks corresponding to the quantum group these can move around freely so there are two isotopes between this function itself where we've moved around these points now if we just shrink these disks to points that's just the configuration space of points moving around in that orbital torus and so by functorality of the invariant this function naturally receives an action of the orbital group of this torus now in particular one thing the two is just choose things to plug in here so you might choose V being the vector representation of the quantum group for each of these entries and take two characters here of rep qk and then choose a D module here to home width so we're going to home the image of this function landing here this is an interesting D module which means we're going to be looking at the following product and copies of this vector representation a character new mapping into M and maybe we're going to take dual here so that we can move this to the other side because that's actually how it appears in the literature in any case this vector space is receiving an action from bnt mod z2 and for this particular choice of representations this descends to the type c check cn so this was done by David Jordan and Xiao Guan Ma in a paper 10 years ago and now this construction is naturally reappeared in a more conceptual way ok let me end there if you take other surfaces have you computed what you get? so yeah that's a great question so what I've said so far is of course specific to framed things and there's not a large supply of two dimensional framed orbital surfaces so one thing that you would have to do now is say ok the extra structure you need to go to an oriented version of this TQFT and so for the quantum group it's quite clear there's some ribbon element for this quantum symmetric pair actually that's still to be worked out so that's work in progress now once we've pinned down that structure which must be there then we can start computing for general surfaces what the invariants are but if you look at sort of the work that David and his collaborators did some of the key ingredients for building all surfaces are DQG together with the annulus computation those two are done so I think that gives us a lot of information about what to expect in two dimensions is there a reason you'd expect only the only sort of interesting group to choose in order to take all the folding of the spectator to be Zmod 2? what would you expect Zmod 2? would you take much more expectations? that's a great question well so for example Zmod 3 I think would be actually very interesting so there's not yet a theory of quantum symmetric pairs for order 3 in volution of the quantum group but I and others expect there will be examples if you look at D4 and the triality this is hinting us that there will be an analog if you look away from like more general things say you do D8 somehow the like if I draw a picture of the type of strata that appear you would get something like so maybe so what kind of the shame is is that if I take an embedding of like the free quotient with all these copies there's no way to move so the embedding cannot move through these I guess singular strata and so somehow these isolated points they have very kind of rich braided structures and for something like D4 that will not be present so I guess in that sense for me because I care about braid groups these more like Zmods and Zs are the most natural place to look for invariance what are the parameters of the DAF here that's a great question let's discuss that in the break when I pull up the paper I don't remember exactly so there's so in choosing the symmetric pair there's a choice of a parameter here so there's one parameter in choosing these characters there's two parameters there's the parameter Q of the quantum group there's actually even more for these but it's already 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 so in fact the characters come with two parameters so it gives seven parameters that are somehow interdependent and recovers five parameters of the DAHA I'll give you the specifics later but so what's interesting here is that we see well there's more room to glue in so we could have glued in more symmetric pairs which is really unobvious from the previous construction of Ma and Jordan and so we're hoping that if you do this maybe one can recover all the parameters of the DAHA but that's unclear at this point


Hey folks, Adam DuPay here and today I'm going to be doing a live hack through of the punnables.kr level shell shock. So let's dive right in. So the title should be an immediate giveaway. If you don't know what shell shock is, I highly recommend you go read up on this vulnerability and bash. It is super interesting and so I'm actually really excited that we'll be able to hopefully this challenge will have something to do with that. So let's read this. It says, mommy there was a shocking news about bash. That's true. I bet you already know, but let's just make sure. And this actually really ties in with my hacking philosophy. So I truly believe that if you really want to learn how to break something, you need to not only be able to understand the theory and understand how stacks works, how string copy works, how everything actually works. Because fundamentally, at the end of the day, hacking is all about knowledge and using your knowledge to control a program and force it to do something that it wasn't intended to do. But the other thing is the knowledge is not the only thing. You need to actually put fingers to keyboard and actually be able to hack and exploit these things. So let's dive right into this one. So here we are. So we're, we have the shell shock binary