Then was brought unto Jesus one possessed with a devil, blind, and dumb: and Jesus healed him, insomuch that the blind and dumb both spake and saw.

And all the people were amazed, and said, Is not this the son of David?

But when the Pharisees heard it, they said, This fellow doth not cast out devils, but by Beelzebub the prince of the devils.

And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand:

And if Satan cast out Satan, he is divided against himself; how shall then his kingdom stand?

And if I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do your children cast them out? therefore they shall be your judges.

But if I cast out devils by the Spirit of God, then the kingdom of God is come unto you.

"Amazing grace, how sweet the sound..." So begins one of the most beloved hymns of all times... The author of the words was John Newton, the self-proclaimed wretch who once was lost but then was found, saved by amazing grace.

Newton was born in London July 24, 1725. When John was eleven, he went to sea with his father and made six voyages with him before the elder Newton retired. In 1744 John was impressed into service on a man-of-war, the H. M. S. Harwich. Finding conditions on board intolerable, he deserted but was soon recaptured and publicly flogged and demoted from midshipman to common seaman.

Finally at his own request he was exchanged into service on a slave ship, which took him to the coast of Sierra Leone. He then became the servant of a slave trader and was brutally abused. John Newton ultimately became captain of his own ship, one which plied the slave trade.

Although he had had some early religious instruction from his mother, who had died when he was a child, he had long since given up any religious convictions. However, on a homeward voyage, while he was attempting to steer the ship through a violent storm, he experienced what he was to refer to later as his "great deliverance." He recorded in his journal that when all seemed lost and the ship would surely sink, he exclaimed, "Lord, have mercy upon us." Later in his cabin he reflected on what he had said and began to believe that God had addressed him through the storm and that grace had begun to work for him.

For the rest of his life he observed the anniversary of May 10, 1748 as the day of his conversion, a day of humiliation in which he subjected his will to a higher power.

The origin of the melody is unknown. Most hymnals attribute it to an early American folk melody. The Bill Moyers special on "Amazing Grace" speculated that it may have originated as the tune of a song the slaves sang.

Oh God, we beseech thee and all thy powers of healing to move within President Bush, Senator Kerry, all public representatives, and the people of this great nation, that we might work with one another to bind up the wounds of our land. Where there is enmity may we sow peace. Where there is disagreement, may we sow accord. Where there is hostility, may we sow reconciliation and understanding. Lord, have mercy upon us. And give us the will to see the public, civic values and virtues we hold in such grand esteem, become true for all Americans; that the world might realize a liberty and justice for all. Give us a loyalty to democracy as an expression of the best that is in human nature, but give us, too, the discerning eye and the humble heart when we have fallen short of the ideals we claim we hold. Give us the courage and foresight to continue this great experiment in ordered liberty. And to live this truth: that democratic men and women hold persuasion over coercion as the means to find hope in tomorrow and truth for today.

AMEN.

This sermon will be a bit different than most Sundays. It will not have a theme, will not weave a fabric of rhetoric as a garment to try on today and tomorrow to discover what philosophical and theological attire fits you best. Instead, I will offer random observations about this past Tuesday. And I offer them because the interpretation and meaning of this election, as much as any I have lived through, appears clear but is actually shrouded in great mystery. So, it is ripe for misinterpretation. Let’s begin.

When the first moving picture was shown in public, it was not a completed work like the movies we see today but a clip of a locomotive coming at the camera. The audience, none of whom had seen this kind of thing before, panicked, certain a real engine was bearing down upon them at breakneck speed. This is a common mistake of anyone attempting interpretation. It is familiar in Biblical interpretation, as well as political interpretation. It is called projection.

The movie projector projects the image on the wall and the eyes sitting in the audience receive the images and interpret them. In the interpretive mistake of projection the individual is both the movie projector and the eyes receiving and interpreting the images. I already believe Jesus is a supernatural savior of humankind from the muck it is mired in, and read the “house divided” as evidence he could literally make blind men see and mute men speak. Or, I believe Jesus is a holy man not unique from other holy people and largely dismiss the story because of its fable-like characteristics. In both the aim of religious interpretation is ignored: To reflect upon the presuppositional beliefs themselves and not the result of the projected interpretation.

