 Good afternoon. I bring you love and greetings from St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in Livermore. Let me say that again. I bring you love and greetings from St. Bartholomew's Church in Livermore. I just want to let that settle. You are loved by a group of people, many of whom you probably have not met, but we reach out those arms in spirit and intangible ways, and I just want to make sure that that is known. It strikes me as I stand here today, and as I heard this horrible news, that if our religion is defined not so much by the doctrine we profess, but by the faith that we actually live in our day-to-day lives, that in today's world there are only two religions. There is the religion that, as Dr. Tarsine said, sees us all as children and creatures of the same God. Every single one of us is an atomite or an evite. There is no such thing as the tribal divisions between the blessed and the cursed, between the in and the out. Those distinctions simply don't exist in the mind of God and in the economy of God. But then there is the other religion, the tribal religion, the one that says the outsider is a threat that must be eliminated, and that only those that are within the fold can really be called children of the real God. Everyone else is less than and is something else. Well, there's no question as I look around this room that nobody would be here if we were not adherents of that first religion. And that first religion has some noble origins, and I think it's important that we all educate ourselves. And I know in a moment of terrible grief it may be a little presumptuous to speak of that, but I believe that the pathway forward, the pathway that leads to peace to a world where this happens less and eventually not at all requires of us a certain depth of understanding that may be greater than we yet have. So this first religion does have some noble origins. If I were to begin a prayer with most high, omnipotent good Lord, many might guess Islam and not Christianity, obviously not in the English language, as the source of that prayer. But others know that this was the formulation that St. Francis of Assisi almost always used in his prayers. He did not receive this from his training in the Judeo-Christian tradition. He received this from his travels and the experiences and the education that he had going throughout the Muslim lands of the world. We have been inter-pollinating for so long that we do not know how to exist otherwise, but we try to pretend that we haven't. We try to hold on to notions of ethnic purity, of racial purity, of religious purity, and yet reality always encroaches upon that illusion. Think about it for a moment. I cannot imagine a Christianity without the witness of Francis of Assisi, who pulled his wisdom from outside the Christian sphere, or for that matter of St. Thomas Aquinas, who went back to the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and Romans. I cannot imagine an American music without Africa. I cannot imagine a Christian spirit without the wisdom of the ancient Greeks and Romans. I cannot imagine so many of the beautiful, artistic, and scientific and mathematical and philosophical traditions of the world without the influence of people that those who adhere to those traditions might call the outsider. But there is an even better reason behind adhering to that first religion, because if there is one thing that all of our varied faith traditions, and I don't mean to erase the differences, we are very different from one another in so many ways, and those distinctions are important and were never meant to be erased. But if there's one thing we hold in common, it's a vision. That vision differs in detail, and it goes by many different names, or whether we call it Shalom, or Paradise, or Heaven, or Nirvana, or whatever other name we might give it, we all share that vision of a perfect and blessed peace, of a state both inwardly and outwardly, where violence and warfare and hatred are simply unknown and unconscionable, and we share the belief that the transcendent and the divine that made us and within which we live and move and have our being made us for the purpose of striving for that state and ultimately achieving it. Well, it simply defies reason to say that if that is the reality in which we exist, that violence and hatred and elimination of the outsider could possibly be a tool for achieving that end, it's simply not possible. So the only way we can create the very thing for which we were created is to use the weapons of peace, to begin living Shalom and Salam in the halting and incomplete way that we of course must in this time and in this place and in this world, but right here and right now. And it means that our weapons are in a way very weak. The weapons of the second religion are far flashier and at first glance far more effective. But in gathering today the way we have, we are employing those weapons of peace to the fullest. And let's not wait until something like this happens again before we do this again. Tomorrow, when there's nothing horrible in the news headlines, let's do it again anyway. And same with the next day and the next day and the next season, next Ramadan, next Passover, next Holy Week in Easter, next festival, next occasion, next opportunity to simply smile at your neighbor who looks and believes and speaks very differently from you. Let's do it every single day. Those weapons of peace will win.