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Thank you, Mrs. Coliver, members of the diocese, brothers and sisters here gathered. I consider it an honor to have had the invitation extended to me to address this esteemed body today and to participate in dialogue after the speech. Amongst other things, I am also a country preacher, and I want to share with you a few verses of Scripture that gives some base from where I am coming. St. John, the 3rd chapter, the 1st through the 7th verses:

And there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews; The same came to Jesus by night, and said unto him, Rabbi, we know that thou art a teacher come from God: for no man can do these miracles that thou doest, except God be with him. Jesus answered and said unto him, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot even see the kingdom of God. Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter the second time into his mother's womb, and be born? Jesus answered, Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit. And so, marvel not that I say you must be born again.

Speaking before a group such as this group, marvel not that I say that fundamentally America needs to be born again. We come at a period approaching the bicentennial of this nation where we assess where we have come from, and we assess where we are going. And I argue that the most fundamental need in America today is to be reborn - the rebirth of a nation. Not to deal with just being 200 years old and starting all over again. We were once born of the water, and a baby in its mother's womb is in water. So all of us have already been born of the water. America's already been born as a nation 200 years ago, but there's a rebirth of the spirit of the nation that must take place again. There's nothing wrong with our money and our matter and our established institutions theoretically, except there's something terribly wrong with our attitude.

It is not your aptitude but your attitude that determines your altitude. The set of your mind determines your greatness, it determines the heights that you climb to. This very rich ruler who came to meet with the rabbi, who came to meet with the teacher by night representing the Pharisaic tradition, had all the legalism on his side. He had all of the rituals, and our nation has all of the ritualism and all of the legalism.

If one wants to deal with health and this nation from a ritualistic point of view, there is a health department. However, people are sick. There is a housing department. However, people are ill-housed. There is a board of education. However, people are not being educated. There is an unemployment office. However, people are unemployed. There are banks. However, people cannot get money. And so in some sense likened unto the Pharisee, we have all of the rituals and all of the notions and all of the motions and the institutions, but something more fundamental than that which we see is missing in the nation today.

As we approach the bicentennial, all of us agonize at the state of the nation. We have our various opinions about the guilt and the innocence of persons in high positions in Washington. Except one thing that all of us can agree to is that the nation today is in disgrace, and the nation is in shame. And it's not enough to self-righteously hide behind your set of reasons. The sum total of the matter is we're trapped in a severe moral-civilizational crisis.

We use very simplistic assessments. We say the nation is in an urban crisis because of what's been happening in major cities. And we are in an urban crisis. But more than that, we say we are in a racial crisis, and we are. But it's more than that. We say we are in a crisis of the sexes, and we are, but it's more than that. We say there is a generation gap, but that's not the only gap. And when you pull all of these crises together, what one has is a civilizational crisis bigger than any rich man's purse, bigger than any ethnic dominant group's righteousness.

To that extent, we will either deal with the crisis in true perspective or fall prey to the law of general ruination and become one of the great nations that died. We have become preoccupied with Nixon. We must become occupied with him - he is the president - but not preoccupied inasmuch as the absence of Nixon is not the presence of justice. The absence of Nixon is not the presence of balance. The nation's ills will not be cured by simply the negation of him and some kind of two-year substitute. We are in a civilizational crisis.

Dr. and Mrs. Charles Beard, some years ago, attempting to size up their studies as the great world and economic historians, what they saw as the problem, how could they size up the rise and fall of civilization, and they reduced all of their writings and studies and travels to four very witty statements, statements often used that must be seen in a new light. One, they said that "the mills of the gods grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small." And from the foot of this nation where lies were told and slavery existed and cards were pushed under the table, the mills of the gods grind slowly, but they finally got into the head of the nation and they are grinding exceedingly small.

Secondly, "whom the gods would destroy they first make mad." And to be in the White House and its environs, breaking in the office of psychiatrists, violating people's basic liberties is the work of people who have gone mad, and their madness, not the body politic, not the military, not the established business institution, not the hippies, but their madness is driving them out of office.

Thirdly, "the ordinary honeybee feeds the flower that he robs." And when the wealthy of this nation is more willing to invest abroad than to protect the laborers on whose backs they stand, they're not exercising the sense of the ordinary honeybee. When we are willing to overspend the military budget by $27 billion, which would completely wipe out unemployment if applied adequately, and would rebuild most American cities, we're not exercising the judgment of the ordinary honeybee.