So, why was the question of “moral values” asked in exit polls in the first place? Was it because pollsters themselves found this election to elude their capacities to interpret, especially when cell phones and caller registries indicate the contempt with which people greet phone solicitations and being accessible to anyone asking anything? Was the vague reference to “moral values” asked and zeroed in on as uniquely important in this election despite historical evidence to the contrary, because the pollsters lacked anything more substantial and understandable to interpret our times? Maybe they projected that this issue was about “moral values,” and only confirmed their own projections. I think that last one is more accurate because I’ve seen it done so many times when it comes to considering religious issues and tasks like Biblical interpretation.

The whole issue of exit polling is under very close scrutiny as a result of this election. And the interpretation of “moral values” holds no value or meaning to uphold or attack.

This may be closer to the truth, not in terms of the characteristics of dogmatic and close-minded versus open-minded and free, but in terms of a clash of religious perspectives. And those who do not themselves critically reflect or see the world religiously are at a disadvantage in terms of understanding this. Here is this interpretation represented by Garry Wills, who earns my admiration and respect not because we agree religiously. In fact we are miles apart, as he is a practicing Catholic and I am a practicing Unitarian Universalist. But, we agree that it is imperative to hold a distinction between one’s religious and one’s civic/political viewpoint. Yet, at the same time I would hold that Wills did not use his religious viewpoint, with antecedents in the Enlightenment (as mine), to analyze culture. He just throws up his hands and declares the Enlightenment lost.

Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity [that seems expressed in part in this election]?... We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein's Sunni loyalists…

I do not think this election was evidence that those who rebel against the Enlightenment and the modern world have triumphed in this country over those who embrace and represent it. The Virgin Birth has always held a magical allure for many if not most, even after the Enlightenment!

The very culture that is the product of the Enlightenment and the modern world, is the very culture that produced those who claim to rebel against the Enlightenment and the modern world. There is something deeper here that even Wills ignores out of a fear that the culture he, and I support, is somehow collapsing under the pressure of an assault from within.

This election is not evidence that American values and the American culture are coming under attack. This election is evidence that this culture, like all culture, arose and is maintained in a vortex of swirling and sometimes competing and antithetical influences. The origins of this culture, as ”critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences,” is not nearly a comprehensive list. The origins of this culture also included men enslaving men, women not even being considered persons, the decimation of the native cultures of this land, and a whole host of other characteristics now recognized as undesirable. It is not American values and the American culture that is coming under attack, as evidenced in part by this election, because those “values” were generated within the irony of culture and the tragedy of history.

But, this election does reveal a religious conflict. And it has ramifications for our faith and our country.

Our faith. Your faith. What is your faith? I would suggest that an individual’s inability (or unwillingness?) to articulate his or her faith in the language of faith, even in its rudimentary form, among political liberals, is suggestive of a deeper problem. I would suggest that this deeper problem is at the heart of Garry Wills analysis, and leads him to suggest mistakenly that this culture, founded in part in the virtues he recognizes and affirms, is now denying those virtues. It can only be communicated in religious language, and our inability to understand it communicated in that form is itself revealing of the deeper problem. This deeper problem is a religious problem that liberal religionists and political and cultural liberals find themselves. We are separated from an experience of God as a transformative experience of liberalis. We are separated from God as the Spirit underlying and upholding reality (literally liberalis as the Spirit holding existence together) in such a manner that transformation towards freedom, liberation, broader love for humanity and regard for creation, is a more remote possibility, though remaining a possibility nonetheless.

We struggle to sing Amazing Grace even though we are uplifted out of our narrownesses and prejudices by singing it. We struggle to sing more than the first verse even though doing so liberates us from the bonds that bind the mind to narrow thought and the heart to lifeless creed. We struggle to sing it because of words like “was lost but now am found,” even though it describes the darkest night of any person’s soul, even our own! The line, “that sav’d a wretch like me,” sticks in our throat because we deny that we can act wretchedly and with an intentional malice from which we cannot save ourselves, save through divine help. We hesitate in singing with gusto, if at all, the words, “But God, who call'd me here below, Will be forever mine,” because we mistakenly adhere to past interpretations and think the main religious issue of our time is one of belief or disbelief in God. But singing songs such as this one is part of transformation, and thus, is part of religion. The confrontation and acknowledgement of the human condition. When we realize how we are wrong, and so many times are in collusion with injustice, then transformation is possible, and all the virtues of humanity, those illuminated by the Englightenment - ”critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences,” – all become part of a transformed world, too. And liberalis, at the heart of humanity’s covenant with itself, because persons have experienced it to be at the heart of existence itself, becomes the walk in transforming existence towards a larger and larger Love.

