We have a new prophet amongst us. Like the fiery biblical prophets who came before him, like Amos, Micah and Ezekiel, like Jonah crying out in the streets of Nineveh, this modern-day prophet recently proclaimed—on TV, the 700 Club to be exact—

“Woe to you people of Dover, Pennsylvania! Hear the word of the Lord! Don’t be surprised when you are smited by the wrath of God for rejecting the righteousness of Intelligent Design from your schools. Yea, I’m pretty darn sure that you shall be visited by floods and other natural disasters, and the earth under you shall tremble! I’m not saying it will happen, but it probably will. And when it does (if it does) well, do not come crying to the Lord. Woe to you, he probably won’t be there, for you have voted him off your school board!”

Ok, I’m over dramatizing this a bit—but not much! Indeed, the Rev. Pat Roberson has taken upon himself a very old mantle, the guise of the biblical prophet.

I felt both amused and disturbed by this news story. Amused by the Rev. Robertson’s supposed ability to know the specific whereabouts of God (apparently God has left Dover in a huff). Amused by Robertson’s claim to speak for the Divine opinion on such cosmically urgent matters as the curriculum at the local public middle school.

I was disturbed because Robertson was invoking a very powerful archetype, a powerful idea and image—that of the prophet on fire, the prophet calling the people back to truth. He conjures up this archetype for purposes that seem, to me, not entirely worthy of those great Hebrew prophets he is emulating.

His biblical forbears focused on problems of economic disparity, social injustice, and idolatry—the worship of false gods and false laws, including the gods of money and power. The condition of the most vulnerable members of a society has always been the clearest barometer of the spiritual health or decay of a society. When those conditions became crushing, a prophet would rise from among the people to wake them up, to get them to open their eyes and their hands and hearts in compassion to those who were suffering in their midst. The prophets railed against the hypocrisy of those who imagined themselves pious while protecting themselves with the security of privilege, power, and wealth.

Honestly, one the likes of Roberson himself would be the most scandalous offender, a religious leader who makes great displays of his piety while joining with the highest ranks of political and economic power, one who publicly keeps the name of God on his lips while he privately benefits from his multi-million-dollar mining interests in war-torn Liberia, and gambles on his $500,000 race horse. This guy is no Amos.

The situation in Dover, Pennsylvania was yet another struggle over the where the line falls in the separation of church and state. The public school board had voted to introduce the idea of intelligent design into their science curricula, and they were sued by eight families, backed by the American Civil Liberties Union. These families claimed that the theory of Intelligent Design is a religious belief, a version of Creationism. To bring it into the public schools was therefore a breach of church and state separation.

We see more and more of these kinds of cases in the media—school science curricula, prayer in schools, the word “God” in the pledge of allegiance, government funding of faith based initiatives, same-sex marriage…

We hear the rising voice of the Religious Right influencing politics and legislation. We hear increasingly bold religious language and agendas put forth by political leaders. There are so many ways in which our society is struggling with what the founders intended when they established the church-state separation in the Constitution.

I won’t begin to claim to an in-depth understanding of this legal issue, but I am learning a few things as I go along. In case there are others of us here today who are as mystified by the fine points of this debate as I have been, I’m going to share some of the abc’s as described by Noah Feldman, author of Divided by God: Solving America's Church-State Problem. This is a paraphrase of his argument:

“Legal secularists" point out that God is simply absent from the Constitution, and that the First Amendment forbids the forming of a state-sponsored religion, even as it guarantees the free exercise religion for all citizens. They conclude that religion and government must be separated by a high protective wall. The “values evangelicals" counter that the words "separation of church and state" are also absent from the Constitution. Reminding us that the Founders' America was almost entirely Christian—and 95% Protestant—they conclude that Judeo-Christian values are the true basis for our national project.

So, who's right?

Both sides are only half right. The framers, one and all, believed in the importance of the freedom of conscience. They barred a national state-sponsored religion in order to protect that freedom. Since they were primarily concerned with taxes, they thought that an official religion would infringe on the religious freedom of citizens by spending tax dollars for religious purposes. They also knew they could never agree on a national religion, given their own diverse denominations. They believed that the government should not financially sponsor religious institutions, and should not coerce anyone to adhere to particular beliefs. Other than that, they had no great objection to religious symbols, ideas, or values being present in the public sphere.

Feldman states…

“If we were serious about getting back to the Framers' way of doing things, we would adopt their two principles: no money and no coercion. This compromise would allow plenty of public religious symbolism, but it would also put an end to government vouchers for religious schools. God could stay in the Pledge of Allegiance, but Bush’s funding for faith-based charities would be over.”

