Imagine There’s No Heaven: Easter Day 2011

When our two girls were growing up, part of our family’s Easter morning tradition was to hunt for the Easter eggs they had cooked and colored the day before. Debbie and I hid some in obvious places like on a living room end table or the dining room mantle, and we hid some in harder to find places, like behind the throw pillows or way up on top of a bookshelf. And then, only after all the eggs were found, Clare & Blythe looked for their Easter baskets, usually hidden in a closet or in a far corner of the room behind some plants. Occasionally they would come up an egg or two short, but that usually had less to do with their egg-hunting skills and more to do with Lily, our old black lab who had an appetite for, well, pretty much everything. But still, it was only after all the eggs were accounted for, more or less, that the girls could look for their Easter baskets; that was the prize for a successful hunt, and so while we made sure that the game was in the searching, we also saw to it that the eggs weren’t too difficult to discover.

This morning’s gospel reading from Matthew is kind of a resurrection sandwich. Matthew layers his account of Jesus’ resurrection with an unusual story, a story that only Matthew tells. A few minutes ago we heard AJ read the start of the story of the guards at the tomb, then Angie interrupted, as did Matthew, with the story of the resurrection, and then AJ finished telling us the rest of the story about the guards. It seems that in the years following the resurrection, rumors began to circulate that Jesus was not really raised from the dead, but that his body was stolen by his followers in order to give the illusion that he was raised. So Matthew tells us this story about Pilate’s placing extra guards at the tomb to ensure the body stays where it is. But even with the guards posted there, Jesus was raised, so in order to save face, the guards were bribed to say they fell asleep and the body was stolen. Whether it really happened this way or whether it was the product of Matthew’s active imagination, the point of the story is clear: even with armed guards posted at the tomb, Jesus was able to escape the bonds of death. An unusual way to tell it, to be sure, but Matthew’s point is taken.

Rob Bell is a rock star among evangelical Christians – there’s no other way to put it. You may have read about Rob Bell in Time magazine last week; he is a preacher, a speaker and a writer who has gained tremendous popularity over the past few years because he has a fresh way of presenting the gospel. Here at Second Church we have seen and discussed Rob Bell’s videos at Bible study, last Spring our seminarian Nathan Willard held a workshop on one of Bell’s pieces, and as Angie will tell you, Rob Bell is a cult hero to some of our youth. Just outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, the Mars Hill Bible Church, where Bell is minister, attracts ten thousand worshipers every week. But the reason Bell appeared in Time last week is not because of his church, but because he recently dropped a theological bombshell smack in the middle of the evangelical world with the publication of his new book, Love Wins. Bell’s seemingly outrageous premise is that God loves everybody – pretty controversial stuff, right? Bell believes that God loves everybody so much that it is not God’s desire that even one human soul should be lost, but that it is God’s intention to bring every single human being to salvation – and since God is God, God succeeds. In other words, Bell suggests, in the end, not one soul is lost, not one soul is condemned for eternity, but every one of us eventually finds a way to God’s eternal presence and embrace. What this does of course, is it makes hell both unnecessary and superfluous. And for this outlandish suggestion, Bell has become the object of criticism and scorn among his colleagues. What is ironic is that most of his peers have decided Bell is going to hell because Bell says there is no hell. Hmmm: Bell’s compelled to dwell in hell, for Bell’s dispelled the knell of hell. There’s got to be a limerick in there somewhere...

But is this such an objectionable idea? That God’s plan is to save everybody, and that what God wants, God tends to get? I think what is really objectionable is that there are some church communities for whom hell is such a pivotal, indispensible notion, who can’t accept the fact that God desires everyone to come to love and faithfulness, that their whole theological system falls apart if Bell is correct. Think about this for a moment: a world without hell. A creation without damnation. For Bell, this makes a lot of sense: at one point he writes, 

 

“When we get to what happens when we die, we don’t have any video footage. So let’s at least be honest that we are speculating, because we are... At the center of the Christian tradition since the [very] first church, have been a number who insist that history is not tragic... and love, in the end, wins, and all will be reconciled to God.”