Perhaps America looks irreparably divided by culture wars to those who have lost the capacity to see America and Americans in any other way than politically. I maintain today, as I have for over a year now, that it is imperative that religion and politics be considered as distinct. I have proposed that there is within an individual a spiritual self, and a civic self. I have encouraged each person to conceive of themselves not as religious liberals – holding liberalism, especially liberal politics religiously – but instead as liberal religionists. I have tried, and will continue to try, to encourage a faith understood as shaped by freedom, broadmindedness, a generosity of the spirit expressed in the theological declaration that God loves all souls, and a unity of creation beneath human difference, conflict, and divisiveness expressed in the theological declaration that God is One.

But, cultivating the spiritual life as something separate than, though related to, the civic life, is a discipline. It is not easy. In our time it is the hardest religious discipline of all. But, to do it in this land today is an embodiment of hope. There was one newspaper advertisement that declared, “God is not a Republican or a Democrat,” and then counseled people to vote their religious values. Self-declared religious liberals sponsored it, and so the headline could just have well declared the “truth” the sponsors wanted readers to understand: “God is not a Republican, and Some Who Vote Democrat Are Religious.” We all know that was the real meaning of the advertisement. But, I would counsel not to vote your religious values, because to do that today is to unwittingly succumb to making your faith a servant of your politics. That is what is dividing the world today. Your religion and your politics are separate, and need be considered so, because they represent different views of the world. Otherwise, today the world becomes seen as divided between those who vote like me, and those who are in league with Satan or ignorance or both.

It is inevitable that when you consider your religion by the measurement of politics two things occur: in a democracy, either the popular will of the people confirms your political viewpoint, as in, they have correctly discerned the will of God, and therefore joy and celebration appear in your life; or, just as assuredly, when the popular will of the people defeats your political viewpoint, they and the country deserve God's judgment, and will surely incur God's wrath and punishment, and therefore sadness and despair appear in your life.  But if you consider politics, and all other parts of culture, by the measurement of faith, then each election begs the questions of ultimate concern.  To the individual of faith it asks what lasts after the signs and the slogans fade, the constitutions are amended or left alone, and the euphoria of victory or the anxiety of defeat set in.  It asks the true and ever abiding religious questions: "Where is the Spirit that bloweth where it listeth, and is always stronger than transient political winds that gain and subside with the seasons?"  "Wherein doth lie true hope?"

I have officiated at gay and lesbian union services for almost twenty years. I will continue to do so, regardless of what happens in the civic sphere. I do so not because I understand love. I do so not because I understand the love of a man and a man, or a woman and a woman. I do so not because it is legally recognized or not. I do so because our faith tradition calls us to declare God’s love for all souls, recognize when it is in evidence, and become a co-creator of its manifestations. And to me that sometimes means I do what I do not understand. I do so because our faith tradition declares that beneath human difference there abides a unity of the spirit that is best expressed in the declaration that God is One. I will continue to do union services not because I understand love, and not because of the power over me of constitutional amendments, and not because of the authority of Scripture. I will continue to do union services because my experience has presented me with an ineffable unity of the Spirit that abides among us, and that Spirit is Love. “God is love, and they that abide in love, abide in God, and He in them.” To see the world in that way and to dwell in the kingdom of God so understood, judges all governments and political decisions and actions as incomplete. When one sees the world in that way and dwells in the kingdom of God so understood, there appears a vision of human equality that is the aim of democracy but is never fully fulfilled by any human government. Our faith tradition calls us to dwell in that kingdom, the Kingdom of God as the unity of the Spirit expressed through a love for all souls; even as we dwell, too, in a considerably smaller domain called the United States.

Jesus declared a house divided against itself cannot stand, as a way to communicate to those around him and, fortunately, to us as well, that seeing the world as for or against me, and, hence, our country today as divided between those who are like me and those who are not, is one way to view the world. Yet it is not dwelling in the Kingdom of God, but in the province of politics. Inevitably viewing the world that way will destroy life because it will ebb and flow with personal defeats and triumphs, and an individual will come to consider the world as divided into Satan and God, evil and good, as merely projected personal opinion. But, the author of Matthew cleverly attached this saying of Jesus to a story of healing. There is another way to view the world: through the life of the spirit, through the lens of love, through the ever-abiding presence of hope.

AMEN.