“So then you are no longer strangers and aliens,” said Paul, “but you are Citizens with the Saints… members of the household of God,… with Christ Jesus… as the cornerstone.”  Our youth, Malesh and Boyosa, along with 35,000 others, have been citizens with the saints in New Orleans this past week.  They are in worship in the Super Dome even now, as we worship here too.   

I tuned in the live streaming a couple times this past week, just to check in on our flock.  I didn’t actually see our group, though I’m sure they were there somewhere!  I did see one fine speaker after another, young, and, well, mostly young, who were telling their faith stories – black, white and brown, gay and straight, differently-abled and modestly famous, all, citizens with the saints, all feeling a part of, included in on, not only this particular assembly, but the wider journey our God calls us to, in Christ Jesus.  “For he is our peace,” Paul preached to both Jews and Gentiles, “in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” 

“All walls serve a purpose, but not all walls serve the purposes of God,” as Kevin Baker, a pastor from North Carolina has said. 

Some time ago, when I lived in Europe in 1977-78, I took more pictures of old city walls and stone farm fences than anything else.  I was fascinated by them!  I’m not sure why to this day, exactly, but something about how old they are and how long they’ve stood – the unique way they define an urban space and farming field, a stoic silent beauty? the wise use of resources and many ways to repurpose them over the centuries?  Tour guides, and locals agree, that city walls were often made for defense against intruders, whether armies, or wild animals.  I never thought to ask, at the time, if the wall was built after a city was first attacked, or if because the wall was made, attackers then came to find out what was inside?! 

Why do we put up walls?  “All walls serve a purpose, but not all walls serve the purposes of God.”  St. Paul was certain that central to the mission of Jesus was the breaking down of walls that divide us – a kind of one man wrecking crew. 

I find it curious that the same year the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, and we watched the jubilant students and others dancing on its rubble, both citizens of east and west peacefully united once again, citizens of this country began building the U.S.-Mexico border wall.  Theologian Ched Myers uses this contradictory image to point out the obvious: such “border walls reminds us that there have always been two Americas,” he says, “one of inclusion and one of exclusion… [which] continually compete for our hearts and minds, not least in our churches.  The America of inclusion,” Myers says, “is the only hope for democracy; the America of exclusion, as Lincoln’s ultimatum about a ‘house divided’ warned 150 years ago, is unsustainable.” 

That’s exactly what I told my brother-in-law a few years ago, as the wall in Israel was being built.  He believed the IDF, the Israeli Defense Force’s official line, which calls it a security fence.  I’ve seen it – an immense fence of poured concrete, that is taller than either of the Berlin or the US-Mexico walls.  And although security is certainly an issue for Israeli’s, this wall is not just built on their property to make good neighbors, but winds its way into and around Palestinian towns on the West Bank, separating families, one from a another, people from their jobs, and creates opportunities for daily abuse at check points for those having to cross from one side to the other.  Palestinians have many names for it, dividing wall, is just one of the more polite ones! 

This wall, I told my brother-in-law, cannot stand, it is unsustainable.  It will come down, because, just like the one on our southern border with our brothers and sisters in Latin America, it’s not built on a moral or ethical cornerstone.  These walls are built on the America and Israel of exclusion.  Please note that I’m not talking about the Jewish faith or people, just like I’m not talking about the spirit of the American people in particular, but about governments and those who exclude on the basis of race, ethnicity and economic status.  A growing number of Israeli and American Jews are also opposed to their security fence.  These kinds of walls are corruptible, no matter where in the world they are built, walls that cannot stand. 

Rick Steves, of all people, that golden-boy, travel-guide-expert of PBS fame, has noted about the walls which I love so well from medieval Europe, especially the tidy yet simple farming ones – that they were constructed without any mortar in them, on purpose, so that they could be dismantled and redrawn in new ways as needed.  I always wondered why that was!  They’re not exactly portable to our way of thinking, but the point remains the same, that the walls’ purpose was to be flexible, to redraw the new reality on the social scene, which inevitably would arise. 

