BOB ABERNETHY, host: Disposing of a sacred text: In Judaism, when a Torah becomes too worn to use any longer it is reverently buried. Some Christians do the same thing with the Christian Bible. And Muslims? You may be surprised to hear that some Muslims say a Qur’an should be burned. We talked with Jihad Turk, director of religious affairs at the Islamic Center of Southern California.

IMAM JIHAD TURK (Director of Religious Affairs, Islamic Center of Southern California): The Qur’an as an idea is something that is in the hearts and the minds of the believers and followers of Islam. It’s not the actual text. It’s not the piece of paper. Muslims don’t worship the text of the Qur’an or destroy the Qur’an.

Although it’s not sacred or something that’s worshiped, it is considered the representation of the sacred word of God, and given that it’s a representation of it, a Muslim would want to make sure that it’s treated respectfully.

When Muslims want to respectfully dispose of a text of the Qur’an that is no longer usable, we will burn it. So if someone, for example, in their own private collection or library had a text of the Qur’an that was damaged or that was in disrepair, so the binding was ruined, etc., or it got torn, they might bring it by to the Islamic Center and ask that someone here dispose of it properly if they were unsure how to do that. And what I’ll do is I’ll take it to my fireplace at home and burn it there in the fireplace. So I sort of take the pages out and then burn it to make sure that it gets thoroughly charred and is no longer recognizable as script.

In the Islamic tradition, it’s the Arabic that is really considered the authentic, original scripture. The very early scripture of the Qur’an—when it was first collated and put into a binding there were a lot of loose papers around, and this was about 1,400 years ago. The first companions of Muhammad, led under the leadership of the third caliph, Uthman, actually instructed the followers to take all of those pages and burn them, and so that kind of set the precedent as to what should be done. If you burn it, it destroys the word, the ink on the paper. It’s no longer perceptible, and so therefore it is no longer scripture. It’s just ashes at that point.

ABERNETHY: For Muslims, according to Jihad Turk, when done with the proper intent the burning of a damaged or worn out Qur,an is in no way disrespectful. The specific paper and ink may be gone, he says, but the sacred word of God endures.

KIM LAWTON: Faith-based groups stepped up lobbying efforts as Congress continues to battle over potential budget cuts. Religious conservatives maintain that addressing the government’s massive debt is a moral issue. Meanwhile, a diverse interfaith coalition urged members of Congress to consider how cuts would hurt poor people in the US and around the world. As part of that effort, several prominent Christian leaders launched a new ad campaign asking “what would Jesus cut?”

Joining me with more on this is Kevin Eckstrom, editor of Religion News Service. Kevin, there’s been a huge mobilization, it seems, from many quarters of the religious community on these budget issues.

KEVIN ECKSTROM (Editor, Religion News Service): Right and you’re seeing it from both the left and the right. From the left, the more progressive side, you see traditional lobbying to keep programs like home heating assistance and school lunches and aid for, you know, women and children, sort of your bread and butter domestic issues. On the right, you’re seeing a lot of action to try to protect the international development assistance, money to buy mosquito nets to prevent malaria and to fight AIDS in Africa, and food for the hungry and refugees and things like that. So you’ve got various groups lobbying for various issues, each hoping that their preferred pot makes the cut.

LAWTON: And a lot of those folks, both on the left and the right, are using moral language and scriptural language, saying, you know, the Bible urges people to care, look out for the vulnerable, the widows, the orphans, and the least of these, and so you are seeing this sort of biblical language.

Watch evangelical author and activist Jim Wallis on budget cuts, debt, deficits, and economic priorities

ECKSTROM: Right, and it’s biblical language on both sides. The more traditional churches, Catholic bishops and your mainline churches and your Jewish groups are saying, you know, we have a biblical and ethical, moral obligation to care for people who can’t help themselves. On the other side, from the more conservative side, especially from the Tea Party, you have arguments saying that it’s actually immoral to leave debt to future generations. And they sometimes chafe at the notion of, you know, what would Jesus cut? They say, well, Jesus didn’t have opinions on this, you know, that it’s up to us to sort of make the decisions on what to cut. But you get various moral arguments from both sides, and we’re just waiting to see who wins the day.

LAWTON: Well, I was at the National Religious Broadcasters Convention this week, and one of their keynote speakers was House Speaker John Boehner, Catholic, who used a lot of biblical language in his speech. He had a very receptive, mostly evangelical audience, and he quoted Scripture. He quoted from Proverbs, “A good man leaves behind an inheritance to his children’s children,” and he said Republicans want to not just be hearers of the word, but doers of the word, another scriptural reference there. And, you know, I found that very interesting, that you had the congressional leadership on the right also trying to seize the biblical and moral language on all of this.

ECKSTROM: Yeah, and it’s going on on both sides in sort of different directions, even I think one of the more interesting splits has been within the evangelical community, where you have sort of small-government evangelicals who want to cut, you know—we need to balance the budget, we can’t have this debt. And then you have another portion of the evangelicals who say, well, we can—government can do good things, and government can make a difference in parts of the world where we have interests, and it’s not just moral interests, it’s strategic interests, and so let’s protect the programs that actually work. Let’s not cut from AIDS funding, for example, which President Bush poured a lot of money into. So you get this interesting divide within especially the conservative religious community over their political loyalties and sort of their religious underpinnings.

LAWTON: And some of those moral arguments I’ve been hearing—I’m sorry, the pragmatic arguments I’ve been hearing, in additional to the moral ones, are that it’s in America’s national security, that folks around the world who have food and a decent job and a place to live and have a good, stable social situation are less likely to be recruited by terrorists. Or they also just say America’s reputation as well. I know when I was in Sri Lanka after the tsunami and the US poured in so much help, or Haiti—US poured in so much help. That really want a long way to improving America’s image around the world.

ECKSTROM: Right, I mean, you’ve been to all these places, you can see the difference that it makes when you’ve got these bags of rice that come in with the American flag on it and people look at that and they see us as a good country. But there are sort of national security arguments to be made and think they are fairly effective, that people who are fed, who have good schools, and who don’t have to worry about what they are going to eat that night are less likely to be recruited into extremism.