And lastly, "when it is dark enough you can see the stars." And it is at that level that even in the darkness, darkness can never be fully declared until we allow our lights to go out, and everybody has a light, and as long as there's a light, there's hope. As long as there's hope, there's possibility, and that is the pinhead of optimism on which we stand today: our own light.

The attitude of the nation determines its course. The Constitution is our legal attitude put on paper. The Statue of Liberty and the words inscribed represent our social attitude. Give me your tired, give me your poor, give me your huddled masses. We love people, there are things for people to do, give us the dispossessed; that was the great national attitude, capital of the free world. Not the world police or the military, but the world's savior with an attitude.

But now our attitude has gone wild. People in power project the notion that poor people have a nature that is inferior to rich people. Not their circumstance, that their nature is different. The same kind of incentives that are provided for the welfare are self-righteously and viciously taken away from the have-nots. When Mr. Reagan did not pay taxes and Mr. Nixon did not pay taxes, they said these are basically good men but the tax system is wrong, the tax system has loopholes. Good men, bad system.

But when poor people, trapped in an economy where beans have gone up 256 percent, beef 80 percent, pork 60 percent, who do not even have the allocation in their budget for toiletries, use somehow that money to make ends meet, they say it is a good system but they're bad people. Good system, bad people when applied to the poverty stricken. That is questioning the very nature of poor people, it goes into the nature of God and theology.

The rebirth of a nation, a new attitude. Many people have lost the desire to see black and white people relate in a civilized fashion. Many people have lost the urge for full employment. Many people have lost the urge for a uniform public educational system. That's all that the Detroit busing case was about. Up to 1954, you were deprived of the best education in America based on race, skin color. As of 1974 you were deprived of the best education based on class, based on neighborhood. Citizenship, not suburbs or inner city, citizenship should be the basis for getting the best education that the nation has to offer. And unless and until that happens, the poor have a right to march and/or be bussed and/or fly to the superior schools. We fight wars together, we pay taxes together, we should be educated together. But we have to be born again to even see that as civilized.

It is not enough to go into 1976 fighting for welfare. We must see welfare as a failure of the economic system, not the people. We don't want and need welfare, we need a full-employment economy, we need an alternative to welfare. No people are legitimately striving to be on welfare, people need to work, and work needs people. The suburban housewife and the inner-city mother, both of them come up awful empty, one getting a check from her husband, the other getting it from the state, but neither one has the glory and the reward of wholesome work. People need to work. There's fulfillment in work, but people need to get paid for the work that they do, and need to be respected as they engage in socially useful work.

What is fundamentally bad about the welfare system is that the economists who designed it were not as intelligent as they had been projected to be, for the present welfare system is an endless cycle that does not have built into it the incentive to earn or to learn. If you're on welfare getting $200 a month and you go out and make $200 a month, they take the whole $200; so you say why work. The incentive to earn is destroyed; you make a dollar, they take a dollar. If you're on welfare in the tenth grade and you go back to night school to get a degree, which increases your ability to go into the labor market, chances are, you'll be put off of welfare and discouraged. So there is no incentive to earn or to learn. The system is bad.

Say this and I close, we must be of service without being servile, because service is power and that's fundamental. We must glory in work and production. Somehow the sense of craftsmanship in America has gone low, because of total alienation between production and the producers. Lastly, there must be some major détentes and summit meetings within the nation between her many ethnic groups. Black people and Jewish people have been together too long to allow their relationship to just disintegrate without having at least a summit meeting. Black people and Arab people need to sit down and have a summit meeting. We need to have a detente between Chicano Americans and Black Americans and White Americans. We need to clean up our own house, be born again of the spirit and have an earnest desire to have a better nation.

The DeFunis v. Odegaard case drew some rather official battle lines between those of us who need quotas and affirmative action for our survival. Some of the people who march hand in hand with us on solving social issues are now taking that money, taking us to Supreme Court, fighting affirmative action or the quota, which is the only objective standard by which we can measure our economic progress. With that I suggest, members of this club, let us earnestly seek a new nation, let us seek a new peace. Let us develop a uniform educational system that will educate all of our children. Let us obliterate hunger and starvation. We have the capacity if we have the will. Let us learn to love and respect each other. Let us reduce the military budget, stop the killing abroad, start the healing at home. Let us be that great nation that God called us into existence to be, a nation that would advocate starting war no more, beating swords into plowshares in the process and declaring the glory of the Lord. That's our possibility, that is our hope. We will not be able to accept such a challenge unless we have the courage of our convictions. Let us diagnose the case accurately. Let us prescribe the remedy, however painful, and let us have the discipline to follow through for the nation's sake. Thank you.

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