Jesus, our cornerstone, was a wandering preacher, an alien in his own land, a peasant who crossed over borders, something like a Leer jet flying international flights, looking down at the border-free globe, that is the world we all live in.   As one of us, Jesus welcomed the stranger and alien, healing the sick and preaching good news, to Gentiles, as well as Jews.  He dined with rich rulers, and sat on the grass with 5,000 hungry commoners to eat fish and bread.  Jesus celebrated Passover in Jerusalem at the Temple’s holy site, but offered himself up as a new border-free temple, that would rise and live in us, a portable, border-less new construct, a church who are the people, and who claim the power of the Holy Spirit, poured out in his name. 

What are the walls we build up today, the walls that divide, instead of welcome and unite?  What are the walls we construct even in our minds, our short-sightedness, that create barriers which we think we need to defend, welcoming conflict and violence, instead of new life and the hospitality of table and meal?  I wonder, for example, where the wall is between the north side and south side of Chicago?  Where exactly is the fence, the edifice that separates us?  And yet, how often we take it for granted that it exists?  What else is this wall but exclusion by privilege, discrimination and racism?  A wall enforced by banks’ red-lining, by poorly funded schools and social services, and food deserts. 

“All walls serve a purpose, but not all walls serve the purpose of God.”  And so, the reason we welcome the alien isn’t just to be nice, and not even because it is a command.  We welcome the stranger and alien because Jesus, a one man wrecking crew, has broken down the walls that separate us, the very walls that lead to hostilities between us, as Paul said.  This is the purpose of God, to create one new humanity in place of [a world divided]. 

And so what a beautiful step forward it was that the President announced last month, in the Dream-Act-like directive from the Department of Homeland Security, not to deport undocumented college students.  Not a fix for our broken immigration system, but a move in the right direction – a welcoming provision for those who came to this country at an early age as, saints along with the citizens, we might say – certainly a breaking down of the walls of division, and, making a way to overcome the hostility between us. 

The biblical provision, from Abraham to Jesus, to welcome the stranger and alien who were from beyond their borders, was not just an act of kindness, though it was surely that, but was a way of putting aside differences that all too often in every culture, then and now, lead to hostilities, as Paul described it.  The Homeland Security Department of that time, realized that the peace we all desire is best accomplished through bridge-building rather than dividing walls.  Walls that are built on exclusion cannot stand.  But living on the cornerstone of a new creation in Christ, we are all citizens with the saints, living the dream God would have us live – connecting us up with one another, as we are at this peaceful table of celebration, in the meal of reconciliation, where we banquet with all the saints.  

I love Green Week!  And I don’t want it to be over!  Eco-Andersonville organizes our neighborhood to think and act environmentally during Green Week, involving business partners to sponsor events, like our Bike for Real, the Zip-Car & I-Go Electric Car demonstrations, a sustainability Fair at the Swedish Museum, Chicago Amateur Bread Makers demonstrations, and a couple different home-brew events, just to name a few.  

As an Urban Green Space, we are participants in this environmental initiative.  Our care of God’s creation is a vital element in being the church.  We come at it out of our theological lens of a Trinitarian God.  A God who is, creator of the universe, a God who sent Jesus to redeem not only us, but the whole world, all animals and living things in it, and a God who breathes and enlivens us by the Holy Spirit, in the work of caring for God’s creation.  In this kind of, recycling, renewing, Trinitarian formula, if you will, we also make room for sin and failure, both in us and of the world.  Somewhere between our faith in a sovereign God, who has given us a graciously loving, incarnate Son, and our increasing awareness of the tipping point for global warming that is upon us, we must reconcile what our faith says, and what it calls us to do, and stand up and be answerable to the kind of people of faith God is asking us to become! 

Ok, so I’ll start off with a confession.  I did not complete my 30 miles of biking this week, as I pledged!  Don’t worry, I have excuses!  Rain got in the way on Friday night, as I was getting ready to leave for Mozart and Merlot, and a meeting down in Hyde Park during the week ran way late on Thursday.  Both times I had to fire up the car instead of hopping on the bike, as I’d planned.  Do I need to make confession, in the company of my sisters and brothers, and before God?  How integrated is our practice of caring for creation with our belief in a Trinitarian God?  If God loves us unconditionally, a “God [who] has destined us for adoption as his children through J.C...” as St Paul said, through whom “we have redemption… according to the riches of his grace that he lavished on us,” isn’t that enough to cover us?  Aren’t we done?  Don’t we now just wait for the happy ending in the resurrection?  Or is there perhaps something more about the incarnate nature of God in Jesus?  Isn’t there perhaps something divine, something holy, calling to us now, something nagging at us, something that won’t let us go, Someone opening up a way out of no way, that in prayer and hope, in faith and love, impinges on us right now?! 