LAWTON: And we’ll both be watching in the weeks to come. Thank you, Kevin.

ECKSTROM: Thanks.

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Talk a bit about the service of Nine Lessons and Carols and what it means.

The Festival of Lessons and Carols, in a sense, is a vigil. How do you spend time waiting for something to happen that hasn’t quite happened yet? What do you do if you’re with friends waiting for something? Well, you tell stories, you pray, you sing songs, and that’s exactly what Lessons and Carols does. From a theological standpoint, and actually from a visual standpoint, it is getting that wide-angle lens and moving back and seeing the whole story, seeing the panorama of God’s plan for salvation for humankind and why that was even necessary, so we have to start at the beginning. We start with Genesis.

Tell us more. Why start with Genesis at Christmas?

Well, the story of Adam and Eve is evocative of profound truths about humanity and our relationship to God, and what you get from that story is this vision of Adam and Eve walking in the evening with God when the cooler breezes are blowing—from having a relationship with the divine, being able to walk with God in the Garden of Eden, which is Paradise, and then disobeying God, feeling shame about it, blaming each other, and then Eve blames the serpent. So they’re always blaming “other”—“‘it’s not my fault, it’s because so and so told me to; it’s not my fault it’s because…,” which immediately sets up a block into your relationship with the Holy One, so they can’t walk in the garden anymore. That’s the saddest thing about that story—that they have lost that ability to be present with the Holy in Paradise, and that story still speaks to us today. We understand that, and I think we long as human beings to get back to a place of Paradise, to get back to a place where things are right and just and beautiful, where there is not anger and fear and evil, and where we are at one with God.

In the service several Old Testament passages are read. Talk more generally about how that leads to Christmas.

In the readings in the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah especially, we have some beautiful passages about the people of Israel being in exile and longing for Messiah to come, longing for a Savior, longing to return to the city of Jerusalem, longing for that reconnection that is proof that their relationship to God has been reconciled, and so we have promises of the Shoot of Jesse, promises of the House of David, promise that a Messiah will come, and Christianity has taken all of those beautiful promises, and we use them as showing that Jesus was foretold. Probably the most powerful place that that happened for us happened musically, and that’s when George Fredrick Handel decided to choose all those beautiful Isaiah passages and to set them to music in “Messiah,” and we hear that all the time now. Christians—actually everyone in the world is aware of those particularly wonderful passages because they have been set to music so wonderfully, and we do of course sing them a lot at this time of year.

Why is it important and meaningful to weave the scripture readings with the carols and the music?

The Scripture is the basis for our understanding how God operates. We are leaning on the experiences of souls of light before us who have felt connected to the divine, and those are the people that—we really stand on their shoulders. We look to them, the great prophets, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah—we ponder their stories, their struggles with God, and from that we glean how to have a relationship with God. So those stories are showing us more profound truths. In a sense, the hymns and carols—most of them are based on biblical sources, so they are interpreting for us, and it’s interesting with carols and hymns you have two different things happening at least: You have someone who wrote the text. You possibly have a translator—some of the texts were in Latin or other languages. And then you have a musician, a composer who either wrote the music for that carol or wrote it for something else, and it gets turned into a carol. So it’s very interesting how that process works and how people who sing actually make the decision what it going to end up in that song.

The Scripture and the music build on each other, interpret each other. How does that work?

The music really tells you how to feel about the text. It’s not a small thing. For example, “Joy to the World”: As soon as you start singing it it’s on a high note, you have to support your breath, you’re joyful even singing it. “Silent Night” is more of a lullaby, and it makes you think more of a little baby coming into the world at night time. It settles you into a different place. “O Come All Ye Faithful” is a procession. You can see people lining up and walking. That first verse—seven times the words “O come” are in there, “O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him, Christ the Lord”—so it’s inviting people to join this procession of faithful people across the ages. I think most churches will use it as the opening procession, because it’s a march tempo.

Let’s talk about the difference between Advent and Christmas.

Advent is the church’s preparation for the second coming and also for that first coming again, so we prepare for Christmas, but we also are preparing for the eschaton, for the final things, the second coming, the end of the world. Like Christians always say in Advent, “the end is near,” and we don’t like to talk about that, and the secular world pretty much jumps to Christmas. That’s a much safer place to be than talking about the final judgment and what will happen then. But for Christians it’s important to be thinking every year—it’s like cleaning house, it’s sweeping out, it’s preparing and trying to remember what it is that is really important in our lives and getting back to that, so it’s letting go of our need to try to be in control and remembering to let God be in control so that there is a place to invite God into our hearts.

And how is that reflected in the music?

The music of Advent—a lot of it has to do with John the Baptist, who was the prophet who came before Jesus just a little bit, enough for him to be baptizing people in the River Jordan when Jesus showed up and was calling people to repent and saying the kingdom of God is at hand, make yourself ready, and that’s the message of Advent. The message of Advent is this time is coming. I think the Advent hymns and carols tend to be more eschatological. They’re talking, again, about larger issues other than just a baby Jesus being born. They’re talking about opening our hearts to what heaven is really about. When we then move closer to Christmas and we talk about the Angel Gabriel coming to Mary, then it gets much more specific in preparing for Christmas. We tend to be more comfortable with that. A little baby Jesus is coming, and that’s great, and we know we are all loved by God. But when we get this bigger John the Baptist yelling in our ear from the desert “you should repent,” you should figure out what’s important and follow the truth, follow God, work toward authenticity—that’s a little harder to take.

Christians talk during this time of year about the Incarnation, and a lot of the music of Christmas speaks to that.