again. So this is one which has a set group ID on shell shock Pone, which has the same permissions as the flag. The interesting thing here is there's a bash in this directory. So we have shell shock and self shock and dot C. So let's jump in and see what this code is all about. Perfect. So this actually makes sense. So what it's doing, so it's calling set effective UID based on the get effective group ID, right, what group ID, group ID, okay, so it's setting your IDs to your group. So it's actually turning us into the shell shock Pone user, which is the group that we're executing as. Yeah. So this is what this is doing. You should definitely read up on these man pages if you don't understand what this is doing. But this is basically set UID gives us an effective user ID and this is changing our actual user ID to this and it's calling system home shell shock bash dot S Echo shock me. So if we do shell shock, we'll see shock me. If we run file on bash. So now what we can do is a few things. So what I know off the top of my head about the shell shock vulnerability is what bash would do is if an environment variable was set. Then so what bash would do is it would go through all of the environment variables that are stored in the local environment. And if there's anything that looks like a function definition, it would actually execute that function. So rather than actually look at what a bash what a shell shock exploit looks like and then use that to do what I want to do here. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to try to challenge myself to see if I can do this just based off of what I know about shell shock. So it Well, maybe I could do man bash and look for basically I want to know what does a function look like in bash. And so shell function definitions a shell function is an object that's called like a simple command next to a compound command with a set of new positional parameters shell functions are declared as follows. See, there's a functions below. So that sounds interesting. That's definitely where I want to be. Okay, so it stores identical to a function, the debug type. So the problem is if I remember correctly, so So how do we pass. So one thing we can try to do is And looking at the shell shock code, right, so we can't actually control this parameter that gets passed in here. So it's calling home shell shock bash dot see so we don't control anything in here. We know it's just calling that. So but what we can do is we can change maybe the path if we wanted to do that. And this is how so any arguments you put here, this is going to be passed as environment variables. So for instance, and the way to kind of test this for yourself if you've never played around with this, you can use Env to look at an output all of the current variables. So if we say foo equals equals bar and then run Env, we'll see foo equals bar in the environment. So this means I need to build up some kind of Adam equals some kind of payload and then call this shell shock. The problem is now so I already tried to challenge myself to look through it for here. Variables local to the function any built in variables function names. The problem is I don't know the exact syntax. So I'm trying to see if there's a way to store a command here to figure out what's the syntax for storing a function. But let's see. Okay, aliases allow you to do various things. Command execution environment 2004 14. So that's the one this came out. So this must be definitely must be a so if I do bash version, it'll tell me it's two dot four dot two dot. And if I just do bash, tell me that this is a non vulnerable version. Okay, great. So, all right, that's not very useful. So let's look at how to store a function in bash. And what this was done is this was done in order to saving bash functions. There we go. I think this is what we want. So this was used if you wanted to pass if you wanted to invoke bash or another process and pass a function. So you know what, let's just so maybe you can take a second and try to figure this out on your own. But I want to get this done with so shell shock software bug. So this was in 2014. So this timeframe is perfect. It was one of the first to use this kind of thing. Okay, so function definitions, environment variables. Yes, this is exactly what we want. So I wonder if they'll have an exploit here. And so super dangerous because there we go. I see it did have something like this. Okay, so here's our function definition. And then Adam is going to we're going to set equal to this. And anything we do after here is going to be after this semi colon so we just should be able to do cat flag shell shock. There we go. So that was a success. Man, that was super easy. And so this was super important because anything that allows you to like forget hub when you check out a git repo, you're actually SSHing into that machine. And so you could use the so the environment variable SSH original command you could set when you SSHed in web servers that use CGI so CGI creates environment variables. So this was super dangerous. There's a tons of different exploitation vectors here. So here we go. We can copy this in and we can get our flag. All right, so this is actually a great I love challenges like this that actually force you to look at and understand different types of real world vulnerabilities. And the crazy thing about shell shock when you research this and look into this is this was around for 20 plus years. So this vulnerability has just remained latent in software. So that kind of helps make you think, well, what about other vulnerabilities and other types of software that I use all the time. So all right, thanks everyone. And I will see you next time.