You have wonder why this is so offensive. Why does part of the religious world cling to the idea of hell so tenaciously in the first place? It isn’t like any of us believes we’re going there. Hell is always for other people, right? It is the threat of punishment that the church has used for centuries to try to get people to behave, well, the way the church wants them to behave. Or to put it in clinical terms, hell has usually been employed as a kind of ecclesiastical avoidance therapy; the thinking is that we will do whatever needs to be done in order to avoid going to hell, so we turn to the church to learn what that is; and unfortunately, for most of the church’s history the simple answer has been, “If you don’t come to church, then you’re going to hell.” Am I right? Bell suggests this is, more than anything, an invention intended to pursue a given story line, like the story Matthew invented about placing guards at the tomb so Jesus’ followers can’t steal the body. But the body disappeared anyway. Placing guards at the tomb to prevent a resurrection makes about as much sense as threatening people with eternal damnation to get them to love God. God just doesn’t work this way.

In fact there is a good deal to suggest that hell is primarily an invention of the Christian church. To begin with, it is a purely New Testament idea. There is no hell in the Old Testament, no eternal damnation in Hebrew scripture or tradition. In the psalm we read together this morning, we said, “If make my bed in the depths,” or more accurately, “in Sheol, God is there.” And we tend to assume that Sheol as a kind of hell for Old Testament folks. But Sheol is actually the place everyone goes after death, the good and the evil alike – Sheol is simply what comes after life; it is not a place, but rather the state of not living any more. There is no place of everlasting punishment, nor is there a place of everlasting reward, in the Old Testament. When you die – you’re dead. It is what you have made of life that makes the difference for the faithful Jew, not what happens to you once you are gone.

Our church has spent the season of Lent reading through the gospel of Matthew. And we have seen that one of the major themes of the gospel can be captured in the repeated phrase, “the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” The kingdom of heaven is at hand. As we heard a couple weeks ago, Jesus is not saying the kingdom of heaven is what awaits you when you die, nor is it off in some distant future when Christ comes again; the kingdom of heaven is at hand: it is among us, it is both imminent and immanent, it is in our midst. The kingdom of heaven is among you: it is the community you make, it is the faith that you live. What if the prevailing cultural ideas of heaven and hell, which come to us more from Milton and Dante than they do from the Bible anyway, miss the mark? What if heaven is not up in the sky, or God’s way of greeting us when we die? What if heaven is not the reward for doing all the right things, in the same way hell is not the punishment for doing all the wrong things? What if heaven is not the great big Easter basket filled with goodies that we have earned by virtue of collecting all the pretty eggs we have discovered along the way? When Jesus said, time after time in Matthew’s gospel, “The kingdom of heaven is at hand,” what if he actually meant what he said?

What really surprises me about the reaction to Rob Bell’s book, Love Wins, is not that so many people in certain church communities are scandalized by the possibility that there might not be a hell, but rather that they have completely missed the corollary: that is, if there is no hell in the traditional understanding of eternal punishment for having made the wrong choices, then maybe there is no need for an eternal reward for having made all the right ones. Maybe this life is our blessing, and the presence of God in our lives, from this moment on through eternity, is what the kingdom of heaven is about. Maybe Jesus actually meant what he said, that the kingdom of heaven is at hand.

Is it possible for us to choose the good without needing the fear of hell to scare us straight, or the promise of heaven to lure us to a reward? There was an article in the Ideas section of last Sunday’s Globe that revealed Rob Bell isn’t the only one who has earned the enmity of his peers. Eminent Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson is also taking quite a lot of flak from his own scientific community for an article he published in last August’s edition of the journal, Nature. For much of his career, Wilson has done some of the seminal work on the nature of altruism. What is it that causes people to choose to do good, even when it is sometimes to our own detriment? For many years, the scientific community believed, as did Wilson, that it was due to “kin selection.” That is, we are hard-wired to choose the good even when it sometimes goes against our own personal self-interest, in order to ensure the survival of our descendants, a kind of genetic Darwinism. But in rethinking his own theory, Wilson decided he was mistaken; he has rejected the conventional wisdom and come up with a new idea. The key, for Wilson, has become the community. Technically speaking, under certain circumstances, groups of people who cooperate for the common good out-compete groups of people who do not cooperate for the common good, with the resulting good serving to benefit the survival of the community. Or to put it simply, when we choose to do what is right, it is not for the goodies we get at the end of the game, but rather it is for the common good of everyone. To put this in biblical language, we love God, and we love one another, not because of the promise of the afterlife, but because it makes the world a better place. And because it is the right thing to do. And because the kingdom of heaven is among us.

