Become the Change Our World So Urgently Needs

The lessons from Chautauqua resonate far beyond the pulpit.

What began as a retreat and training place for Methodist Sunday School teachers has become, one hundred and fifty years later, a large and very well known summer retreat for tens of thousands of people from across America and around the world. The Chautauqua Institution is still based on faith, but now serves a broad interfaith community. Almost every denomination has a “house” on the site with most on a beautiful red brick road that runs between all the cottages and houses that now fill the place.

I am now here at Chautauqua as the Chaplain and Preacher of the week, accompanied by my wife Joy Carroll Wallis, who many recognize as the “Real Vicar of Dibley”, a famous BBC and PBS sitcom show based upon her experiences as one of the first ordained women ministers in the Church of England. Many people here have enjoyed that show.

The Sunday service at scenic and tranquil Chautauqua draws several thousand from around the surrounding area of upstate New York, and the weekly morning services are attended by several hundred. Joy and I have been here before, once when our two sons were 7 and 2–now 27 and 22–and I told the story of how my older son Luke just loved riding a bike all around this place, finally able to ride on his own in a safe place far from the city streets where he lived. I walked alongside him the first day, on the way to Lake Chautauqua for the children’s program. On the second day he gently suggested he now knew how he could get there on his own with the bike. I hesitated to let him go off on his own on a bike for the first time, but he assured me by saying, “I’m okay Dad, but you can pray for me!” I did and he was fine.

I am spending the whole week mostly on the teachings of Jesus. “When you are in a crisis–and we are–it's time to turn back to our faith. On Sunday, I said that we must rediscover the God of the Bible, who is not just a “God of charity, but a God of Justice.” I preached from the text of Matthew 25, which was, and still is, my conversion text. A text that transformed me from a young secular activist to a faith activist.

In the sermon that day, I testified how 800 clergy and other faith leaders had done a spiritual procession to the Senate steps, where a big, brutal bill was threatening an assault on the ones Jesus called “the least of these,” denying children, the elderly, and the disabled access to healthcare and food–all in order to pay for more tax cuts to the wealthiest among us. I preached about how I was able to read Matthew 25, my conversion text, on the Senate Steps saying that, while the Bible doesn’t give us details of legislation, Senators (especially the majority who call themselves Christian) should not leave their faith and Jesus outside the door of the Senate Chamber. A chamber where they will soon be voting on the bill that targets “the least” of these to reward millionaires and billionaires.

View the entire Sunday Service here, compliments of the Chautauqua Institution

Our call to Christ and to conscience has helped to morally “complicate” this bill; a bill that far too many politicians have been willing to pass in order to bend the knee and demonstrate fealty to the man who would be king, Donald Trump. We have yet to see the outcome of the prayers and the Pentecost Witness for a Moral Budget offered at the Capitol. It is not too late for you to offer your prayers and to call your Senators in opposition to the Budget Reconciliation Bill. Call 202.224-3121 and ask for the office of the Senators from your state.

On Monday, my sermon on the Good Samaritan Parable was titled “Your Neighbor Doesn’t Live Next Door.” This is a text against “othering” and how the command to love our neighbor (who is different from us) is literally a moral guidepost for re-establishing democracy in America today.

On Tuesday, we went to the beginning, in Genesis 1:26, where the image of God in each of us is made foundational to human dignity and to every issue we now confront–including voting rights! On Wednesday, we looked more deeply at Jesus saying, that only the truth can set us free–that opposite of the truth is more than just lying but is captivity and how truth and freedom are indivisible in America today. I also said that “elders” with most of the audience here seniors could become among the vital truth-tellers that tyrannies that depend on lies are the most afraid of.

The last two days we took up how the Galatians 2:28 text about overcoming race, class, and gender–the eternal pillars of oppression. The text was an invocation and a ritual in all of the baptisms of the early church instructing that we are all one in Christ Jesus. And on Friday, we went deeper into what Jesus might mean in our time by calling peacemakers (not peace lovers or peace keepers) “the children of God.”

The lessons from Chautauqua—rediscovering the God of justice, embracing the image of God in every person, and answering Jesus’ call to be peacemakers—resonate far beyond the pulpit. In a world divided by “othering” and injustice, we are invited to become moral truth-tellers, advocates for the vulnerable, and builders of a more compassionate democracy. Together, let’s put faith into action and become the change our world so urgently needs.

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