Danielle, welcome. Thanks so much. It's been great to be here. I appreciate it. Oh, I just, I didn't even notice. I just, you know, I was just thinking as all those women were standing up here, what would you have done without all that goodness in your churches? But the handful that I do know are just beautiful and amazing and gifted and wonderful people and I adore them and I just can't imagine what would have happened if the church didn't have their gifts. I'm grateful for them. So every summer in New Mexico the Pueblo Native American clans come together for their most important summer ritual. It's the corn harvest, the corn dance and it's their responsibility to make sure that they do all they can to ensure a good harvest and the dance that they do is a prayer for growth. Each clan has their own kiva or spiritual society and each kiva makes elaborate preparations for this dance. And the kivas have dug deep holes in the ground because it is their practice to pray in the belly of the earth. Which gosh, why don't we do that? And so they dig these deep holes in the ground so that they make their prayers from the belly of the earth. And so when it comes time for the corn dance some stay in this earth chapel all day long. They fast, they pray without ceasing from sun up to sun down. Others of them leave the kiva at an appointed time and they form two long lines of men and women and they're dressed in brilliant and elaborate traditional dress and they stream to the center of the festivities where they will dance and chant and sing and pray hour after hour from dawn until sunset without ceasing. It's a vitally important function of the clans. It's their responsibility to ensure a good corn harvest and every person plays a vital role in this prayer of growth and supplication. Because everyone will benefit from the corn, it's the job of everyone to do their best to dance well in prayer for the harvest. The intricate headdresses and the complex foot movements and the subtle chant intonations are sacred and every detail is meant to be performed to perfection. And then later in the day they send in the clowns just as the rhythm has become steady and resolute just as the form of the dance and the chant and the private prayers and the belly of the earth have become constant and unbroken just as everyone is feeling solid and good and deeply reverent, the clowns come. They step on the feet of the man leading the dance to disrupt his stomping. They poke fun at the dancers by standing uncomfortably close to their faces and doing weird things. They laugh. They tug at headdresses. They yelp and whoop in the middle of the chants in the times when it would never fit with the rhythm. Some of them run and grab babies out of the hands of mothers and run them around. They're called the Koshari and their bodies are painted black and white and they have dried corn husks in their hair.  The purpose of the Koshari is to disrupt the form just as the form of the dance is becoming stagnated. The Koshari arrive to break the solemnity to bust up the aura of spiritual fervor to obliterate any feeling of self-righteousness. Just as everyone begins to feel that the rhythm of the corn dance will never be broken the Koshari arrive like hammers to ensure that it is. Is that considered holy? Why is this the most sacred act of the entire corn dance? Because the corn dance is a prayer for growth and growth demands that it forms. The Koshari don't settle for life as usual they come wearing rabbit skins as I said to remind their brothers and sisters of death so that they may invoke them to new growth or what we would call resurrection. And resurrection as we know is never life as usual it's life that's new right in the middle of everything we know. And as important as their role is these clowns it would be inaccurate to say that the Koshari are always enjoyed. They're not they're a nuisance but they are embraced because they remind the Pueblo clans that the world is not under their control. No matter how well they perform this corn dance the world is unruly and mysterious and most importantly always changing and if they are to grow and survive they must be people who learn to live and dance in the middle of disruption. Our Native American brothers and sisters know a thing or two about disruption do they not they also know about displacement and dismissal and yet these clans have survived in the midst of deeply oppressive forces for hundreds of years they haven't died out nor has the role of the clans nor has this hallowed dance that has been performed for centuries. Their ritualized openness to change has allowed them to be people of renewal in the face of the most impossible circumstances and as is often the case they have been keepers of a deep wisdom that science is only now discovering because the truth is now we know change is actually the only constant it's the only one we have I don't know a lot about science but I am interested so I read books that I don't understand and glean like things from them that probably aren't exactly true here are a couple of those things if you happen to have like a degree or something I know I'm probably saying these things wrong you can come and tell me more about it later physicist as I understand it are just now beginning to think that what they saw as constant actually may have just been because they didn't understand the world at its smallest level it's like oh yeah we think nothing is going on and then they got a microscope and they're like oh actually there's a lot going on there's no constant down there that we thought even the speed of light I read earlier this year is not constant what? that's like the one thing I got from science class why isn't the speed of light constant? well I can't explain that to you I was really confused but apparently it has something about