Yes. Incarnation means coming into the flesh, literally, so it’s becoming human. What’s wonderful about Incarnation is God actually lowering God’s self to become human and in doing so reminding us of how awesome it is to be human. That original sin with Adam and Eve and that break between divine and human which was so huge—the whole thing changes when God becomes Jesus as a little baby, and now we are reminded that our humanity is not something to be thrown away or discarded. That God would use the Virgin Mary, would use a human mother, that a mother could be the mother of God changes how we think about ourselves, and I would just say in our own lives that often God comes to us in the form of someone else always, and it’s always a human being, and if I go back in my own story about my own conversion as an adult, re-conversion, I can tell you the people who have touched me, where I saw God in them, I saw Christ in them, I saw a love beyond what I could understand and imagine. So, in a sense, God Incarnate is coming to know love in a very personal, very real, and very human way.

You have talked about the God who is far away and the God who is close. Can you talk about that concept and relate it to Christmas?

The transcendent God is God who is the skies, above us, so far away that we often don’t feel any connection whatsoever, or we’re so fearful of God that we can’t imagine approaching God in that form. “Imminent” means that God is right here with us, God’s presence is here now, and that’s the gift of Jesus coming into the world, of being born as a child. In the Christian world, one of the great, great gifts we have been given is the gift of Communion, of Eucharist, of being able to break bread with each other and drink wine, and in that simple act of sharing these very basic things, bread and wine, we believe that Christ is present again with us and becomes incarnate anew, so that every time that we join together in a service of Holy Communion we are reenacting this Incarnation, and God comes in us.

We also spoke about a tie between Christmas and Easter. How are they related, and how does the music show us this?

Well, the interesting thing about Christmas music is that we love best the ones that just tell the story clearly about Jesus being born, about shepherds coming, about angels singing, about wise men coming. We sort of like to leave it there. But there are some carols that hint at what is to come. Our Advent lessons and carols [service] today is going to end with a wonderful hymn “Lo! He Comes!” that really talks about Jesus now having to go and to suffer and die for our sins and then to be resurrected. Also, it’s interesting that Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio”—the very last chorus in it is beautiful and joyful and has a wonderful trumpet solo, but the music is the same music that we sing to the chorale “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” so Bach is speaking very theologically, knowing that, yes, this is joyous, this is the end of the Christmas festivities, but you know how the story ends.

The themes of hope and joy are really present, and the music highlights that.

“The hopes and dreams of all the years are met in thee tonight”: That’s part of “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and in this particular carol Phillips Brooks had been in Bethlehem three years before, and he had stood on the hills where the shepherds might have been and looked down at the little, sleepy town of Bethlehem. So here he is at his job as a priest, a young man, and he’s asked to write a text, or a carol, for the Sunday school, and he thinks about looking down at this little town of Bethlehem, and then Lewis Redner, who was not only his organist but also the Sunday school supervisor, was in charge of composing a tune for it, and he couldn’t. Nothing came to him, it didn’t come, and then Christmas Eve he finally had a dream, and the tune was given to him, and it’s chromatic, it’s thorny, it’s beautiful. We know it so well as the American tune for “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” But what it does is it captures the darkness, the sadness, the fear and then also turns it to this hope and this joy in the baby Jesus being born in Bethlehem. The words have meaning, but the melody tells you what that meaning is and how to listen to it. We’re used to Redner’s version in America, but in England they’re used to a different tune, “Forest Green.” The two versions give you a very different sense of those texts. The Lewis Redner—“St. Louis” is the name of the tune—has a much more profound sense of the darkness of being in the city and hoping for something beyond ourselves and of longing that God will come to us. The “Forest Green” version sounds like it’s Christmas morning already. Everything has happened already, and we are safe in heaven with God.

Hope is deep in our communal soul. We want to be saved. We understand that we as human beings somehow let our pride, our egos, take over and when we do that it tends to alienate us from other people. We tend to cut ourselves off. The people who really are the happiest are not the people necessarily with the most things. It’s often people who have a community that they care about, a family where there is love that prevails even in the times of darkness. Almost anything that we face as human beings—if we can face it with other people of faith, other people who share love with us, they can be endured, and I’ve seen this again and again watching couples who have been so in love with each other, and one partner dies and being honored to be able to step into this holy place and to witness this extraordinary love that finally transcends the grave. It’s absolutely clear to me that there is something beyond, and there is a part of us that wants to be part of God, that wants God to dwell within us. I believe we’re happiest when we give. I think we are happiest when we are able to love. This season with the beautiful carols, many of them sentimental, many of them more lullabies, many of them helping us deal with the darkness—they are reminders to us that we are loved and that we are loveable, and in getting to that place it actually allows us not only to give gifts, but to receive love in a way we didn’t think was possible.

The amazing thing about Christmas is that it allows us to celebrate a really profound joy, the joy of being re-found by God, of opening our hearts to that love in a new way and of receiving this light that will transform us and reconcile us not only with God, but with each other.

And the themes of darkness and light?

Advent really is dealing with the fact that our days are getting shorter and that we are losing light, that we feel a sense of darkness encroaching and that the true light of the world now will come in the form of this baby, and if you think of a dark room and just one small, tiny candle, that will indeed make a difference. You will see that. So we’re reminded that even when things seem the darkest, seem the most impossible, seem absolutely like we have lost our way that we look to that light of Christ, and we invite that light within us.

Candles and the verses about darkness and light are important: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”

Absolutely, and I believe those lights, the Christmas lights, the lights in the store, the shiny baubles that get reflected light—I think that’s our society’s way of trying to be mystical, and I think it works.

What about the meaning that “O Come, O Come Emanuel” transmits?

“O Come, O Come Emanuel” is one of the hymns that is based on Latin chant and is at least nine centuries old or more, and there were “O” antiphons that were written for every day before Christmas, for the eight days before Christmas, and each one had a different word for who was coming, a different word for God: O Come, O Come Emanuel; O Come O Wisdom; O Come O Root of Jesse. But it’s inviting God in, and that’s what Christmas is all about. It’s asking, pleading with God—this yearning, this desire to be reconciled, to get it right once more. Hymns such as “O Come, O Come Emanuel,” which has been chanted through the ages by monks and nuns in processions of faithful Christians—you have this sense of a timeless melody, and you join all these fellow souls of light and the communion of saints when you sing it.

“Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” is very typical in the lessons and carols service.

Charles Wesley, one of the great hymn writers of all time, wrote “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and the story goes that he was very moved by the sound of the bells ringing on Christmas morning and that inspired him to write that song. The other interesting fact about it is that Felix Mendelssohn’s music was actually from another secular work that he had composed, and Mendelssohn didn’t think it was appropriate at all, but we have so taken over that tune, and we so accept that as wedded to that particular text that, for us, that is the angels at Christmastime.

What do people feel when they sing that?

This is where heaven and earth meet. In our society I don’t think we’re ever going to get rid of Halloween. We have horror movies at Halloween that remind us that evil is present in the world, and I don’t think in our secular society we’re ever going get rid of Christmas, because we need those angels. We need that image of something outside ourselves, and somehow we know that. Often I talk to people who say they’re atheists, they don’t believe in God, struggle with that, there’s nothing out there, but I have to say that when people who proclaim that to me are then in some grave difficulty, health problems or someone they love is dying, that my conversation is always very different to them, and I don’t need to talk anyone into believing in God. But I have to say in my own experience with life and death and with being with people who are dying and have died that there are mystical things that happen that I cannot explain in any rational way. I’m aware that if we live in a place of hope and faith that opens the door to beautiful things happening, wonderful coincidences that we can’t explain that change our mood from one of darkness and despair to one of joy. Christina Rossetti’s wonderful text “In the Bleak Midwinter” makes this point very well about this moment between heaven and earth coming together in the second verse: “Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him / Nor earth sustain; / Heaven and earth shall flee away / When He comes to reign: / In the bleak midwinter / A stable-place sufficed / The Lord God Incarnate / Jesus Christ.” So that brings together the sense of Advent, when we’re looking towards the end time, and then focusing it finally on this little baby who saves the world.

Is it the words, is it the melody? Is it both?

It is always a combination of the words and melody, as far as I’m concerned. When we sing “Gloria” in “Angels We Have Heard on High” we’re singing this long melisma, all of these notes on one word that allows us to get into a place where we’re actually going beyond the verbal. The music is going to tell you how to feel about it, and oftentimes it will flip you into a nonverbal place of ecstasy. Many, many notes to the same syllable is a way of trying to express the ineffable. We are trying to express what cannot be expressed. We are trying to get to a place of ecstasy that is beyond our normal experience.

How does sitting in a service of lessons and carols take us through all of this?

The gift of lessons and carols is that it takes time, and that you sit there and at the beginning you’re thinking about all those things you should be doing, and hopefully you just take out a piece of paper, write them down, and let them go. And then you let the music, the carols, the texts, the prayers wash over you, and if you do it well you will open your heart into a place of deeper and more profound meditation, and the light will break through. Some text, some image, some musical phrase will change you, and that’ll be the gift you get.

Many different kinds of churches and congregations have taken the traditional lessons and carols service but have changed it, adapted it. What does that say?

The idea of lessons and carols probably comes from the oldest service we have, which is the Easter vigil, and that was very early Christianity, so it’s the idea of waiting around for something to come. What are you going to do? Well, you’re going to sing, you’re going to read scriptures, etc. So for us to keep changing the order of what is read and what carol is sung is absolutely appropriate. It is good and right for us to keep recreating something so that it speaks to us now.

Some people coming to a lessons and carols service may expect that it’s going to be all the old carols that they know so well, but there may be some carols they are not as familiar with. How does that work into their experience of it?

Lessons and Carols is not a concert. It’s not where you’re going to applaud after everything. You’re going to allow yourself to meditate at a much deeper place. It can be very annoying if you’re expecting to sing carols that you know and are confronted with hymns you’ve never heard before, that go into different places. But my best suggestion is rather than being annoyed at it, talk to God about it, and say, okay, why are you telling this to me now? And then if you open your hearts you’ll find that all of the anthems, all of the carols are going to show you a different side of what you know in the familiar carols , but they’ll help you to attach it to your life now, in the present. Sometimes when we sing carols, we forget the text altogether, and we are at our grandmother’s knee, or whoever first taught that to us. But the gift of new carols is that God is working among us today, even now, inspiring us anew with the Holy Spirit breaking through in new ways, and often the Spirit is talking to you right now, and it could be that that most annoying new anthem or carol is just for you.

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LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: The reaction for and against the law has reverberated from Main Street through the halls of government to the sanctuaries of churches. This is Bishop Kirk Stevan Smith of the Arizona Episcopal diocese.

BISHOP KIRK S. SMITH (Episcopal Diocese of Arizona): Along with many other religious leaders I think it’s a terrible law. Legal things are important, political things are important, but people’s basic human rights are the most important thing, and that’s where the churches have an obligation, in my way of thinking, to stand up.

SEVERSON: But even among the clergy there is a divide. Religious leaders like the Reverend Tim Smith of Scottsdale, Arizona, support the law. Smith was a nondenominational pastor for 30 years, now a spiritual advisor.

REVEREND TIM SMITH: I think it’s a cry for help from the legislature, from the governor.

Bishop Kirk S. Smith

SEVERSON: Arizona has become ground zero for illegal immigration. It’s estimated that there are nearly 500,000 illegal residents living in Arizona and more streaming in every day. The federal government has dramatically increased the number of border agents, but not enough to stem the flow. Congress has yet to agree on a comprehensive solution. Reverend Smith says that the Arizona law only supports what was already on the books.

REV. TIM SMITH: Essentially, as I read the law and its amendments, it’s an attempt to enforce what has been a federal law since the days of, I think, FDR.

SEVERSON: Illegal immigration has long been a federal crime. The Arizona law makes it a state crime and instructs local police to check the immigration status of anyone they stop for an infraction and arrest anyone they reasonably suspect is undocumented or illegal. If citizens don’t think the police are being vigilant enough they can sue them in court. Supporters say there are enough safeguards to prevent profiling. Critics say the law makes it almost impossible not to profile.