Blessed be the holy Trinity, + one God,

the creator of wind and rain, field and ocean,

the bread of life coming down from above,

the power at work within us and this world.

This beautiful Trinitarian formula which we hear as we begin our liturgy every Sunday morning of the summer, reminds us of the faith we are called to, a faith that continues to form us, and a faith that is alive in us, wherever and whenever we are at work in the world.  And so, with an authentic, living faith, inertia, dead-ness, is not an option. 

The battle over climate change that we’ve been engaged in, is full of both faithful devotees and fierce deniers.  Politically, we are frozen in place by opposing teams.  To make changes in our over production of carbon emitting fossil fuels, we need an organized concerted effort that has to include, national political action.  But right now, neither presidential candidate is even talking about it.  Until the body politic, us, make up our minds about it, they will continue to see it as a losing proposition.  And so, we hear more about the Kardashian family in the news than climate change.  Somebody actually counted, comparing, the latest climate disaster from carbon, the dying coral reefs and ocean fish populations, happening much faster than predicted.  And we hear the Kardashian’s in the news, 40 times more often.  You have to really dig, to find the climate stories that are out there, like, excessive nuclear leaking at the California San Onofre nuclear plant, water contamination here in Chicago, increasing shortages of clean water around the globe, or, a cloud of plastic trash in the ocean the size of Texas.  All these are mostly lost in Kardashian-land.  Yet the rich and famous, who are in no way integrated into the real world, mostly seize our attention.

And yet, here, in God’s very good creation, is where we are called – in the world that God has made, redeemed and sent us.  The distractions and denials are nothing new really, certainly not for Jesus and the disciples.  We have only to look at our gospel reading, and the scandalous story of the beheading of John the Baptist!  Scandal both attracts and repels us, as we discussed last Sunday.  And the scandal here is no different.  At the birthday bash for King Herod, a high flyer party for the rich and famous, the highlight was his daughter’s present, a special dance for him and all the royal guests.  Amid all the revelry and excitement, Herod promised her whatever she wanted up to half of his kingdom.  Maybe he figured, it’s all the family, what can it hurt.  But as the story goes, she conspires with her mother, who had a grudge against John and wanted to kill him, and so she tells her daughter to ask for the head of John the baptizer.  It’s the daughters’ idea to ask for it on a platter.  Herod knows better, but doesn’t want to look weak.  The games of the rich and famous, not integrated or incarnate in the real world, never-the-less, can affect us who do, and who believe, and work, and care for God’s creation. 

The same thing will happen to Jesus, of course, at the end of the story.  Jesus will be arrested on trumped up charges, and bound up and put in prison like John.  He will be shuffled back and forth between the rich and famous, who aren’t really impressed with the itinerant peasant from Galilee, who pretend to wash their hands of their responsibility, yet send him to the cross, just to appease the crowds at the Passover celebration, and so they can get back to their courtiers in their own version of Kardashian Land. 

Caring for God’s creation by the rich and famous has led only to excessive misuse of the earth’s resources.  And now, even our elected leaders listen more to them, and will continue to, unless we speak with a passionate convicted voice.  The earth itself is rising up in angry swirls of tsunami’s, droughts, floods, and heat-waves, and still, climate deniers, like Herodias’ mother holding a grudge, want to kill off the world and it’s testimony against them. 

The good news is that many people are acting locally to live more simply, reduce their carbon footprint, and desire a world that is habitable for our children.  Green Week is catching on.  Individuals and businesses are finding ways to make a difference.  We, are rediscovering our confession in a triune God that loves the world and all of creation, one God, the creator of wind and rain, field and ocean, the bread of life coming down from above, the power at work within us and this world.   But the disconnected rich and famous, acting on whims, still hold much of the power to change the agenda for the country.  Voting is not gunna be enough.  Green Week is not enough.  We need Green Year and Green Decade!  We need to live out our confession of faith in our powerful and living God, to care for creation in all that we do, the things we buy, the resources we consume.  We need a Green life-style for us individually, and for every social and political aspect of God’s world we live in.  We need to love Green Week, and want it never to end.  Then God will be praised in all creation.  