when you get down to the level of photons stuff gets weird and it's not constant anymore and apparently if I have not already freaked you out enough time is also not constant are you even kidding? every time I try to read an article about how or why time isn't constant my head starts to hurt because it's like the multiverse and like I don't know too many things that I don't understand what you're thinking about neuroscientists as you know can now prove that the brain and the body are in endless flux with one another so so much so that it's problematic to say that we have anything resembling a fixed self right? we can't figure out how to talk about consciousness or anything of substance like because there's no sense in which we are like this substance that's the same all the time no that's not how it works we're composed of millions of choices and actions that we take every day and we are equally affected by the millions of actions and choices that other people and other creatures and the ozone layer makes every day all around us we are affected by all the millions of choices all the time it is a dizzying dance of accommodation and disruption this is what led the sixth century greek philosopher heraclitus to say you can't step twice in the same river once your foot's in it it's not the same anymore he was adamant about professing the about professing the constancy of change in the universe is something that wasn't true he said you can't identify the universe as static which in his time wasn't the most popular thing to say but the other thing that he said is that despite the fact that the universe seems lots more in motion than we often anticipate he deeply believed in a unity of creation that was deeper and more profound than we could see and he tried to figure out a way to say okay how can I describe this unity that is underneath all the movement and chaos and change that's happening and he came up with a word logos yes that one despite all the change that happens and the logos the logos the word all things are connected and one the logos is the source of order in the universe that by which all things come into being and all things come to pass john the evangelist knew this he had heard of this idea which is why the gospel he writes in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God and as reverent as we are want to make Jesus the word the word of God often serves as a disrupter to our norms the form breaker to our expectations the one who calls us right in the middle of our self-righteousness Jesus continually disrupts our uniformity to bring us into fuller unity it's always what he does it's a little annoying the most sacred role Jesus plays for us this may be the most sacred role Jesus plays for us his willingness to unsettle us just as we're getting comfortable because Jesus is not the statement or the doctrine or the book of discipline he's the word and as the word he is both utterable and unutterable both known and unknown Jesus is both the holy dance and the sacred clown and his deepest calling is to bring us into new life and resurrection I arrived at college in seminary with a deep love for theology I liked to think about the big ideas of God and I was eager to pursue a unified theory of God I thought that there was one nobody had told me there wasn't and so like Einstein who thought he could come up with a unified theory of the universe I thought well there's got to be one of those for God also and though not Einstein I can read a lot so I'll try I came to seminary and thought there's got to be this way to find a place for all those weird old testament passages and even for things like human suffering and death maybe like me though you found that theology's best answers still fall short of describing the world's deepest mysteries shoot for every systematic theology that has been written even the most beautiful ones there is a clown just waiting to disrupt the logic within it I heard Walter Brigham and speak earlier at Perkins this year I imagine some of you were there and I love that he said there is a problem that we have with the God of the Old Testament and that is the God who inhabits the text of the Old Testament that's the problem as if to say good luck getting around that guys it's constantly a disruptive act and process Karl Barth the German theologian who may be on record is trying to write the longest attempt of systematic theology oh my gosh get an editor buddy we have things to do gracious well Barth my seminary is obsessed with Barth so boy did I get to read like three fourths of that thanks guys it's really helpful he saved his treatment for the Holy Spirit until the very end which was a dumb thing to do but that's another story for another time as he was writing the section of the Holy Spirit he came to the uncomfortable truth that oh the Holy Spirit is not particularly fond of being confined and so all of these categories that he thought were going to just fit right in he could just keep that thread going all the way through and add the Holy Spirit to it it wasn't working and as that realization set in one of my professors said Bart said I'm going to have to go back to the beginning which he didn't of course but even if he had the ending would always be the same the Spirit of God continually disrupts our forms it's why Celtic Christians called the Holy Spirit the wild goose because in their experience the Spirit was unruly and prone to loud honking how lovely it would be for us to be asked to bear witness in a world of consistency and met expectations that would be lovely as it is however we are asked to bear witness in a world of both fear and wonder in a world of both dance and disruption and perhaps we bear witness best when we embrace the creative tension that seems to be ever present in the nature of the world and maybe just maybe