 It's great to see you in the North Texas Conference this morning. Praise the Lord. I'm grateful to be with you. I'm honored by the invitation of your Bishop and my friend and of the planning and leadership team, some of whom have spoken before you today, to be a part of your and I want to say our common journey toward healing and wholeness as we become an anti-racist church. Are you hearing me? The destination is not just being nicer to each other. The destination is becoming an anti-racist person and an anti-racist church in the name of Jesus. Am I in the right house today? So I want you to know that's why I came. I would have come from Bishop McKee, no matter what, but that's my agenda. I hope it aligns with your agenda. I am honored. I am humbled. I'm blown away that you are doing this work and how you're doing it, but I should not be surprised with the stellar leadership of Bishop McKee and the team that he has surrounded himself with and all of you today, but let's give the Bishop some love today. So I'm grateful Bishop Mike for your leadership and your courage to step into this. We have had any number of conversations about this. I want you to know that Bishop McKee is going to be one of my annual conference preachers this year in the West Ohio annual conference, and Sister Tammy, I want you to know now the way you've outlined this day, you and the team, so you all just need to receive my love for what you've done, but I've already sent that back to West Ohio, so that's gone. That's gone. So if I have a fee I owe in North Texas, I'm willing to pay it, but you're having organized this in the way that you have, particularly around the vows of baptism is a blessing and an insight of genius indeed, and we ought to turn again and again to the sacraments. Now don't dig up this from my time, but let me just let me just say one other thing. This is difficult and challenging work. It's ongoing work. It has been in our movement as a church, episodic work, and it has in America been episodic work. I only ask you to witness the rhetoric of 2008 November upon the election of President Obama and the sigh of relief of some Americans that surely now we have solved the race problem and we are in a post racial society. And I want to say to you seriously, what planet were we living on? So we have worked at this. There have been some watershed moments. There have been seasons of multiple steps forward in the church and in society. And then there have been these periods of regression and retrenchment in which we have gone backwards, it would seem, or something has come to the surface again that reminded us that the work in shedding a propensity toward our sinfulness, I'm in the Bible now, is ongoing work for every servant of God and every follower of Jesus. And that's why when we gather together every seven days, if you only make it that, though the definition, as all of you know, of what constitutes regular church attendance is a moving target. Now, when I was growing up and early on, it was Eris Sunday. I conceded to three Sundays a month you were a regular attendant. And now it's something else. So I just, you know, it is what it is. But you struggle with that weekend and week out month in and month out. But that's why when we gather together every whatever we gather together, it is important for us to engage in liturgy so that we can be formed and reformed again into our essential identity as children of God and as followers of Jesus. And I think in spite of all of our attempts to identify with the culture and the cultures around us, we need to maintain that we have a distinct contribution to make as the community that is shaped in by for and around the crucified and risen Christ. And that's why liturgy matters. So I didn't come to make you mad if you got one of these freewheeling operations that you call a church. But I'm just saying liturgy matters. And in fact, everywhere outside of the church, people are trying to find a liturgy that is meaningful to them. Have you ever been to a football or basketball game and listened to the chance? Sometimes led by the cheerleaders and sometimes started spontaneously in the crowd. And it is picked up in waves, literally, because everybody knows the word. That's the power of liturgy. But we keep coming back to our primary liturgy, the liturgy of the sacraments, the order of word and table. And not that you can't gussy it up or innovate or use words that are contemporaneous or make it relevant to particular context, but there ought to be some liturgy that shapes us. And everybody that claims they are a Christian has some relationship, even if they're afraid of clean water to baptism. We all claim to be baptized, even those who got in without any water. And we keep running from our liturgy, which I say is a way of running from our identity. Even in our movement, even in our movement, and I don't want you to feel guilty about this, but we try to use as little water as possible. A little dab will do you. Remember, grilled cream, I may be telling on my age up here. And I think, actually, in this case, less is not more. More is more because we need the power of words and of symbols. So when you come to this first entry, I'm almost through here. When you come to this first entry that talks about in the interrogatory, do you reject sin and evil and injustice in all of their forms? I'm saying to you, we need that. And not just generically, we need it generically, but we need to get really specific. We need the power of those words and the power of a living and supportive community to remind us that we are on a shared journey of faith and a shared human journey. It's just not that everybody is woke yet to the need for the confession of sin, the need to repent, the need to reject something. In order to take up the life of the cross, you've got to put something else down. And so when it says to a person or to persons who stand in behalf of others, as in some of the baptismal covenants, do you reject the evil powers of this world? That's a serious question, with which we ought to wrestle not every once of the month when there's a baptism service every day of our lives. We ought to be saying, yes, Lord, I reject the spiritual forces of wickedness and the evil powers of this world. And may I say all of the ways in which they have aggregated themselves out of individual behaviors that have become collective systemic behaviors institutionalized and running so deep that some days we and I don't even know why I act like what I am, because we have been acculturated to the world and acculturated to evil. And in the same way in which we say in politics, quote unquote, you can't fight city hall. We just kind of move along with a case sarah, sarah adage. That's if in the wars of baptism that we pray over that God is not acting. If in the making of the sign of the cross on the foreheads of the communicates that God is not being invoked and invited and hopefully implanted in the hearts and lives of those who are receiving the gift of baptism. In fact, I went and checked