Scandals are really a delicious concoction of both titillation and personal offense.  It’s true!  And we dare not tell lies to ourselves, believing we don’t have each ingredient in equal measure, opposites, like oil and water, but tasting much more like sugar and butter.  For scandals are as common, and delicious, as apple pie!

There is even a new TV show called “Scandal.”  It’s star, Olivia, is a former communications director to the President of the United States, who left the White House to start her own prestigious “crisis management firm.”  She has “dedicated her life to protecting and defending the public images of the nation’s elite,” says the show’s byline, and then this, “[Olivia is both r]evered and feared at the same time.”  Now that’s the root of scandal, a kind of person, whether elite, celebrity, or iconoclast - we love to hate!  It’s so delicious, isn’t it?  We are jealously desirous, and offended, at the same time. 

One could make a pretty good case, that, America is run on scandal!  Political scandals that can actually affect our lives, or, when there’s a slow news day, Hollywood scandals, which are a dime a dozen.  Magazines at the checkout counter tell the scandal of the week, online news headlines grab for our attention daily:  divorce of the rich and famous, secrets, supposedly revealed, that turn our rock solid belief in the stars we thought we knew, upside down, and pictures of amazing photo-shopped body types we revere and hate.  Scandal is all around.  It attracts and repels us endlessly, in one delicious concoction after another. 

Can it be the same for Jesus?  2,000 years ago?  Was scandal alive and well already?  In our reading today, Jesus returns to Nazareth, his home town, where he grew up.  It was a small town in Galilee, and everyone knew him even before he became famous.  Jesus returns after healing the two daughters of Israel, the woman with the flow of blood and Jairus’ daughter, scandalizing the crowds and leaders of Jerusalem.  Jesus is creating scandal wherever he goes – but not to continue the cycle of scandal, but to offer himself as a way out.  Not to feed the desire for more scandal, continuously looping back around in our lives, leaving us in the same unfulfilled place, but to overcome scandal and offer us a new model, bring us to a new place, a realm where we are fulfilled and truly satisfied – as we are by the bread from this table.  As in all his stops, as he travels from town to town, Jesus starts at the synagogue in Nazareth, teaching and healing.  Have you ever gone back to your home town, or your home congregation?  Been to a high school reunion?  Is it surprising how people remember you?  Do people allow for change in your life?  Why is it that we say, the more people change the more the stay the same? 

The people of Nazareth who listened to Jesus preach were astounded, and said where did this man get all this?  We had no idea he was this good!  How did he get so wise all of a sudden, get such ability?  But in the very next breath they were cutting him down: He’s just a carpenter – Mary’s boy.  We’ve known him since he was a kid.  We know his brothers and his sisters.  Who does he think he is?  And, …they were scandalized by him, it says.  They were amazed, and repulsed.  They were attracted, and despised him.  Titillated and offended. 

So, what if we do love scandal?  What’s the big deal?  Where’s the harm? 

Just this week, the headline that grabbed me was, “Following Barclays' Scandal, Stiglitz says 'Send Bankers to Jail': Without threat of prosecution, says Nobel economist, expect little to change.”  For that one day, everyone was attracted, and repelled, by this breaking story.  There it was, out in the open, banking’s elite, talking plainly to one another about how to hide their willful defrauding of government and public.  Same old, same old, seemed to be the reaction.  But as Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz says in the article, where are the consequences for such behavior?  Why is it so natural to jail the little guy down the street for petty theft in the midst of economic peril, and those who have engineered fraud in the billions with a B, get to retire with million dollar bonuses?  But I digress!  My point is simply that this scandal, as humungous as it is, faded away as quickly as it sprang up.  Why?  Because the system we live in no longer provides justice in these cases, so the attraction quickly gives way to repulsion, a scandal with no teeth.  But we can’t say, there’s no harm done. 

Jesus understood this and said, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown, and among their relatives, and on the streets they play in as a child.”  So, Jesus subverts the pain and violence we do to each other, as long as we live by scandal, and for our sake unveils the destructive mechanism at work within it, so that we can live new, and life-giving relationships with one another.  In Jesus’ case we can see that the stumbling block for the home town crowd of Nazareth is –not that they don’t believe the insightful teachings and powerful deeds Jesus does- but that this fellow carpenter they grew up with, can do such things!  They are scandalized, amazed and repulsed, by the realm of God dawning in their midst.  