because that's how God intended it what would it look like if we didn't reject our clowns or shun them or even resent them but bore witness to them as holy disturbances what if we saw them as not disturbances at all but as those who bear witness to the sacred that has been removed from our sight Rudolf Balrow said when the forms of an old culture are dying the new culture is created by a few people who are not afraid to be insecure I read that in a book a couple of months ago and I thought oh darn it I'm gonna have to sit with that one for a while because I hate it because really who wants to be insecure I think of insecurity as such a terribly negative thing it's something to be avoided at all costs I have two middle schoolers so believe me I have reacquainted with the apex of human insecurity that we call middle school and it is not pretty it isn't you know everybody with middle schoolers know or you just think take three seconds to think of your middle school experience you know it's not good our middle school principal always says yeah there's a reason why no one has a middle school reunion he's a wise man enjoy it this is a one-time thing kids you don't want to come back here who wants to be insecure I don't but when I think about the power of this story that I heard about this dance when I think about the power of those who dance knowing that the clowns are coming the best term for them is bravery they are not afraid to be disrupted they're not afraid to be insecure that's because they're planning to hold their noses and grit their teeth until the clown leaves them clowns leave them they don't face the disruption with clenched fists like they're determined to stick to the rhythm no matter what happens and determined to get right back on beat no matter how many times they're interrupted that's not bravery that stubbornness right the beauty and bravery of this act that they do is their willingness to be open even while they're dancing for one of the most fervent things they believe in what a contrast I do tai chi sometimes and the lovely thing about tai chi is that you realize that you have to hold this sort of softness and firmness of life so you hold a really firm pose like tight with your legs your arms are just like flowing and you experience in your body the contrast of those things openness and firmness strong back and open heart sometimes we say this is what it is these people who do this dance they don't own the sacred and they know that the good news of that is they also don't bear the burden of carrying all of the sacred because they know that they've come to know that their only job is to behold the sacred in wonder in whatever form that it takes peaceful dove or hunking wild goose sermon on the mount Jesus or eating with the person that we like least Jesus the gust of a mighty wind or a still small voice the question isn't only whether we can bear witness to the sacred the bigger question is whether we can bear witness to the sacred and all its forms I'm reminded in the gospels that miracles nearly always are preceded by disruption just like that like literally it's perfect I'm gonna buy you coffee later if we think of every miracle story that we know it was preceded right before that by a disruption think about it friends of a lame man lowered him in front of Jesus from the roof which had to have been quite a spectacle the woman who suffered from bleeding kept reaching out for the hem of Jesus cloak even though we know that by law really she wasn't supposed to be out there mingling much less reaching for him what a disruption Jesus only fed the 5,000 after the disciples became anxious because the crowd wouldn't leave and it was lunchtime and they didn't have anything to eat before it, total disruption a demon possessed man shrieked and fell down and yelled at Jesus before Jesus sent the legion of demons into a herd of pigs the sea of Galilee burst over the sides of the boat with brute force before Jesus rose to still them a blind man and Jericho shouted out to Jesus for mercy only to be shushed by the people leading the intercession but he just shouted again even louder the second time and Jesus stopped and healed his sight after disruption comes new life we know this after disruption comes new life well what's the biggest disruption that we know Jesus dying on the cross and what was the new life well Easter it's almost enough for us to say send in the clowns that seems to turn out well it's almost enough but old habits die hard and it's so very hard for us to let go of our very deep fears of failure and that's what it is we're terrified of disruption because we think it might lead to failure and it's not a risk we find worth taking I know this dance if you come over here I'm going to mess it up and then like what am I going to do then we ministers and lay leaders we people of the church we are unapologetically earnest people we spend so much of our days in the trenches of the human condition binding up the broken hearted listening to the heart broken seeking to liberate the oppressed attempting to bring spiritual meaning to an endlessly busy culture bless our hearts we do not have time for clowns we can't suffer setbacks we are earnest people with an urgent mission in a world that is going mad there is no time for clowning around the clock is ticking all of which is true but the deep mystery is that when we enter into our job as Christ's witnesses with too much fervor and fists that are clinched in fear we have lost our witness already what will we add to the world when all that we can bring it is fear and anxiety and aggression what are we going to add to the world doing that what the world needs is people who trust the dance so much who can hold their peace so well no matter what's going on around them that even the clowns are welcome what the world