“A Preference for Blindness”     Lent 4  March 26, 2017   

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO

Roger Ray, pastor         (John 9:1-41)

click here to see the video

Mark Twain “Education: the path from cock ignorance to miserable uncertainty.”

 Isaac Asimov “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”

 Miguel de Unamuno “That which the fascists hate, above all else, is intelligence.”

In 2010 the University of Michigan did a research project in the psychology of prejudice. They were interested in trying to understand why that so many of us, when presented with facts that are contrary to our beliefs, do not seem to be very inclined to change our beliefs. One of the researchers involved mentioned a very specific case in politics from that year when the governor of Arizona at that time, Jan Brewer, had said in a speech that border patrol officers had found bodies in the Arizona desert along the border that had been decapitated.

She was, as you recall, famous for ginning up fear among her voters of illegal immigrants coming across the border of Mexico into Arizona. Border agents assured news sources that they had never found any decapitated bodies. Governor Brewer had obviously heard news stories about drug wars in Mexico where there had been instances of beheading and she let her imagination run a bit wild…. One could say that she figuratively lost her head over this one. But she never backed down on the topic, even with the total absence of evidence.

She was not the only Arizona politician with this kind of sketchy connection to facts. Senator McCain has, for years, said that Phoenix ranked number two in the nation for abductions. He has very publicly been corrected on this fact and yet, for years, he has continued to repeat the claim. There are a lot of non-facts used both then and in our recent campaign year about immigrants. Though immigrants are blamed for high crime rates, for smuggling drugs, for rape and murder, but the facts clearly indicate that illegal immigrants commit many fewer violent crimes or thefts, or even traffic violations, than the average citizen specifically because they don’t want to have any run ins with law enforcement.

In recent years, as the economy in the United States has failed to produce many new jobs, the actual immigration flow has been from the United States back into Mexico. Regardless of who actually pays for it, it is beyond ironic that President Trump campaigned on the promise to build a 30 ft tall wall between our two nations. The facts are so obvious that those naughty boys at South Park actually did a tongue in cheek episode on the wall being built to keep our cheap Mexican labor from escaping the United States.

What the University of Michigan study was documenting was how often people will choose, not to give up a mistaken prejudice in the presence of contradictory facts, but they will actually double down. Three weeks ago, when President #45 tweeted that President Obama was a sick, bad man because he had ordered Trump Tower’s phones tapped, every spy agency in the country quickly insisted that it simply wasn’t so.

And rather than admit that he was taken in by a raving nut-case on Fox News the night before, he actually doubled down and said that Obama had gotten the British secret service to do it for him.

This was such an insulting and preposterous claim that the former Prime Minister of Great Britain, David Cameron, quipped that the best part of no longer being Prime Minister is that he doesn’t have to listen to Donald Trump’s wire tapped conversations anymore.

Sadly, this Clementine Caligula who now occupies the White House keeps giving us so many examples of belief without facts that it is hard to keep up. His famous mistakes began when he insisted on the guilt of the Central Park 5, the black and Latino teenagers who were falsely accused of raping a Central Park jogger in 1989. Even after they were cleared with DNA evidence, the Donald still insisted that they were guilty, one can only assume, because they were black and brown.

He entered presidential politics with his attempt at discrediting America’s first black president by insisting that he was born in Kenya. Even after Obama’s birth certificate was made public, Donald insisted that it was fake and he wasn’t born in Hawaii. Which, since Obama’s mother was an American citizen, it would not have disqualified Obama from being president if she had given birth while abroad but that is a constitutional issue that is far beyond the grasp of the most powerful elected official in the world.

The misinformation, mistaken beliefs, prejudices, and outright lies are so numerous that it would be too depressing for me to go on listing them but I want to make one further objection and that goes to the administration’s proposed budget.

Our military budget is larger than the next ten largest military’s in the world and eight of those are our allies. Still, Trump has proposed a $54 billion increase in military spending, even though we are not at war and our military spending is already crowding out healthcare, infrastructure, education, and other civil expenditures.

To help pay for this massive increase in spending, the Donald has asked to cut out all funding for the arts, for Public television, and for National Public Radio. He actually wants to fire Big Bird!  He also wants to increase Homeland Security by $44 billion to build that wall and hire more immigration agents.

