Jesus said, "You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world."

Anyone who spends any time around the institutional church -- not church in the abstract, but the institution, with its worn-out linoleum and its 19th century hymns and its propensity to trivialize its own gospel and its tendency to make mountains out of molehills (and what is far worse, molehills out of mountains), and its use of its own message of love and redemption to be unlovely and hateful and exclusive -- anyone who knows anything about the institutional church becomes impatient with it and sometimes sick at heart over it.

We want it to be more inclusive, more biblical, more relevant, more Christocentric, more businesslike, friendlier, bigger . . . .
"Maybe the best thing that could happen to the church," Frederick Buechner wrote, "would be for some great tidal wave of history to wash it all away, the church buildings tumbling, the church money all lost, the church bulletins blowing through the air like dead leaves, the differences between preachers and congregations all lost too. Then all we would have left would be each other and Christ, which was all there was in the first place." (The Clown in the Belfry, p. 158).

Paul Vasile, our beloved Minister of Music, reminded me after having attended the New Year's Eve Watch Night Service at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in Harlem, of the song, I Wish I Knew How to be Free.

It became one of the anthems of the Civil Rights movement written by Billy Taylor, jazz pianist and composer who died this past December and was memorialized at the Riverside Church this past Monday. Taylor wrote the song in 1967 for the iconic Nina Simone.

I have been humming it for the past few weeks. It has become in many ways my theme song for the new year -- particularly so in light of the tragedy in Tucson.