Arizona police come down on both sides. Some say they don’t have the manpower to enforce the law. Another major issue is what is “reasonable suspicion”?

BISHOP KIRK SMITH: The wife of one of our priests who is of Mexican [descent], she was just driving through the neighborhood and was pulled over by a sheriff’s officer, asked to see her identification—which she had, she is an American citizen and has been an American citizen for 20 years—and the sheriff said to her, “If you didn’t have these paper you’d be taking a quick trip back to Mexico.”

SEVERSON: Supporters of Senate Bill 1070 say its purpose is to crack down on crime, like that experienced by rancher Robert Krentz. He was interviewed in 1999.

ROBERT KRENTZ: You know, we personally been broke into once, and they took about $700 worth of stuff, and you know if they come in and ask for water I’ll still give them water. That’s just my nature.

SEVERSON: In March, Krentz was murdered. His killing spurred passage of the new law because it was suspected that he was killed by an illegal. Now there is evidence that the killer was not an immigrant. Overall, the violent crime rate in Arizona is down, and so is property crime, and census data show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than legal residents.

REV. RAUL TREVIZO: The legislature would say that this law is intended to stop home invasions, drugs coming across the border, guns being smuggled is absurd. In no way does this law even begin to address those issues.

SEVERSON: Father Raul Trevizo pastors a Catholic parish in Tucson, near the border, of about 4,000 families, many of them undocumented.

REV. TREVIZO: All this law does is put fear in people who are here as economic refugees trying to eke out a living and help themselves and their family back home.

SEVERSON: If it seems that many, if not most religious leaders are opposed to the law, Mark Tooley, a self-proclaimed conservative watchdog, says it’s because they have been the most vocal and, in his view, the most misleading.

Mark Tooley

MARK TOOLEY (President, Institute on Religion & Democracy): They are speaking very dogmatically to a political issue for which there is not direct guidance from the scriptures or Christian tradition, and it really is a political issue that Christians across the spectrum can disagree about.

SEVERSON: But religious opponents of the law say they are simply following the scriptures.

REV. TREVIZO: I believe the fundamental principle of the Old Testament is that we are under full obligation to follow God’s law. Jesus summarized God’s law in the great commandment: love your neighbor as yourself.

SEVERSON: United Methodist Bishop Minerva Carcano has been a vocal opponent of the law, lobbying anyone in Congress who will listen.

BISHOP MINERVA CARCANO (Desert Southwest Conference of the United Methodist Church): Scripture is full of references about the immigrant, and the message is consistent and clear. The message is we are to care for the immigrant. Leviticus says that we are to receive them and treat them as if they were native-born, as if they were citizens, and it also says that we are never to oppress them, and so that’s our job as religious leaders, to hold up our faith values.

BISHOP KIRK SMITH: And of course Jesus’ passage at the end of Matthew where he reminds us in the way that we treat the least among us, the way that we treat the hungry person or the thirsty person or the person in prison, is the way that we treat him.

SEVERSON: So you think that obeying the law would take precedence over taking care of the least amongst you?

REV. TIM SMITH: Well, obeying the law is foundational to our society and one of the reasons why the United States has been a haven for people across the years, that there has been a rule of law here and that through that rule of law we can sort out these problems that we have.

SEVERSON: Mark Tooley says scriptures that are often sited don’t really apply to illegal immigration and that religious opponents are not representing the views of their congregants.

TOOLEY: There is a perception that the religious world is for liberalized immigration because those on the more liberal side of the religious world are the most outspoken. So I don’t think that most of these church officials genuinely speak for the constituencies they claim to speak for.

BISHOP KIRK SMITH: I find that totally, totally wrong. I mean, these are our parishioners. I have a parishioner who’s undocumented, whose son who is seven years old said to her this week, “Mommy, what am I going to do when they take you away?” Those are my parishioners. I can’t see how somebody can say you’re out of touch with those people. Those are the people that I serve, and those are the people that I care about.

Bishop Minerva Carcano

SEVERSON: Bishop Carcano says many in her congregation oppose the law, but some are very upset with her position.

(speaking to Bishop Carcano): Have you had people leave or threaten to leave the church over this issue?

BISHOP CARCANO: We have, we have. They’ve left. Some of them are people who leave for a season and then return. Others—we will have lost them, and we pray for them.

SEVERSON: Many in the religious opposition say they can’t back away from their moral obligation even if it means harboring an illegal immigrant, even if it means breaking the law.

BISHOP CARCANO: We know that there are moments in history when we are under laws that are not just, that are not moral, that are not right. We’re called to challenge those. Slavery—it used to be a law to have slaves and to treat them in a certain way. If religious leaders had sat back and said that’s alright, we would have been stuck. We would have been at a very different place over the years and today. There are moments when we must challenge the laws of society.

SEVERSON: The state has taken a huge hit economically since the bill passed. Phoenix officials estimate the city has lost at least $100 million just in convention cancellations, and more keep coming in. Bishop Smith thinks the law will eventually be defeated, but not because of moral or ethical concerns.

BISHOP KIRK SMITH: But I suspect that it will ultimately be defeated because people say, you know, this just doesn’t make sense economically. Everybody is going to lose. This is a lose-lose for everybody. Our pocketbooks are going to lose, and our souls are going to lose.

SEVERSON: Unless court challenges prevent it, the Arizona law is scheduled to take effect after July 28.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Lucky Severson in Phoenix, Arizona.

Talk a bit about the service of Nine Lessons and Carols and what it means.

The Festival of Lessons and Carols, in a sense, is a vigil. How do you spend time waiting for something to happen that hasn’t quite happened yet? What do you do if you’re with friends waiting for something? Well, you tell stories, you pray, you sing songs, and that’s exactly what Lessons and Carols does. From a theological standpoint, and actually from a visual standpoint, it is getting that wide-angle lens and moving back and seeing the whole story, seeing the panorama of God’s plan for salvation for humankind and why that was even necessary, so we have to start at the beginning. We start with Genesis.