All of which gives him the excuse to do what people of his ilk want to do anyway, taking deep cuts in education funding, the EPA, and even agricultural science research. But the most hypocritical of all is the suggestion that we cut all funding to Public Broadcasting which is only a tiny sliver of the federal budget, less than 5% of the proposed increases to military and homeland security spending.

We get an unnecessary wall between the USA and Mexico and we lose funding for the arts, education, public TV and radio, meals on wheels for seniors, and after school meals for hungry children. All of this is like a caricature of what liberals have been saying that Republicans are only now he is giving solid mathematical evidence to the caricature.

Clearly, cutting Public Radio is not about saving money… it is about killing off a reliable news source.

One administration official even said, “Why should we pay for another liberal news outlet when we already have MSNBC?” Which goes to the point of my objection this morning…. You can have conservative and liberal opinions but you can’t have conservative and liberal facts.

When you are presented with facts that you do not like, that does not make it fake news. Things are not true just because you want them to be true and things are not false because you don’t like them. The Buddha said that there are three things that cannot remain hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

If we were the kind of people who paid close attention to the liturgical year, I would have read the gospel lesson for the 4^th Sunday in Lent which is the John chapter 9 account of the man who was born blind. I don’t think it will come as a shock to any of you to hear me say that there are not historical accounts in the Gospel of John. John is a work of narrative theology…. John is trying to instruct our faith, not give us a peek into Jesus’ day-planner.

It is not that he healed a man who had been blind. Blindness in this account is a metaphor for refusing to see. In the John 9 account, the man who was born blind has his sight restored but then he runs into treacherous opposition from his parents, his neighbors, and his church. John is not telling us about a single healing incident, he is writing a commentary on a culture that prefers blindness to seeing.

That is really what this Michigan State study was about, they were trying to answer the difficult question, why do we prefer to remain blind to facts? Why do we cling to our worn out beliefs?

I was just 24 years old when I heard Ronald Regan say that he was going to cut taxes, increase military spending, and balance the budget all at the same time and even then I knew that couldn’t be done. It sounded nice but it didn’t participate in reality. He might as well say that he was going to replace gas burning cars with flying unicorns because the kind of people who would believe that you can cut taxes, increase military spending, and balance the budget all at the same time are the kind of people who would believe in flying unicorns.

This past year, when Donald Trump said that he was going to cut taxes, increase military spending, and reduce the deficit, I don’t think that even the flying unicorn voters believed it and yet when he polished the lie a bit and said that he was going to get rid of Obamacare and give health insurance to everyone that would cost only a fraction of what Obamacare costs and would give us better health care…. Millions of people fell for it.

I love that quote from Mark Twain that says that, “Education: the path from cock ignorance to miserable uncertainty.” It would be nice to believe that you can cut healthcare spending and get more healthcare but then there is this thing called “math.”

Like every other tyrant, our current president wants you to be uninformed. An uninformed public is easier to control with propaganda. The proposal to do away with Public Broadcasting is an attempt to take away a source of education and information and I don’t think that we should allow that to happen.

So I guess you can say that this is my “save NPR” sermon but more than that, it is a plea for you to strive to remain informed. Don’t be seduced by promises of pie in the sky. Be willing to change your views in light of new information.

Emily Dickinson said, “We both believe, and disbelieve a hundred times

 an hour, which keeps Believing nimble.”

If you believe all of the same things you believed five years ago then you

 are already brain dead. Keep your minds nimble. Listen to NPR and

make it a part of your daily diet and don’t let anyone take it away from

you. Expose yourself to new things. Change your mind. Grow. Challenge

authority and if doing that scares you keep doing it until you learn to like

it, and then keep doing it until you are addicted to it.

Don’t let propaganda intellectually kill you by starving you for facts. Be

curious, be disobedient, be defiant, think while it is still legal to do so.

“Spirituality beyond Theism”    March 19, 2017  click here to see the video

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO       Roger Ray, pastor      

George Santayana “My atheism . . . is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.”

Thomas Henry Huxley   “Agnosticism simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that for which he has no grounds for professing to believe.”

Ann Lamott  “You can safely assume that you’ve created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.”