the other liturgies. Let me say some other liturgies. Actually ours is kind of mine. Looked at the Orthodox liturgy and there's a part of it where they do this thing where they're getting ready to baptize and they refer to it as exorcism. Oh, you don't hear me today. Nor they take it that there are some traditions in which they ask the communicates or those who stand on behalf of the children to say, do you reject the devil? The vocabulary needs a new and a fresh strength to remind us of what the apostle said to us, that truly we do not wrestle with flesh against flesh, but against principalities and powers and spiritual wickedness in high place. Reject Satan and all of his men. This is not a quest to get you into some anthropomorphic sense where you're looking for a boogey man around every corner. But it is a way of framing, naming, liturgizing and liturizing the reality of evil in this world and the presence of evil and spiritual wickedness that we sometimes get. Now I've got a hunch. I've not verified this. Don't have a terminal degree in this. But I've got a hunch that as the church, the model of church became more therapeutic as some leading lights have said. And the mission of the church and people coming to worship us to make people feel actually good about themselves. We began to take our hand off the throttle of some of the old models. A hunch is that we swung the pendulum too far in the feel good category and not have not yet swung it back in the category that reminds us of the perniciousness of our sinfulness. Now I know that to be true when it comes to the matter of race and tribe and ethnicity and national origin and language. I know that to be true. And so when we pray some of our prayers, which are kind of catch-all and they are intended to be for corporate worship, sometimes we need to insert some specificity as you have done in your liturgy this morning. And so I close with this in the order of service, I kind of like this stuff. Now I'm a bureaucrat, I kind of get paid to do the party stuff. But may I remind you that when you stood in front of the bishop in the annual conference in the clergy session, whatever your status, elder, deacon, local pastor, and you responded to the historic questions, you said, yes, you would uphold and use and teach the liturgies of the church. So I just came to remind you of what you already committed to do. I'm not asking you to do a new thing, I'm asking you to get over the delusion that you need to create a new thing. Because the church already has a thing. And I came by this morning to say it's a good thing. And we won't know how good it is until we actually use it and reiterate it over and over and over and over and over. I feel bad about what gets me to the place of a need to confess, but I love to confess. Because I feel better afterwards. You don't hear me. Listen to what the liturgy says. Merciful God, we confess that we have not loved you with our whole heart. Just tell Deacon this mess when it comes to our sin and our sins. Say you're a racist. Say you've got prejudice. Divert of all of that. I'm over my time, but bear with me. I'll make it up on the other end. I moved to Columbus, Ohio in 2012. So I called up some of the brethren and I said, where can I find a barber shop? Now, I know some of y'all think seriously. I like to get my line. I'm preaching and serving the Lord's Supper and baptizing, and my stuff is all hanging. You reach a certain age and all the brethren know this. You know, hair is growing where you don't want it to grow. And it doesn't grow where it used to grow. So at least I can do to be presentable is to get my lines right. So this brother said, he said, just go on Cleveland Avenue and they had nothing but nail shops, barber shops, and beauty parlors. Sure enough, he was right. So I went in one, it looked clean from the outside. It said, Sam's barber. I looked in the plate glass window and everybody in there looked like me. I said, well, let's see how this goes. You never know how you're going to be received in a nail shop of beauty parlors. Because they all have a culture of their own. Am I right about that? Yeah, black, white, otherwise they all have a culture of their own. And so I went in and, you know, greeted everybody as I'm prone to do. I didn't know anybody. I just, you know, being a nice guy and, you know, I'm the outsider. So I need to ingratiate myself. And, you know, I saw a few guys, they nodded their heads. A few women were there with little boys that needed haircuts, et cetera. And so nobody really spoke that purposely. And then I sat and I listened and the primary language was not English. I said, help me, Holy Ghost. The primary language was Twain. So it was the brothers from Ghana. And it was a community gathering. And I'm not a Ghanaian. Well, I don't consider myself racist. You assume I have some prejudice. And here was the prejudice. I had a certain image of what an African American barbershop was going to be like. And that didn't fit the image. Are you hearing me? And I had to sit there and I wrestled for 15 minutes waiting on a chair because they don't take appointment, y'all. Waiting on a chair to decide if I was going to leave, period. Then I got in the chair. I said, well, I hope this cut turns out all right. And then I couldn't decide if I was going to ever go back because I had a certain image. I had a certain filter. I had a certain social and cultural expectation of what I would experience in addition to a good cut. Now, Sam is my barber. He did a great job. I'm in year eight. I'm still at Sam's barbershop. Remember, I said this is an ongoing journey. That's what Kami said earlier. And you thought I was here to beat up on somebody else. And I'm here merely to say everybody's got several lenses, filters, cultural and religious overlay that we have to wrestle with on an ongoing basis. And when we see it clearly, reject, renounce. Let me close with this scripture. I mean, first John used to hear some folks refer to it as I. I've been looking for I John for 50 years. If you don't know what I'm talking about, I asked somebody. Chapter one, verse five. This is the message that we have heard from him and we announce it to you. God is light. And in God, there is no dark. If we claim we have fellowship with him and live in the darkness, we are lying and do not act. But if we live in the light in the same way that he is in the light, we have fellowship with him and the blood of Jesus, his son cleanses us from all sin. If we claim we don't have any sin, we deceive ourselves. And oh, it gets stronger. The truth that the truth is not in your life. But the truth is not in us. But if we confess our sins, God is faithful. God is just to forgive our sins and to cleanse us from everything that we've done wrong. If we claim we have never sinned, we make God. I came by today to join you in the journey of being set free. Charles Timmy said in one of his hymns, I'm free from condemnation. Jesus Christ has set me free. On the cross he bore my part. And the chorus says hallelujah. He saves.