Clear as mud? Lots of room for gray area still?

I think what struck me most in what I read and learned was the idea that the separation of church and state was intended to protect our religious life from government intrusion. The separation was not intended to wall politics off from the influence of religious beliefs or forces. This raises some interesting questions for religious liberals.

Recently there has been a flurry of chat on-line amongst the ministers of the Mass Bay District on this very subject of church state separation. As my colleagues wrestle with the issues, many Unitarian congregations and ministers rush to the defense of the “legal secularist” position, trying anxiously to rebuild the wall of separation that they see crumbling. They rail against the encroachment of the “evangelical values” in the political sphere. They angrily and fearfully assert that religion—namely conservative religion—should not be so influential in government. And there is no doubt that when religion and politics get to be entwined bed-fellows and the money starts flowing across that line of separation, we start to see something that looks an awful lot like state sponsored religion.

And yet, do we really want government and policy to be completely divorced from the values that we ourselves wish to uphold?

There is another perspective coming from among our UU ranks, which is saying, now wait a minute…Rev. Pat Robertson is not the only model of a powerful religious voice in the public sphere. Robertson and those of like-mind should not be, must not be the only model of a religious voice in the public sphere.

When we advocate only for a hard line separating political things from spiritual things, we cut ourselves out of the religious values debate. We settle for secularism, just when a progressive, religious, justice-based, prophetic voice is called for to bring balance.

Jim Wallace makes this case amply in the book we heard from earlier today, God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong, and the Left Doesn’t Get It. He feels the language of faith has been co-opted by the right and dismissed by the left.

A weirdly narrow and misaligned vision has emerged in the Religious Right. Wallis has watched the Right come to assert a Christianity that is mean-spirited, pro-wealthy, nationalistic, puritanical, and corrupted by its links to power and money. The prophetic Jesus at the heart of Christianity is utterly ignored. What happened to “love your enemies?” What happened to “blessed are the peacemakers?” What happened to “open your hand to the poor and the outcast in your land”?

On the other hand, Wallis sees a sad lack of vision and authority on the part of the Secular Left. The Left has been so committed to the separation of church and state that it has virtually lost the language of moral vision and fails to speak to a very wide swath of Americans, in fact the majority of Americans.

Most folks are religious, are concerned about moral issues and the moral fabric of society, and a great many are also progressive and justice oriented. They are interested in and even long for a faith-oriented discourse, but not the skewed and polarized one currently being propagated. There is a huge gap in the public debate that religious liberals have a capacity to fill.

I had an interesting experience at a house party to raise funds for our state Senator, Marion Walsh’s, ____campaign. In the heated debate over same-sex marriage, she had taken an enormous political and personal risk and stunned her Catholic base by standing in support of same sex marriage. What had been a loyal base turned against her as a result, and in order to win re-election, she had to rebuild her relationship to the community and seek out new support. But she was a conundrum to both liberals and conservatives, because she was both pro-marriage equality and pro-life.

At this party were many lesbian women and social progressives. I listened with great interest and admiration as she explained how her faith had informed her conscience and led her to these two positions. She had clearly engaged in very deep reflection and soul searching, and had arrived at an ethic of justice based upon her understanding of the sanctity of life and the God-given worth and uniqueness of each individual. Her positions on these two matters were theologically consistent. Her faith had taught her to examine her conscience in light of the example and teachings of Jesus, to ask herself, “where would he stand on this debate?” She said that her faith had also given her the strength to stand alone.

While many of us may not agree with her views, we have something to learn from her. She has challenged the politically convenient polarities and brought a more nuanced religious perspective to public moral discussion. This is what religious liberals can and must do.

“We are politically adrift” Wallis says, “cut off from our best values, our public life a bankrupt battlefield of competing special interests without a framework of serious moral discourse.”

Yet all the great movements for social change in our country’s history saw faith communities and religious leaders rise to become a the voice of conscience--the abolition of slavery, the suffrage of women, child labor laws, and civil rights. In Massachusetts today, hundreds of religious communities of many traditions have signed the Declaration of Religious Support for Same-Sex Marriage—Theodore Parker Church being among those signatories. We have a tradition to carry forward, given to us by Theodore Parker and many of our Unitarian and Universalist saints, whose moral conviction was religiously grounded and who did not shy away from proclaiming that.

Wallis writes:

“The great practitioners of real social change, like Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi understood that you don’t change society by merely replacing one wet-fingered politician with another. You change society by changing the wind. Change the wind, transform the debate, recast the discussion, alter the context in which political decisions are being made and you will change the outcomes. Move the conversation to a whole new place, and you will open up possibilities for change never dreamed of…and, you’ll be surprised at how fast the politicians adjust to a change in the wind.”