My homiletics professor, David Buttrick, insisted that we never tell a joke in a sermon but in light of the fact that Buttrick isn’t here today and in honor of this year’s observance of St. Patrick’s Day, I want to share my favorite Irish tale with you.

An unsuspecting American tourist walked into a neighborhood pub in Belfast where the locals were always on the lookout for some fresh meat with whom to start a good bar fight. A local, we’ll call him “Paddy,” sat at the bar beside him. Said hello and then asked, “Since this is your first time here, do you mind if we ask if you are Catholic or Protestant?”

Without hesitation, the American said, “I’m an atheist.” Which was not a word that Paddy had heard often. He retreated from the bar and conferred with his friends for a few minutes and then returned. “Tell me then, if you would, is it the Catholic God you don’t believe in or the Protestant God?”

Nothing is more obviously hypocritical than fighting about religion. It makes no more sense than having sex for in honor of virginity. There is a more straight forward way to say that but even I bow to context from time to time.

If you are at all like me you have always cringed when you heard terms on the news like “the Christian militia” or “the Islamic army”… we turn a religious reference to Mt. Zion into a militaristic, racist term like “Zionism.”

But in this sense, religions give us a sense of identity before they give us a sense of ethics or even the ability to blush. These are not good Muslims who are becoming terrorists just as these are not idealistic Christian who don robes in the KKK.

The violence we have witnessed around the Irish Republican Army’s bombings in England had nothing to do with being Catholic or Protestant and had everything to do with the Irish not wanting to be ruled by the English and if American’s can’t sympathize with that then clearly our awareness of American history has gotten a little shabby.

One of our wisdom lessons this morning is a quote from the Spanish born Harvard scholar, George Santayana who considered himself to be a sort of a Catholic atheist. He rejected the faith claims of Catholicism but admired the personal ethics and social awareness of faith. He said, “My atheism . . . is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image to be servants of their human interests.”

And, to that, I would say, that all religions are fashioned by people in their own image to serve their own purposes. Still, like with Santayana, that is no reason to be entirely dismissive or even to be blatantly iconoclastic. All of the religious texts in the world are the distilled product of a civilization’s attempt at articulating what they believed to be of absolute importance.

I don’t like the way they express it in many instances but neither you nor I live in the time that gave voice to these ancient doctrines. The belief that Jesus of Nazareth died on our behalf to save us from judgment for our sins is, in our age, a preposterous suggestion. To say that you are such a horrible person that God had to kill himself simply does not make sense in our culture. Millions of people are doggedly still trying to make it make sense but no rational person could look at that fundamental claim and be anything but embarrassed by it. And yet, much of the world’s most helpful ethical leadership has come from Christian teaching.

I recently met a NASA engineer who has been hired to do some technical work for MSU. He is a very bright scientist, who also believes in psychics. If I knew him better, I would probably be able to find some psychological explanation for why he chooses to set his rational beliefs aside from time to time in order to seek the guidance of a psychic. And he knew when I pointed out to him that psychics never seem to win the lottery that his faith in them was not rational but it is somehow important to him.

I don’t think that everyone who goes to a traditional Christian Church, or to a mosque, or a conservative Jewish synagogue are either bad people or stupid people and I strongly suspect that most Muslims do not really believe that Muhammad rode a winged horse up to heaven, just as I doubt that many Christians believe that Jesus walked on water, and Jews don’t believe that Moses divided the Red Sea. They just are not willing to suffer the cognitive dissonance of admitting to themselves or others that they no longer believe such things.

And it certainly is not that we enlightened 21^st century folk are the first people clever enough to get this figured out. A thousand years before Muhammad was born, five hundred years before Jesus was born, the Greek philosopher, Xenophanes said, “The Ethiops say that their gods are flat-nosed and black,

While the Thracians say that theirs have blue eyes and red hair.

Yet if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw,

And could sculpt like men, then the horses would draw their gods

Like horses, and cattle like cattle; and each they would shape

Bodies of gods in the likeness, each kind, of their own.”