needs are people who can take a deep breath and look at the world in wonder and not in fear Margaret Wheatley wisely writes the fear of error seems the darkest of Darwinian shadows when errors hold so much peril play disappears creativity ceases only fear and struggle persist and paradoxically we make even greater errors we say to one another for the first time how can we live with so much fear we can't the good news though is that our world is not a world of get it right or die it's a world of infinite possibilities because it's changing all the time there is no mythical window of opportunity that will be lost forever there are definitely moments when things are moving more in our favor or the universe is aligning yeah, we should listen to that but also we should remember that the universe is a far more forgiving place than we often give it credit there's not a window of opportunity being of people of faith we should know this scriptures filled with people who missed their window of opportunity Abraham and Sarah missed it like a zillion times while waiting for Isaac like literally a zillion I counted one time the Israelites in the wilderness had bad choices some of them in rapid fire succession as if they had no memory at all David was a terrible decision maker he was totally incompetent in making good decisions this is to say nothing of the entire band of disciples who quite often looked like the 12 Stooges people made mistakes they had failures they had disruptions and all of them found more opportunities to get it right the next time we have a window of opportunity we have windows of opportunity the world is always changing if we missed it that moment just get right back into it the next moment did you know that in the patterns of evolution you can see that the universe is primed towards innovation it's openness that's flexibility that's windows of opportunity we only believe that the world runs on competition and survival of the fittest but in actuality the world runs on innovation and flexibility the universe is constantly looking for unique and new possibilities the 14 billion year old story of the universe says that life is supposed to happen and it says that life happens even when we thought it would be rather impossible for life to happen so we can't let the story of world as a machine or world as competitive battlefield become our primary story because life is about invention more than survival it's about creation more than dominion or defense when we're in survival mode it demands results it's impatient and anxious when we focus on survival we're usually leading with problem solving and I mean a certain kind of problem solving which is about making what you don't like go away problem solving so if we took this and applied it to the clowns we could easily solve the clown problem we could just lock them up or send them away we could decide just we don't need their role in the dance anymore nobody really likes it let's just get rid of it or we could be really crafty and say like hey let's keep the clowns but let's just make them like fun just make them fun problem solved unless we remember those words those gut-wrenching words of Rudolf Bravo the new culture is created by a few who are not afraid to be insecure problem solving for survival isn't our only choice system scientist Peter Singh says that we should move from problem solving in this way to creating and creating involves not making something you don't want go away but actively bringing something you care about into reality it's a shift of perspective you're not doing this you're doing this when we create we don't ask what's wrong we ask what's possible he says he calls people who are these creators, animators which is a pretty cool word it's fun to call yourself that you put it on your card pastor, comma, animator these kinds of creators are people who bring life into a new way of thinking thinking and seeing and interacting in ways that create energy and focus they aren't special people they aren't ordained people we're all called to be creators and animators together animators are people who can come into any situation and find a way to bring new life new forms into being while holding on to what matters most bearing witness means living a life of creativity and not problem solving it means letting go of the form and allowing the disruption to bring about something new and perhaps unexpected you guys did that 60 years ago you ordained women as a result bearing witness means taking our calling seriously but also taking the pressure off enough to live into our calling with joy and wonder what we find when we take a moment to exhale and to realize there's not just a window of opportunity we can laugh it off we can take ourselves less seriously what we find as a result of that is joy in between fear and wonder lies the possibility of joy joy which has room for the harsh realities of the world and the awe-inspiring wonder of the world joy has room for our reverence and our laughter our delight and our pain last week I went to hear Dacher Keltner speak he's a psychology professor at UC Berkeley and the founder of the greater good the science center and his most recent work he's working on is exploring how awe the experience of awe creates deep positive change in us to which I was like yeah I know I'm a pastor get on it scientists we knew that already but go do your little experiments and we'll be like yeah you got it but what he's found in just a few things that he's looked at is that experiencing awe makes us wonder and question everything well sure it does you stand in front of the ocean you think and our response to things that are too vast to understand is awe and it gives us perspective it disrupts the form of the norm for us and we are opened up to something bigger than ourselves and it also gives us