The relevant question, I think, is not, Do heaven and hell really exist? John Lennon did not sing, “There is no heaven,” he sang, “Imagine there’s no heaven:” choose to do good because it is good, not because you’ll get a prize for making the right choice. The relevant question is, Does God really use the threat of punishment or the promise of reward in order to get us to do the right thing, to love God and each other? Or does God equip us and inspire us to do the right thing simply because God loves us? Which comes first, God’s love or our faithfulness? On Easter morning, the answer is right there at the empty tomb. God loves us first, and foremost, and a God who would send his son for us all does not require a system of punishment and reward in order to demonstrate that love. Or as another gospel writer put it, “God so loved the world that God sent the only Son, that whoever believes will have eternal life. God sent the son into the world, not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.” Christ is risen. Christ is risen indeed. Alleluia and Amen.

Let us pray.

Now’s the Time: February 20th, 2011

As most of you know by now, my daughter Blythe is spending her Spring semester at University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. It was kind of difficult to send her off that far away for that long, but what has proven even more difficult is to try to figure out what time it is, for that matter, what day it is, for her at any given moment. I started out trying to add sixteen hours to Beverly time, but that proved too taxing for someone who last had a math class in high school. So what I do now is subtract eight hours and add a day: so if it is 10:00 am in Beverly on Sunday, then it is 2:00 am in Sydney on Monday. So in this sense, I’ve got the time all figured out; what I’m still trying to get my head around the fact that she left San Francisco last Saturday night and arrived in Sydney – fifteen hours later – Monday morning. Where did Sunday go? I suppose she’ll find it on her way home in July.

This is one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about the whole idea of time this week. How do we spend our time? In what ways have we put it to good use, and in what ways have we wasted it? I think it’s helpful every now and then to evaluate what we do with our time, since time is an entirely nonrenewable resource; once a moment is gone, we can’t get it back. Besides, so much of our efforts to manage our lives, and to make sense of the world around us, has to do with time. You might have seen the article in yesterday’s Globe about how eighteen busy Bostonians save time. And we do try to control our time, to understand it, in some cases to predict it, and in nearly every instance, to master it. We would prefer to make time serve us, instead of, as is so much more often the case, our serving it. Since earliest days, humanity has endeavored to divide time into increments, the better to orchestrate and manipulate it. The ancient Egyptians invented the Nileometer, a crude device for measuring time by gauging the rise and fall of the Nile River; medieval Europeans listened for the bells of the cathedral, which marked the hours - very much the same way our own church bells on Sunday morning awaken the small corner of our world at the junction of Conant and Cabot. And today the digital displays of our clocks wake us up, they brew our coffee, they reheat our leftovers, and ironically they have rendered the notions of “clockwise” and “counter-clockwise” virtually anachronistic!

So there is a tension here. For all the great ideas you and I, and in particular our merchandisers, conceive of to control time, to get the most out of our time, the reality too often turns out to be that our time is controlling us. Our experience is analogous to the football field and the basketball court where the team that is behind late in the contest is “playing against the clock.” We allow time to control us during the week so we can enjoy the weekend, or during the year to earn our vacation, or during our lifetimes to reach retirement. And yet for all our time-saving strategies and devices, it still seems, as every one of us has been heard to lament, that nobody has enough time. How many people cannot make a decision without consulting their calendar, or their Blackberry, or their iTouch? Even as we try to economize and streamline our time and juggle our responsibilities with our desires, we wind up filling in the few blank spaces we have, and discover to our chagrin that we have even less time than we started out with.

“Behold, now is the acceptable time,” the apostle Paul once wrote; “behold, now is the day of salvation.” The Bible makes much of the notion of time, so much, that there are actually multiple words for it. The time we have been talking about so far is called chronos, or chronological time, time which is measured by the hour, the day, the month and the year. There is another kind of time though, which, though less commonplace, is no less familiar to us. In Greek it is called kairos, kairos, or what we might call the “right time;” the favorable, propitious, opportune moment for doing something. An example of this might be the couple who decides that it is time to have a child; presumably, they have not come to this decision by consulting their watch, yet nonetheless, they believe the time is right to begin a family. This is what we mean by the kairos, the appropriate time. Another example might be the old commercials for Miller beer, which managed to squeeze both notions of time into its pitch. Chronologically speaking, after work let’s say, it’s “Miller Time,” time to crack open an ice cold Miller Beer; yet in the broader sense, the commercial also wants us to think that it is always “Miller Time;” that regardless of the hour or the day, the time is right to become a Miller beer drinker. For a Harpoon drinker, this is where the analogy breaks down.