We have always made our gods in our own image. Just as it is obviously true that if horses had gods they would look like horses, we have endowed the gods of our creation with the values that we hold dear. The nomadic sheep herding tribes of Palestine figured out that if they were going to survive without killing one another that they had to have some hard fast rules:  no stealing, no lying, no killing, no messing around with your neighbor’s wives, and stop being so darned jealous of his livestock.

God didn’t really write these rules on tablets of stone but their society was better off, it was more stable, it was safer and they were happier when they acted like they believed that God had written these rules in tablets of stone.

What I believe actually motivated the creation of all of the great world religions was a desire both to understand the meaning of our existence and to find a way of living that helped to make our own and the lives of others better. It is not so much true any longer, but for many generations, parents felt compelled to raise their children in a church, even if they were not much interested in religious stuff themselves, because they believed that religious faith was what harnessed or civilized our more base instincts…. It is religious guilt and fear that keeps us from stealing, lying, killing, screwing around, and being generally miserable people.

Think about it. Very few parents every wanted their kids to be anything more than a nominal Chrsitian. If they took it too seriously, got too involved, or, like me, changed their major in college to religious studies, that was not often applauded. No one really loves a fanatic of any ilk.  Because fanaticism has to do with beliefs. Fanatics have a set of orthodox religious beliefs that they generally want everyone else to believe with them. I can’t recall which comedian first made the observation but it seems true, that the people who are the most eager to tell you about their religion never seem to want to hear about yours.

But here is the big division in religion that we have talked about before: there is orthodoxy and there is orthopraxy. One is about right beliefs and the other is about right practices. No one is ever offended by someone who is a fanatic about being generous, about being forgiving, a fanatic about loving is someone we generally think of as being a really great person.

I understand that to an awful lot of religious people in traditional churches, we often look and sound like atheists. And I think that a lot of famous historical characters from Voltaire to Thomas Jefferson, and Mark Twain actually thought of themselves as atheists because they knew that they didn’t fit in to traditional religions.

Once you have peeked behind the curtain of religious orthodoxy and you have seen either that there is nothing there or that what is there would embarrass Charles Darwin, it is impossible to unsee that. Once your mind has been stretched to accept a new idea, it can never go back into its former shape.

But I don’t think of myself as being an atheist, but I, like Thomas Huxley, believe that trying to believe in things for which there is absolutely no evidence, is a violation of reason and intellect. I have rejected supernatural theism… I don’t believe in God as a person, not as Zeus and Hera, not as Odin, or Allah, or Yahweh. But that does not mean that I am not in awe of the wonder and mystery of life and the universe, that unknowable, ineffable, deep reality, that has always been the God beyond all of the named caricatures of human invented religious characters.

When we say, “love is my religion” as vague as that is, I think that we are saying something much more meaningful than when we said “I am a protestant” or “a Catholic” or “a Baptist.” We don’t have rules written in stone but we have a passion to find a way of living that makes rules no longer necessary.

And many of us may still love rituals, religious symbols, songs, and holidays but cherish such things as stones along the path that brought us to the liberty of thoughtful, mindful living.

I started with a tip of the hat to St Patrick’s Day…. A holiday that seems to mean much more to American beer drinkers than it ever did in Ireland but what you might not hear in Ireland is that Patrick was not Irish… he was English, captured by pirates and sold into slavery in Ireland. And he was not Catholic since he lived and died before the Roman Catholic Church ever got its formal start. I suppose that it goes without saying that there were never snakes in Ireland so he didn’t get rid of them but, at least metaphorically, there are a lot of snakes in organized religion and it may be up to us to expel them from what it means to actually be spiritual people.

Ours is no longer a religion of beliefs, creeds, doctrines, creeds, or even of denominations. We are free thinkers who seek to encourage one another to grow and become more committed to a spiritual life, a life that protects the earth, defends the weak, serves those in need, and speaks truth to power….all under a heading of love.

“People Don’t Change Much…But They Can”     

Lent 2   March 12, 2017    Community Christian Church

Click here to see the video

Roger Ray, pastor

John 3:1-10               

Now there was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews.²He came to Jesus by night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God; for no one can do these signs that you do apart from the presence of God.” ³Jesus answered him, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.” ⁴Nicodemus said to him, “How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?” ⁵Jesus answered, “Very truly, I tell you, no one can enter the kingdom of God without being born of water and Spirit. ⁶What is born of the flesh is flesh, and what is born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷Do not be astonished that I said to you, ‘You must be born from above.’ ⁸The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” ⁹Nicodemus said to him, “How can these things be?”¹⁰Jesus answered him, “Are you a teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things?