So that’s the harm of scandal.  It can fulfill a desire we have to be like those we look up to, but traps us into blaming the victim, whenever we fail to measure up.  When we are scandalized, we feel powerful, but only in a voyeuristic way, which leads, really, only to powerlessness itself, as our jealousy and envy leave us unfulfilled, and we turn on the former object of our desire.  We are attracted, but because we want to be something we are not, and can’t be, because it’s not authentically us.  What is it that we confess at the beginning of this liturgy? 

   “We have thought better of ourselves than others… 
    acted in ways we wish we could take back…”

But the biggest scandal of all in the gospel story, of course, is the cross and resurrection.  This very same stumbling block of being scandalized by Jesus, the boy wonder who we know is really only a boy carpenter, the one who offers new wine in old wine skins, and who bursts our bubble, is the same kind of scandal at the end of the gospel story.  On the one hand, the crowds love Jesus for challenging the leaders and authorities who devise the rules which help to keep them in poverty, but they hate Jesus because he goes willing, without a fight, to the degrading cross of defeat.  Our love for him turns to shouts of, “crucify him, crucify him!” 

But on the third day, Jesus unveils what no one expected, but everyone, at least the 99%, wanted.  God vindicates Jesus, and our stumbling block becomes for us the corner stone of a new construct – the scandal is resolved, and the way of life and truth itself, are handed over to all who are beginning to see.  Jesus reveals that when life is lived for the other, that anyone can see their way into the interconnectedness of life in this increasingly global village.  The way to authentic life is modeled by leaders who practice servanthood, instead of privilege.  Jesus, becoming, and revealing scandal, is for us, the building block of a new life beyond the tempting concoction of scandal that never fills us up.  We see it in the cross, once a symbol of shame, now a symbol of victory and new life.  Then our confession becomes more than just liturgy – it is our joy and our freedom: “cleanse us, O God, and heal us, for the sake of Jesus, our Savior.”   

Watching the You Tube video’s of the crowds outside the Supreme Court back in March, and then the crowds just 3 days ago, were like night and day.  Back in the spring-time, all was quiet.  The people interviewed were calm and philosophical about the deliberations on health care, going on inside.  But this past Thursday, as you know, the crowds were highly politicized, organized for demonstrations, attuned to the cameras, and it was a shouting match! 

As I listened with one ear to the radio, one ear to some other task I was working on, I heard the first announcement, CNN is reporting that the Supreme Court has struck down the Affordable Care Act!  Half of the crowd outside the Court went up with a loud cheer, and began their celebration.  And, that’s all I heard, before I had to turn off the news and go to my next appointment.  I didn’t hear anything else about it till the 10:00 news, and was stunned that it was actually just the opposite. 

CNN, wanting so bad to break the story first, had come to a premature conclusion, based on reading only the first page of the lengthy document released by the Court. 

Actually, the legislation President Obama had signed, 2.5 years ago now, was upheld.  The crowds, I learned some 12 hours later, had totally reversed their initial cheering and sulking reactions, while the implications of the decision were still being debated in the media by every commentator from the Redwood Forest to the New York Island. 

When Jesus, the disciples, and the other boats who were with them, came back across the Sea of Galilee from the other, foreign side, sailing smoothly this time into familiar home fishing ports, his fame preceded him, and now, a great crowd was assembled awaiting him.  Those who opposed his healing Gentiles on the other side, were there, protesting his mission outreach.  And those who were attracted by his fearless style of engaging everyone who had faith, be they rich or poor, Hebrew or Syrian, male or female, were also gathered on the shores.  The docile crowds Jesus left there, some time ago, had grown now to, a great crowd, pressing in on him, louder and more polarized. 

Jesus wasn’t a politician, or a supreme court justice, but he was a kind of Affordable Health Care Act all by himself, and he walked in the midst of the crowds, full of charisma and the Spirit’s healing power.  One of the leaders of the synagogue – one who apparently didn’t oppose Jesus, whose name was Jairus – came with all the political and social clout he had at his disposal, and followed the proper protocol when approaching Jesus by falling at his feet, a sign of honor and respect.  He pleaded for his daughter, who, not having any social standing, was dependent on her father to ask such a favor.  My little daughter is on her death bed.  But I know if you come and lay hands on her, she will be made well.  Jesus goes, no questions asked. 