The Bible has many examples of this kind of time, the right time, the appointed time, for every facet of human life, and there is no place where this is more evident than the well-known passage from Ecclesiastes chapter 3 which Brad read for us this morning. “I have seen the business that God has given to his children to be busy with,” the writer declares. “God has made everything beautiful in its time; God also has put eternity into the human mind, yet so that one cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end.” The right time, we learn, is divinely prescribed. God knows the time to be born and the time to die, the time to weep and the time to laugh, the time for war and the time for peace. “For everything there is a season,” we are told, “and a time for every matter under heaven.”

Even as a document, the Bible leans more toward the notion of the “right” time than it does chronological time. For while it is true that the scriptures are arranged from the creation of the world in Genesis, to the vision of the last days in Revelation, neither the Old Testament nor the New Testament is organized along a strict chronological pattern. The most ancient reference to the creation is found in the book of Jeremiah, which doesn’t appear until nearly two-thirds of the way through the Old Testament. Likewise, Jesus offers a vision of the last days as early as the gospel of Mark, which, although it is the first gospel, still doesn’t appear first in the New Testament. In fact the earliest New Testament book, I Thessalonians, doesn’t show up until nearly two thirds of the way through its particular part of the Bible. The Bible’s concern is not so much with chronological time. The most prevalent use of the notion of time in the scriptures is the kairos, the chairotic moment, the particular, decisive, definitive point in time. Indeed, the Bible betrays little abstract conception of time; in the Bible, time consists of what is contained within it, of what makes up those definitive and decisive times which comprise the important moments of life.

We talked a little about this kind of time at our staff meeting this week, for example, how there can be a time for both weeping and laughing, mourning and dancing together, and Bob Lague hit on a good illustration. Bob raised the idea of what takes place at a funeral, or a memorial service, perhaps because he attended two of them last week. A memorial service usually has its share of weeping and mourning – that’s what it’s for, after all. But a true memorial is also a celebration of life, and very often that celebration brings laughter in its wake. We had some good hearty laughs at Rose Brady’s service a few weeks ago, and one of the reasons is that Rose often brought a smile to our faces. There is a time for weeping and a time for laughing, and occasionally the time is right and ripe for both.

The notion of the chairotic moment can also be seen in what’s been going on in the Middle East of late. Every now and then, history seems to be telling us that the time is ripe for change. We’ve seen it in Egypt, Bahrain, Iran, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Tunisia, Algeria, and who knows where it will strike next? Wisconsin, perhaps. In one sense, we might say that revolution is in the air and its flames are being fanned by the internet. But it is also true that there are times in history when people rise up against oppression. Remember that at the same time the American Revolution was gearing down, the French Revolution was ginning up, and even though a third revolution, the Industrial Revolution, was taking shape at the same time, I don’t think the internet had much to do with any of them. Sometimes the time is simply right.

In John’s gospel Angie described Jesus’ brothers trying to encourage him to put his time to better use, to be bolder in displaying his works, to be more assertive and direct in declaring himself and his mission. They urged him, “Leave here and go to Judea so that your disciples also may see the works you are doing; for no one who wants to be widely known acts in secret. If you do these things, show yourself to the world!” But Jesus replied, “My time has not yet come; but your time is always here.” Jesus was waiting for God’s time, for the “right time,” to be fulfilled, and that time had not yet arrived. For his brothers, though, Jesus admitted that their time had indeed come, that the moment was ripe for them to display their own convictions in what Jesus was saying and teaching about God.