I had an uncle named John Ray, Junior. In his youth, he was called “Junior” but as my father completed a household of nine children, brevity demanded that John Junior’s name be shortened to simply “June.”  John Junior grew up to marry a woman named Maxine and, again, in the abbreviation common in that rural setting, she became “Mac.” So, in rural Kentucky, I had an Uncle June and an Aunt Mac, and that seemed normal enough to us even though their names always seemed to come as a surprise to my friends.

Uncle June was a farmer, and like every other farmer in the area, his real cash crop was tobacco. In that part of the world, in those days, a man who didn’t smoke was a rare person indeed. I grew up setting and topping tobacco. My best paying agricultural jobs came in the early fall when we cut, staked, and housed the tobacco crop.

But this was the time when the dangers of tobacco were reaching even into rural Kentucky. My father quit smoking, as did our family doctor, our pastor, and most of the people at our church. But not Uncle June.

In fact, when he began to find it impossible to breath well enough to help in the fields, he would sit on a stool and smoke and watch us as we brought in the fall harvest. His doctor told him that he had emphysema and that smoking was going to kill him. And Uncle June did what a lot of devoted addicts did; he found another doctor, who, in the end, told him the same thing. He then went on a search for a doctor who smoked and found one nearly a hundred miles from his home and he remained in the care of that doctor until his untimely death.

My high school had a smoking area just outside of the cafeteria… for students. Teachers could smoke inside in the teacher’s lounge. When I started college, people were typically allowed to smoke in class, and the same was true, even in seminary. In those days, people smoked in the hallways of hospitals, in grocery stores, and even in airplanes.

In my early years as a pastor in southern Kentucky, I presided over a lot of funerals for men who were very much like my uncle… persistent addicts to the end. All during this time there were public information campaigns going on. Warning labels were affixed to packs of cigarettes. And society changed but very slowly.

First there was evidence that it was bad for your health. Then it became less socially acceptable. There were smoking and non-smoking sections of restaurants and airplanes and finally public places all became non-smoking areas, even to the point to prohibiting smoking in outdoor spaces such as hospital and university properties.

But there were decades between knowing without plausible denial that smoking was bad for us and actually banishing the few remaining smokers to a smaller and smaller space.

This goes to why I absolutely hate for people to give me dieting advice. I am not overweight because I lack information about what causes obesity. I don’t need any more diet books; I just need more willpower.

In the world of psychology, the debate that has gone on for centuries is whether we are who we are because of our DNA, our nature, or if we are a product of our environment, our upbringing. Clearly, the answer is at least some of both.

We know what almost every child molester was molested as a child. But not all children who were molested grow up to be pedophiles. We know that almost all cases of domestic violence are perpetrators grew up in a home watching domestic violence, and yet no where near all of the little boys who saw their mother being a victim grew up to be victimizers.

In the field of addiction, we know that the children of alcoholics have a much greater chance of becoming an alcoholic and a child with two alcoholic parents really should avoid all contact with alcohol because the statistics for them are horrifying. But, having alcoholic parents does not determine the outcome of their children.

There are those who use their family of origin as their excuse for all of their personal failings but, there are reasons that are not direct causes.

Most of us grew up prejudices in the environment of our homes… racial prejudices, prejudices against gays and lesbians, against communists, illegal immigrants, and people of other religions. And for the most part, we did not give those prejudices up either easily or quickly.

I was disgusted by the first openly gay people I knew in college but my graduate school education dispelled all of the bad information I had been taught in my childhood but it was not information alone that changed how I viewed same sex relationships. I can trace my own change of heart directly back to 1992 when two women friends of mine, Misty and Marilyn, fell in love with one another. I had known better for a decade but the real change of heart for me didn’t come until the information was applied to two people I loved.

Probably everyone here could tell a story about having to confront the racism or prejudices that you inherited with your mother’s milk when you were young. You know that there were years between the realization that your prejudice was wrong and when you were able to really change…. If, in fact, we ever totally change. Some shadows can linger within us for a long long time.