Where is the wind blowing today? Are we reading correctly the signs of our times? How can we loosen up the failed ideological polarities and find deeper solutions to our pressing social problems? How can we, as members of this faith community, as “people of faith,” enter into the moral discourse, connecting with others, persuading others from the perspective and passion of our religious commitments?

Some of us may continue to feel most grounded in the example and words of the Judeo-Christian prophets, upon whose testimony the ethics of our UU tradition are based. We can use this language to speak to others who come from a scriptural faith, whether Christian, Jew or even Muslim, since Islam recognizes the Hebrew Prophets.

Some of us will use the principles and purposes as a grounding. We can practice saying…

“Because I am a Unitarian Universalist, I believe that we have a responsibility to the web of life, the web of human society, in which we are all connected and interdependent.”

“Because I am a Unitarian Universalist, I believe that compassion and equity should be primary values in our society.”

You, of course, must find your own words to link your spiritual values with your ethics. But the point is, we can learn to speak the language of faith and moral vision in the public sphere, in order to change the direction wind, or in order to amplify the breeze of justice and peace that is already beginning to rise.

May it be so.

THE READING was adapted from God’s Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and The Left Doesn’t Get It by Jim Wallis, pgs 209-211.

I often do a little bible quiz for audiences that I’m speaking with. I ask this question: “What is the most famous biblical passage in America about the poor?” Every time—and I mean every single time—I receive the same answer. “The poor will always be with you!” they shout out. It’s the scripture from Mark’s gospel, chapter 14, verse 7: “For you will always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you will; but you will not always have me.”
But it’s only that first part of passage people remember, not the part about showing kindness, and they miss a few other things as well—like the whole context of the story. This highly American commentary on a famous biblical text is worth some further reflection.

First of all there is the context. Jesus was at Bethany “in the house of Simon the leper,” the passage says. There is a clue to the meaning of the story right away. This was not dinner with business executives from the chamber of commerce, not a prayer breakfast with the president and members of Congress. Jesus and his disciples were at the table with a leper—the ultimate outcast of their society.

While they were eating, “a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly oil of nard, and broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head.” This was a cultural sign of high regard and religious devotion toward a person due great respect, but instead of being pleased that their teacher was being honored in this way, the disciples complained among themselves and criticized the woman’s lavish act of devotion. She had probably expended her entire life savings to afford this special gift and his followers had just scolded her. “Why was the ointment wasted in this way?” they murmered. “It could have been sold for over 300 denarri and the money given to the poor.”

But Jesus says to them, “Leave her alone; why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing for me. For you will always have the poor with you, and whenever you will, you can show kindness to them, but you will not always have me. She has done what she could. She has anointed my body for my burial. Truly I tell you, wherever good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her.”

So what is really being said here? Remember the context. They are at the table with Simon the leper, and Jesus us making an assumption about his disciples’ continued proximity to the poor. He is saying: Look, you will always have the poor with you because you are my disciples. You know who we spend our time with, who we share our meals with, who listens to our message, who we focus our attention on. You have been with me and have been watching me, and you know what my priorities are. You know who comes first in the Kingdom of God. So, you will always be near the poor, you will always be with them, and will always have the opportunity to share with them.

Indeed, biblical scholars trace Jesus’ teachings here directly back to the Hebrew scriptures in Deuteronomy, chapter 15. “Give liberally and be ungrudging when you do so, for on this account the Lord will bless you in all your work and in all you undertake. Since there will never cease to be some in need upon the earth, I therefore command you ‘Open your hand to the poor and the needy neighbor in your land.’” Jesus is assuming the social location of his followers will always put them in close proximity to those in need and easily able to reach out to them.

He’s also telling them not to be so “politically correct”, as it were. Don’t be grudging and cheap when it comes to expressing your worship and devotion. You can be abundant in your worship and still be generous with the poor.

But how do modern American’s interpret this text? We simply use it as an excuse. “The poor you will always have with you” gets translated into “There is nothing we can do to end poverty; the poor will always be there, so why bother?”

The critical difference between Jesus’s disciples and the middle class church is precisely this: our lack of proximity to the poor. We are no longer “with” the poor and they are no longer “with” us. The middle class church doesn’t know the poor, and they don’t know us. Wealthy Christians talk about the poor, but they have no friends who are poor. So they merely speculate on the reasons for their condition, often placing the blame on the poor themselves.