And you and I often find ourselves waiting, and truth to tell, not always waiting patiently, for God to get to work. We are anxious for God to do something in our lives - or in someone else’s life. We are eager for God to heal, or to straighten out an unpleasant situation; we don’t see why God should wait to bring peace to our world and to fix broken or displaced lives. But part of this frustration, or impatience, if you will, is because we are dealing with the two different expressions of time we have been talking about this morning: our waiting for God consists of chronological, or measured time - it’s why we wish God would hurry up and do all those things we things God ought to be doing in our world, and in our lives. We feel as though we have waited long enough, and it is high time God acted. But as that well-known passage from Ecclesiastes reminds us, God works in God’s own time, knowing when the right time is to work; and remember that even when it comes to all those nasty things we especially wish God would remedy, things like war and hate and killing and death - Ecclesiastes reminds us that these, too have their time, as little as you or I may like it. There is a time for every matter under heaven. We need to remember that God will take God’s own time regardless of what our watches, analogue or digital, might want to tell us.

And like Jesus’ well-meaning companions in John’s gospel, if all we’re doing is sitting around waiting for God to do something, we may well be missing our own opportunity to seize the time. “My time has not yet come, but your time is always here.” While we’re waiting for God to do God’s good work, there is a lot of good work you and I can be doing in the meantime.

I think this is what Augustine meant, who wrote that the only significant time is the present, the “now.” The past does not exist except as we call it to memory, Augustine wrote, and the future exists only as we predict or envision it in the present. And it may be part of what Bertrand Russell said, when he later agreed that we may not confuse memory or envisioning with the past or the future themselves, since it is the present that really counts. And who knows, it may even be what the immortal Charlie Parker was trying to get at, whose signature tune, “Now’s The Time,” musically incorporates the chairotic with the chronological. And I think it is clear this is what Paul meant, who summed it all up when he wrote to the Corinthians, “Behold, now is the acceptable time; behold, now is the day of salvation.” Which in a sense means it doesn’t matter if the sermon goes over twenty minutes or the church service goes over an hour, because you can’t put a stopwatch on God’s Holy Spirit. What gives meaning to this moment, to any moment, is when you and I seize upon it because it is indeed the right time.

Let us pray.

Sticks & Stones: January 16, 2011

Before we begin this morning, I need you to do something very important for me, so that we don’t miss any of what I have to say today. At no point during this morning’s sermon should you be thinking about a purple elephant with pink polka dots, OK? Can I get you all to do this? Nobody think about a big purple elephant with large pink polka dots. Not even in the balcony. OK, so nobody’s thinking about that elephant, right? Great, let’s get started.

We have a lot of creative people in our church. We have knitters and quilters, we have bean-bakers and chili-makers, we have painters of many stripes, from still-life to wood trim, we have musicians and singers, we have carpenters and product engineers, we have a lot of people who are able to create wonderful works out of nothing more than their imagination and a simple medium.

I have always envied those of you who can take something ordinary and make it look beautiful, because the only way I can claim to be creative is with something that can be neither seen nor touched, something that appears only for a moment and then is gone. I – and Angie – create with words. I just created that purple elephant with pink dots that none of you is thinking about. Now, in a certain sense a word is ephemeral. It is heard once in the course of an instant, and then disappears. So in one sense those of you who make quilts and paintings and bookshelves and jet engines make something that is much more enduring than the words we put together on a regular basis. I remember taking a class in seminary where one of the assignments was to create something that could be used as an aid to worship, so I thought for a while, and wrote a liturgical poem that could be used in multiple worship settings. Everybody else made banners, and icons and other symbolic pieces from wood and cloth and other equally constructive materials. But I made something with words alone, and as a result, I received the lowest grade in the class. The irony is that it was my preaching professor who preferred the material to the verbal.

So there is a sense in which words are fleeting. But there is a deeper sense in which words are far more permanent than anything made of sticks or stone or steel. John begins his story about the life of Jesus in exactly the same way the Bible begins the story of creation: “In the beginning.” In each of the first six days of creation, it is more than just God doing the creating; it is the word of God doing the creating. The Hebrew litany falls into a familiar pattern: “God said, ‘Let there be...’ and there was... and it was good.” God spoke – and it was – and it was good. So in the same way that God’s creative word is at work in Genesis, God’s creative word is similarly at work in the gospel: “In the beginning was the word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... all things came into being through [the word], and without [it], not one thing came into being.” I like the way the RSV phrases that last bit, “without him was not anything made that was made.” This is the power of the word.