But any substantive change we ever made started with a willingness to confront the flaw in ourselves. My Uncle June probably knew very well that smoking was killing him, but he was resolutely unwilling to face those facts.

More than 25 years ago a young man at MSU asked me if I would meet with his parents to help them to accept the fact that he is gay. They came into my study with large Bibles under their arms.

His mother was red-faced and hostile. She simply could not believe that a pastor could be telling her son that it was OK to be gay. She tried every angle from religious guilt and fear to threats of being cut out of the will to persuade him to just stop being gay.

Finally, she said, “Look, when I see those TV commercials with those beautiful models shaving their legs, I feel very sexually attracted to them but that doesn’t make me a lesbian.” The young man looked at me and then at the floor, and I turned to his mother and replied, “Well, actually, that’s a pretty good indication.” I will not repeat what all she said as she ran up and down the hallways of the church but suffice it to say that while it is possible to give someone an explanation, it is not necessarily possible to give them an understanding.

People can change, but it is not easy. People can change, but not very many people change very much, and the ones who do, usually do so very slowly.

In the gospel lesson we read today from John, chapter 3, a thoroughly indoctrinated religious scholar has come to talk to Jesus under the cover of night. You can almost feel the timidity of Nicodemus in the dialogue. There is something about the teachings of Jesus that had taken away his comfort, his certainty, but he sincerely questions whether it is even possible for him to change.

Can a person, once born into a culture with all of its prejudices, preferences, beliefs, and practices ever really change?  Look, there are a lot of people who will go to their graves believing that no one ever changes.

When I was married, it would infuriate my wife when someone approached me in a restaurant to praise one of my columns in the paper. After one very effusive fan walked away, she exploded on me saying, “You are wasting your life. No one listens to sermons. No one is changed by your articles. You are kidding yourself if you believe that you are making a difference.”

Marriage was mostly like that for me, but as horrible as you may think that was for her to say, look at the evidence. Most people don’t change and when they do they don’t change much, and even that, only after a long time. She had seen the seamy underbelly of church politics. She had seen people who pretended to be saints doing the most horrible things. I wasn’t angry about her lack of support for the work that I feel compelled to do because I know that she was more right than she was wrong.

But, and I think that Henry David Thoreau said it best:  “I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.” We can change if we are willing to be self-critical. If we are willing to let evidence creep into our skulls and change the way we think and then, if we can let that information slowly, over time, work its way from our head to our hearts.

Everyone in this church and probably 99% of the people who listen on line are self described liberals and yet how many of us started out in life that way?

I grew up in a gun-toting, George Wallace voting, racist, evangelical home and I know that the ideological ground that I covered in my young adult life was territory covered by most of you as well. We changed, so you can’t really say that people just don’t change.

The largest single hurdle we face is our willingness to even look in the mirror and honestly face our own dishonesty.  We listen now to Shawn Spicer giving White House briefings that contain more falsehoods than truths but do you think that he knows that he is lying?

In President Trump’s recent speech delivered to a joint session of congress, a speech for which many pundits were giving him a lot of praise, but a fact checking review showed that he told 51 lies in just over 65 minutes…still, do you think that he allows himself to be aware that he is lying at the nearly breathless rate of once every minute, even in a closely prepared speech?

But here is the trap folks, we, who are predisposed to hear these guys critically, we can hear their lies and be horrified by how lacking they are in self-awareness. But the question I would like to pose to us all is just this, can we hear our own lies as easily?

Granted, we had to face down some ugly demons to even make it into this room, to be able to swim against the tide of the religion and politics of our part of the world to become progressives, but are there parts of ourselves that we refuse to yield to that progressive honesty?

The question echoes through the centuries: can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?  Jesus said that it not only could be done but that it must be done.

Like you, I watch the news through a moral lens and I am not likely to stop doing that anytime soon. I’m just inviting you to use the same lens when you look in the mirror, because, not only can we be renewed, but I know of no more encouraging fact than that we can all change through honesty, conviction, and conscious choice to be better people. Otherwise, what are we doing here. This is not, after all, a graduation ceremony for those who have arrived, it is a laboratory where we hope to make something new out of ourselves.