Tell us more. Why start with Genesis at Christmas?

Well, the story of Adam and Eve is evocative of profound truths about humanity and our relationship to God, and what you get from that story is this vision of Adam and Eve walking in the evening with God when the cooler breezes are blowing—from having a relationship with the divine, being able to walk with God in the Garden of Eden, which is Paradise, and then disobeying God, feeling shame about it, blaming each other, and then Eve blames the serpent. So they’re always blaming “other”—“‘it’s not my fault, it’s because so and so told me to; it’s not my fault it’s because…,” which immediately sets up a block into your relationship with the Holy One, so they can’t walk in the garden anymore. That’s the saddest thing about that story—that they have lost that ability to be present with the Holy in Paradise, and that story still speaks to us today. We understand that, and I think we long as human beings to get back to a place of Paradise, to get back to a place where things are right and just and beautiful, where there is not anger and fear and evil, and where we are at one with God.

In the service several Old Testament passages are read. Talk more generally about how that leads to Christmas.

In the readings in the Hebrew Bible, in Isaiah especially, we have some beautiful passages about the people of Israel being in exile and longing for Messiah to come, longing for a Savior, longing to return to the city of Jerusalem, longing for that reconnection that is proof that their relationship to God has been reconciled, and so we have promises of the Shoot of Jesse, promises of the House of David, promise that a Messiah will come, and Christianity has taken all of those beautiful promises, and we use them as showing that Jesus was foretold. Probably the most powerful place that that happened for us happened musically, and that’s when George Fredrick Handel decided to choose all those beautiful Isaiah passages and to set them to music in “Messiah,” and we hear that all the time now. Christians—actually everyone in the world is aware of those particularly wonderful passages because they have been set to music so wonderfully, and we do of course sing them a lot at this time of year.

Why is it important and meaningful to weave the scripture readings with the carols and the music?

The Scripture is the basis for our understanding how God operates. We are leaning on the experiences of souls of light before us who have felt connected to the divine, and those are the people that—we really stand on their shoulders. We look to them, the great prophets, Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah—we ponder their stories, their struggles with God, and from that we glean how to have a relationship with God. So those stories are showing us more profound truths. In a sense, the hymns and carols—most of them are based on biblical sources, so they are interpreting for us, and it’s interesting with carols and hymns you have two different things happening at least: You have someone who wrote the text. You possibly have a translator—some of the texts were in Latin or other languages. And then you have a musician, a composer who either wrote the music for that carol or wrote it for something else, and it gets turned into a carol. So it’s very interesting how that process works and how people who sing actually make the decision what it going to end up in that song.

The Scripture and the music build on each other, interpret each other. How does that work?

The music really tells you how to feel about the text. It’s not a small thing. For example, “Joy to the World”: As soon as you start singing it it’s on a high note, you have to support your breath, you’re joyful even singing it. “Silent Night” is more of a lullaby, and it makes you think more of a little baby coming into the world at night time. It settles you into a different place. “O Come All Ye Faithful” is a procession. You can see people lining up and walking. That first verse—seven times the words “O come” are in there, “O come let us adore him, O come let us adore him, Christ the Lord”—so it’s inviting people to join this procession of faithful people across the ages. I think most churches will use it as the opening procession, because it’s a march tempo.

Let’s talk about the difference between Advent and Christmas.

Advent is the church’s preparation for the second coming and also for that first coming again, so we prepare for Christmas, but we also are preparing for the eschaton, for the final things, the second coming, the end of the world. Like Christians always say in Advent, “the end is near,” and we don’t like to talk about that, and the secular world pretty much jumps to Christmas. That’s a much safer place to be than talking about the final judgment and what will happen then. But for Christians it’s important to be thinking every year—it’s like cleaning house, it’s sweeping out, it’s preparing and trying to remember what it is that is really important in our lives and getting back to that, so it’s letting go of our need to try to be in control and remembering to let God be in control so that there is a place to invite God into our hearts.

And how is that reflected in the music?

The music of Advent—a lot of it has to do with John the Baptist, who was the prophet who came before Jesus just a little bit, enough for him to be baptizing people in the River Jordan when Jesus showed up and was calling people to repent and saying the kingdom of God is at hand, make yourself ready, and that’s the message of Advent. The message of Advent is this time is coming. I think the Advent hymns and carols tend to be more eschatological. They’re talking, again, about larger issues other than just a baby Jesus being born. They’re talking about opening our hearts to what heaven is really about. When we then move closer to Christmas and we talk about the Angel Gabriel coming to Mary, then it gets much more specific in preparing for Christmas. We tend to be more comfortable with that. A little baby Jesus is coming, and that’s great, and we know we are all loved by God. But when we get this bigger John the Baptist yelling in our ear from the desert “you should repent,” you should figure out what’s important and follow the truth, follow God, work toward authenticity—that’s a little harder to take.

Christians talk during this time of year about the Incarnation, and a lot of the music of Christmas speaks to that.

Yes. Incarnation means coming into the flesh, literally, so it’s becoming human. What’s wonderful about Incarnation is God actually lowering God’s self to become human and in doing so reminding us of how awesome it is to be human. That original sin with Adam and Eve and that break between divine and human which was so huge—the whole thing changes when God becomes Jesus as a little baby, and now we are reminded that our humanity is not something to be thrown away or discarded. That God would use the Virgin Mary, would use a human mother, that a mother could be the mother of God changes how we think about ourselves, and I would just say in our own lives that often God comes to us in the form of someone else always, and it’s always a human being, and if I go back in my own story about my own conversion as an adult, re-conversion, I can tell you the people who have touched me, where I saw God in them, I saw Christ in them, I saw a love beyond what I could understand and imagine. So, in a sense, God Incarnate is coming to know love in a very personal, very real, and very human way.

You have talked about the God who is far away and the God who is close. Can you talk about that concept and relate it to Christmas?