joy people who experience awe they're finding are more connected to others and get along better with others they become more generous more compassionate and less self important which is a pretty great movement towards discipleship right sounds like good results in one study he mentioned they had students at UC Berkeley go outside in two groups and in the first group they had these students stand up for one minute and just stare at the trees and then for the other group they had them stand for one minute and stare at the science building for them and then they had I don't know how they come up with these studies too it's like are you high when you think of these studies anyway they had someone come by the two groups and drop a box of pens and do you know what happened the group that had stared at the trees for one little baby minute were like way more interested in helping the person pick up the pins like just a better person already which go to the park later I guess is what we should say ah invokes wonder it invokes wonder when we're in awe we can't put our experience into words we can't categorize it our whole normal life becomes destabilized in the face of this awesome experience and that can transform us in ways that stability never could stability may be comfortable but I think it also may be overrated sometimes we need a little stability right we got to like get up every day but too much we can go on autopilot we don't give thought to our actions because everything is going to be just as it was I don't know if you've ever had this experience but sometimes I've gotten to the experience where I've realized that I drove all the way home from somewhere and I didn't make one conscious thought while in that process I was like am I in my driveway right now like I got on the highway and I like dropped a kid off at their house I wasn't even I don't even know I just I met my driveway right now I didn't think one time about it which is a little terrifying actually stability can breed familiarity and familiarity sometimes can breed in attention note the words on the knob disengage stability can allow us that if we have too much of it if we're stable we don't have to ask questions or grapple with difficulties or confront challenges that are in every way impossible we choose instead to live comfortably because we have the choice thank God for the clowns who force us to reengage and put our hands mindfully back on the wheel so that we can ask ourselves now where are we going and also is that where we want to be going because that is when we bear witness real and true thing happening in front of us that's when we bear witness to the wonder of the world that God loves stability doesn't suit us fear definitely doesn't suit us wonder does will we choose to bear witness to the world in fear yeah it's there or in wonder I was talking to my daughter last night actually when I was tucking her in and she was having a difficulty with something she was scared and I said honey I guess you're just gonna have to decide like is it worth it to you to overcome this fear or is it not you're gonna have to decide that she was like mom I am afraid like I don't get to make a choice about that and I said well no you're right if you feel afraid in your body physiologically you don't have a choice about that but in two seconds you do start having a choice feel the fear yeah you don't have a choice about that two seconds later you can be conscious and decide to do something about it what are you gonna do what are you gonna do baby girl you're gonna live in fear and wonder it's a tough question I was glad I was the one asking it not having to answer it for myself parenting win yes how do we bear witness in a world of fear and wonder we smile when they send in the clowns we could do that we could smile because we know that disruption is not a step back but maybe a step forward we smile because the clowns remind us to set down the burden of our earnestness and look with wonder at the mystery of the sacred instead we smile because we're not afraid of being insecure and we're not afraid of making mistakes and maybe we're not even all that afraid of fear after those two seconds we remember that Jesus said don't be troubled trust in God trust also in me and so maybe we will even when we're surrounded by clowns I was thinking about Psalm 23 the other day and I was reminded yet again that I had to give you that you had to see that slide I was thinking about Psalm 23 and I was reminded again which is helpful for me that the love of God is not something I have to hunt down with laser-like intention I can be a little bit much sometimes you hardly know me but I'm sure you've already noticed that that's probably true I don't have to put finding the love of God on my to-do list because the Psalm does not say I don't know if you know surely Danielle did everything right and God rewarded her or surely Danielle knew where God was and what God was doing and followed one step behind in perfect synchronicity at all times it says surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever goodness and mercy follow us what a wonder as we leave this place and as you are commissioned to do good work in this beautiful world of wonder may you remember that goodness and mercy follow you and may the assurance of that give you the courage to dance no matter what distractions may come your way I'm a fan of blessings these days and so if I may I'd like to leave you with a blessing from Maureen Hilliard may you be blessed with vision in these shadow times may light invade the darkness may it be a soft brilliance as bare as candlelight guiding you through twilight till dawn and when the dawn breaks may you find yourself upon a threshold may you enter and go through and may you emerge into the dance a whole and holy new dance of grace Amen