A word is something powerful. A word can do things that bricks and stones and mortar and wood cannot do, and it is more enduring as well. This is why right now someone in the choir still can’t get that purple elephant with pink polka dots out of their mind, because once a word is spoken it takes on a life of its own that lasts considerably longer than the things we can fabricate and see and touch. Anyone here who has ever blurted something out in the heat of the moment that we wish we had never said knows this is true: whether to a spouse, or a child, or a boss or a co-worker, we know that a word, once spoken, takes on a life of its own, and cannot be called back. And though we may try our best, once spoken, no explanation or apology or justification can ever make that word completely disappear.

I was reminded of the enduring power of words as I followed the news about last weekend’s shootings in Arizona. You don’t have to subscribe to the theory that Jared Loughner went on a senseless rampage because he listened to too much Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, to understand that words still have the power to make a difference. After all, I suppose too much NPR and “All Things Considered” might have the same effect on some. But whether the shrill tone of public discourse contributed to the attack on Gabrielle Giffords, whether those were crosshairs or surveyors marks on the map of Giffords’ district, whether one side of the ideological spectrum or the other employs the most war-like metaphors, there is still the cold reality that words make a difference. Words have power, words have endurance, and it would be a mistake to pretend they do not. When Jesus said it is not what goes into a person that can defile, but what comes out, he was thinking of the words we speak to each other, their power and their lasting effect.

When we hear Jets’ cornerback Antonio Cromartie curse out Tom Brady in a public interview earlier this week; when we engage in an honest debate about the value of language in Mark Twain’s classic Huckleberry Finn; when a critical conversation about end-of-life decisions becomes a “death panel;” when we pause before a meal to bless the food on our table and the people around it; and this weekend, when we remember the legacy of a man whose inspiring words led to a non-violent revolution and greater equality for people of color; we recognize that words possess an enduring power and a lasting effect far beyond the simple speaking of them.

Gail read this morning from the book of the Proverbs, words that take us back to the very creation when the Word began its work:

“The Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago... when he established the heavens, I was there, when he drew a circle on the face of the deep, when he made firm the skies above... when he marked out the foundations of the earth, there I was beside him, like a master worker, delighting in the human race.”

From the very beginning, it is the word of God’s wisdom that has given meaning and shape to all creation, to the heavens and the earth, and to all of human life. By the spoken word God created, and by the incarnate word God is creating still.

As the details of last weekend’s shootings emerged, it became clear that it was much more a combination of Loughner’s own mental and emotional instability coupled with his access to guns and ammunition that led to the tragedy, much more than any politically-charged language. And so in a sense, trying to corral and parse whatever words might have been spoken or written before last Saturday is not altogether helpful. But what surprises me is what we have heard since the shooting. Gratefully, there have been a good number of thoughtful, level headed leaders who have spoken evenly, and civilly, and compassionately, who have urged the same in our better lights. I appreciated the President’s words, as well as his observation that speech matters, at Wednesday’s memorial service when he said, 

 

“At a time when our discourse has become so sharply polarized – at a time when we are far too eager to lay the blame for all that ails the world at the feet of those who think differently than we do – it is important for us to pause for a moment and make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not in a way that wounds.”

Yet without pointing fingers or naming names – though, forgive me Lord, but Barbara Anderson just drives me crazy! - without pointing fingers or naming any other names, we have reason to be disappointed in those who have used the occasion for division and polarization, for blame-calling and self-aggrandizement, rather than for healing and compassion. Listen to what John says about the potential of the Word: “From its fullness we have all received grace upon grace.” It is possible – and it is not just possible, it is responsible, it is incumbent and it is faithful – to see that the words we speak, and the thoughts which motivate them, are vessels of grace. One of the things I really appreciate about the discussion we have been having around becoming an Open and Affirming congregation is that the conversation has been a thoughtful, responsible, and grace-filled conversation. There was a time in our church’s life that such a conversation would have generated more heat than light, but one of the things we have learned together is how to talk to each other with a mutuality of respect as brothers and sisters in Jesus Christ. “From the fullness of the Word, we have all received grace upon grace.” This should be the aim of our words, of what we say to each other, and I don’t think it is unrealistic to hold ourselves, and our leadership, both our ecclesiastical and our civic and political leadership to this noble, honest and respectful standard.

Purple elephants notwithstanding.

Let us pray.