The transcendent God is God who is the skies, above us, so far away that we often don’t feel any connection whatsoever, or we’re so fearful of God that we can’t imagine approaching God in that form. “Imminent” means that God is right here with us, God’s presence is here now, and that’s the gift of Jesus coming into the world, of being born as a child. In the Christian world, one of the great, great gifts we have been given is the gift of Communion, of Eucharist, of being able to break bread with each other and drink wine, and in that simple act of sharing these very basic things, bread and wine, we believe that Christ is present again with us and becomes incarnate anew, so that every time that we join together in a service of Holy Communion we are reenacting this Incarnation, and God comes in us.

We also spoke about a tie between Christmas and Easter. How are they related, and how does the music show us this?

Well, the interesting thing about Christmas music is that we love best the ones that just tell the story clearly about Jesus being born, about shepherds coming, about angels singing, about wise men coming. We sort of like to leave it there. But there are some carols that hint at what is to come. Our Advent lessons and carols [service] today is going to end with a wonderful hymn “Lo! He Comes!” that really talks about Jesus now having to go and to suffer and die for our sins and then to be resurrected. Also, it’s interesting that Bach’s “Christmas Oratorio”—the very last chorus in it is beautiful and joyful and has a wonderful trumpet solo, but the music is the same music that we sing to the chorale “O Sacred Head Now Wounded,” so Bach is speaking very theologically, knowing that, yes, this is joyous, this is the end of the Christmas festivities, but you know how the story ends.

The themes of hope and joy are really present, and the music highlights that.

“The hopes and dreams of all the years are met in thee tonight”: That’s part of “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and in this particular carol Phillips Brooks had been in Bethlehem three years before, and he had stood on the hills where the shepherds might have been and looked down at the little, sleepy town of Bethlehem. So here he is at his job as a priest, a young man, and he’s asked to write a text, or a carol, for the Sunday school, and he thinks about looking down at this little town of Bethlehem, and then Lewis Redner, who was not only his organist but also the Sunday school supervisor, was in charge of composing a tune for it, and he couldn’t. Nothing came to him, it didn’t come, and then Christmas Eve he finally had a dream, and the tune was given to him, and it’s chromatic, it’s thorny, it’s beautiful. We know it so well as the American tune for “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” But what it does is it captures the darkness, the sadness, the fear and then also turns it to this hope and this joy in the baby Jesus being born in Bethlehem. The words have meaning, but the melody tells you what that meaning is and how to listen to it. We’re used to Redner’s version in America, but in England they’re used to a different tune, “Forest Green.” The two versions give you a very different sense of those texts. The Lewis Redner—“St. Louis” is the name of the tune—has a much more profound sense of the darkness of being in the city and hoping for something beyond ourselves and of longing that God will come to us. The “Forest Green” version sounds like it’s Christmas morning already. Everything has happened already, and we are safe in heaven with God.

Hope is deep in our communal soul. We want to be saved. We understand that we as human beings somehow let our pride, our egos, take over and when we do that it tends to alienate us from other people. We tend to cut ourselves off. The people who really are the happiest are not the people necessarily with the most things. It’s often people who have a community that they care about, a family where there is love that prevails even in the times of darkness. Almost anything that we face as human beings—if we can face it with other people of faith, other people who share love with us, they can be endured, and I’ve seen this again and again watching couples who have been so in love with each other, and one partner dies and being honored to be able to step into this holy place and to witness this extraordinary love that finally transcends the grave. It’s absolutely clear to me that there is something beyond, and there is a part of us that wants to be part of God, that wants God to dwell within us. I believe we’re happiest when we give. I think we are happiest when we are able to love. This season with the beautiful carols, many of them sentimental, many of them more lullabies, many of them helping us deal with the darkness—they are reminders to us that we are loved and that we are loveable, and in getting to that place it actually allows us not only to give gifts, but to receive love in a way we didn’t think was possible.

The amazing thing about Christmas is that it allows us to celebrate a really profound joy, the joy of being re-found by God, of opening our hearts to that love in a new way and of receiving this light that will transform us and reconcile us not only with God, but with each other.

And the themes of darkness and light?

Advent really is dealing with the fact that our days are getting shorter and that we are losing light, that we feel a sense of darkness encroaching and that the true light of the world now will come in the form of this baby, and if you think of a dark room and just one small, tiny candle, that will indeed make a difference. You will see that. So we’re reminded that even when things seem the darkest, seem the most impossible, seem absolutely like we have lost our way that we look to that light of Christ, and we invite that light within us.

Candles and the verses about darkness and light are important: “The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light.”

Absolutely, and I believe those lights, the Christmas lights, the lights in the store, the shiny baubles that get reflected light—I think that’s our society’s way of trying to be mystical, and I think it works.

What about the meaning that “O Come, O Come Emanuel” transmits?

“O Come, O Come Emanuel” is one of the hymns that is based on Latin chant and is at least nine centuries old or more, and there were “O” antiphons that were written for every day before Christmas, for the eight days before Christmas, and each one had a different word for who was coming, a different word for God: O Come, O Come Emanuel; O Come O Wisdom; O Come O Root of Jesse. But it’s inviting God in, and that’s what Christmas is all about. It’s asking, pleading with God—this yearning, this desire to be reconciled, to get it right once more. Hymns such as “O Come, O Come Emanuel,” which has been chanted through the ages by monks and nuns in processions of faithful Christians—you have this sense of a timeless melody, and you join all these fellow souls of light and the communion of saints when you sing it.

“Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” is very typical in the lessons and carols service.

Charles Wesley, one of the great hymn writers of all time, wrote “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and the story goes that he was very moved by the sound of the bells ringing on Christmas morning and that inspired him to write that song. The other interesting fact about it is that Felix Mendelssohn’s music was actually from another secular work that he had composed, and Mendelssohn didn’t think it was appropriate at all, but we have so taken over that tune, and we so accept that as wedded to that particular text that, for us, that is the angels at Christmastime.

What do people feel when they sing that?