But there is no limo to take them, no secret service to protect Jesus.  There are no police to separate Jesus and Jairus from the great crowd who were pressing in on him.  Jesus walks in the midst of the great crowd.  And just then, Mark, suddenly introduces a new character, a nameless woman, because she too has no standing to be doing what she’s doing, standing out there in the marketplace!  She may have had some money at one time, and been more well-off than most, but she has spent all that she had on doctors in hopes of a cure for her blood flow which was uncontrollable, her hemorrhaging, and to no avail.  And so she too is nearing the point of death, the health care delivery system not set up to meet her catastrophic needs, she waits for the Affordable Care Act, to take effect for her. 

To touch others in her condition, heck, even to be in the marketplace with the crowd, was forbidden, an old world taboo that marginalized half the population.  So, what is she doing there?  Why is she risking everything?  Then again, what does she have to loose?!  She is destitute, now, without “a Jairus” to protect her honor.  But she has one thing Jesus is interested in, faith and fortitude.  If I but touch the clothes of Jesus, just the fringe of his seamless robe, I will be made well, she is convinced.  The crowds are great and pressing in on him, and she too presses in.  ‘Who will even know, if I touch the hem of his garment?’ 

And, as soon as she does, she felt in her body that she was healed.  But before she could secretly shout, hallelujah, Jesus stops dead in his tracks, because he too felt a power had gone forth from him.  Who touched my robe, Jesus calls out to a hushed crowd?  His disciples thought he must be crazy!  How in the world could anyone distinguish which one of hundreds or thousands pressing in on him, had brushed up against him?  But undeterred, Jesus surveyed the crowd until the woman, just like Jairus, falls at Jesus’ feet and tells him, as Mark says, the whole truth.  The crowd waits breathless for Jesus.  Must he punish her?  “Daughter,” he addresses her compassionately, your faith has made you well; go in peace.  More than medical healing, she has her life restored.  She is dismissed, not in shame, but with a blessing from God, through Jesus.  She is a daughter of the most high!  She is named now, for her faithfulness. 

But this delay brings bad news with it.  Jairus’ daughter has reportedly died in the mean time.  Again, Jesus seems to have crossed over to the other side, violated proper rituals, not respecting the hierarchy of rich and poor, privileged and the socially inconsequential.  But Jesus, with the power of health care for all, is undeterred.  He steps up the pace, taking only 3 disciples and Jairus with him.  Do not fear, only believe he tells them.  At the house of Jairus, the crowd has already begun their weeping and wailing for the little girl’s passing.  They do not recognize Jesus as the source of life and healer of the world.  Jesus tells them the little girl is only sleeping, and they can’t help but laugh at him.  But, taking her by the hand he said to her, Little girl, get up!  And immediately she got up. 

We learn now that she is 12 years old, the age of bar/bath mitzvah, when she is about to become a woman.  The age too when she can be transferred as, property of Jairus, her father, to a husband, who will likely be 5 or 10 years older than she.  But Jesus has intervened, restoring her to a new life, to join the way of discipleship. 

12 years!  This daughter has been alive exactly as long as the unnamed woman has had the hemorrhaging condition.  Jesus has stopped the harmful flow of blood for the un-named woman, and restored her to the community, while raising the little girl from her sickbed, so she can go on with her life and begin her flow of blood that will produce life.  And it can be no coincidence that the number 12 is used, a symbol of the 12 tribes of Israel.  Jesus, in these healings, is making a new way forward for all the people, male and female, transforming what wasn’t working anymore, into the possibility of new life. 

Both daughters were made whole, and, in relationship with Jesus – the healer of the world, the bringer of life to all the faithful – whether insider or outsider, approved or looked down upon – they had been transformed, raised up, as new people.  They were “set apart” from the great crowds who gathered around Jesus, as examples of being restored and made whole, both medically, and socially, beyond the crowd politics of polarizing and demonizing. 

Jesus, as a part of his ministry, brings healing and wholeness to all, free of charge, a basic right for all the un-named of the great crowds who pressed in on him.  We all come from the crowd – but we are not of the crowd.  In Christ, we are called out, and set apart by faith, to live in wholeness for the sake of God’s world.