This is where heaven and earth meet. In our society I don’t think we’re ever going to get rid of Halloween. We have horror movies at Halloween that remind us that evil is present in the world, and I don’t think in our secular society we’re ever going get rid of Christmas, because we need those angels. We need that image of something outside ourselves, and somehow we know that. Often I talk to people who say they’re atheists, they don’t believe in God, struggle with that, there’s nothing out there, but I have to say that when people who proclaim that to me are then in some grave difficulty, health problems or someone they love is dying, that my conversation is always very different to them, and I don’t need to talk anyone into believing in God. But I have to say in my own experience with life and death and with being with people who are dying and have died that there are mystical things that happen that I cannot explain in any rational way. I’m aware that if we live in a place of hope and faith that opens the door to beautiful things happening, wonderful coincidences that we can’t explain that change our mood from one of darkness and despair to one of joy. Christina Rossetti’s wonderful text “In the Bleak Midwinter” makes this point very well about this moment between heaven and earth coming together in the second verse: “Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him / Nor earth sustain; / Heaven and earth shall flee away / When He comes to reign: / In the bleak midwinter / A stable-place sufficed / The Lord God Incarnate / Jesus Christ.” So that brings together the sense of Advent, when we’re looking towards the end time, and then focusing it finally on this little baby who saves the world.

Is it the words, is it the melody? Is it both?

It is always a combination of the words and melody, as far as I’m concerned. When we sing “Gloria” in “Angels We Have Heard on High” we’re singing this long melisma, all of these notes on one word that allows us to get into a place where we’re actually going beyond the verbal. The music is going to tell you how to feel about it, and oftentimes it will flip you into a nonverbal place of ecstasy. Many, many notes to the same syllable is a way of trying to express the ineffable. We are trying to express what cannot be expressed. We are trying to get to a place of ecstasy that is beyond our normal experience.

How does sitting in a service of lessons and carols take us through all of this?

The gift of lessons and carols is that it takes time, and that you sit there and at the beginning you’re thinking about all those things you should be doing, and hopefully you just take out a piece of paper, write them down, and let them go. And then you let the music, the carols, the texts, the prayers wash over you, and if you do it well you will open your heart into a place of deeper and more profound meditation, and the light will break through. Some text, some image, some musical phrase will change you, and that’ll be the gift you get.

Many different kinds of churches and congregations have taken the traditional lessons and carols service but have changed it, adapted it. What does that say?

The idea of lessons and carols probably comes from the oldest service we have, which is the Easter vigil, and that was very early Christianity, so it’s the idea of waiting around for something to come. What are you going to do? Well, you’re going to sing, you’re going to read scriptures, etc. So for us to keep changing the order of what is read and what carol is sung is absolutely appropriate. It is good and right for us to keep recreating something so that it speaks to us now.

Some people coming to a lessons and carols service may expecting that it’s going to be all the old carols that they know so well, but there may be some carols they are not as familiar with. How does that work into their experience of it?

Lessons and Carols is not a concert. It’s not where you’re going to applaud after everything. You’re going to allow yourself to meditate at a much deeper place. It can be very annoying if you’re expecting to sing carols that you know and are confronted with hymns you’ve never heard before, that go into different places. But my best suggestion is rather than being annoyed at it, talk to God about it, and say, okay, why are you telling this to me now? And then if you open your hearts you’ll find that all of the anthems, all of the carols are going to show you a different side of what you know in the familiar carols , but they’ll help you to attach it to your life now, in the present. Sometimes when we sing carols, we forget the text altogether, and we are at our grandmother’s knee, or whoever first taught that to us. But the gift of new carols is that God is working among us today, even now, inspiring us anew with the Holy Spirit breaking through in new ways, and often the Spirit is talking to you right now, and it could be that that most annoying new anthem or carol is just for you.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: For more than 200 years there has been a chaplain in both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate. The tradition has been challenged by advocates of a strict separation between church and state, but the Supreme Court has upheld it, as long as the chaplains remain nonsectarian and nonpartisan. The current Senate chaplain is the Reverend Barry Black, the first African American and the first Seventh-day Adventist in the position. Kim Lawton reports.

Pastor BARRY BLACK (Chaplain, U.S. Senate): Let us pray. Let us pray

KIM LAWTON: He has prayed with some of the most powerful people in the world. Chaplain Barry Black opens every session of the U.S. Senate with prayer and is often called upon to pray at important national events. It’s not mere ceremony, he says, but helping to set the spiritual tone of the country.

Chaplain BLACK (speaking at National Day of Prayer): More things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of.

Chaplain BLACK: I see myself as an intercessor. I see myself as articulating the longings and the concerns of the people whom I seek to minister to.

LAWTON: It’s a job that’s strictly nonpartisan and nonsectarian. As the 62nd chaplain of the U.S. Senate, Black not only ministers to senators and their families, but also to Capitol Hill staffers, service personnel, and police. He organizes many weekly Bible studies and offers private counseling.

Chaplain BLACK: As their pastor, I am interested in their spiritual well-being.

LAWTON: Fifty-eight-year-old Black is the first African American and the first Seventh-day Adventist in the position. He’s been there since 2003, but says he still marvels that this is where he’s landed, especially considering his background growing up in the housing projects of inner city Baltimore.

Chaplain BLACK (speaking to students at Andrews University): Night after night, the “hood” is a subculture of poverty and pathology. Domestic violence is a spectator sport. You can sit on your stoop and watch it.

LAWTON: In his book FROM THE HOOD TO THE HILL, Black vividly describes his youth: a rat- and roach-infested apartment; an alcoholic absentee father; and a struggling welfare mother often taking her eight children to church hungry.

Chaplain BLACK (speaking at book signing event): We were like hostages. When people would shake our hands and say “The Lord is good”—because my mother warned us you better not let anybody know you’re hungry—we were trying to let people signal, trying to let them know we’re captives. Somebody feed us, feed us, feed us.

LAWTON: Black says his mother’s strong Seventh-day Adventist faith was hugely influential.

Chaplain BLACK: My mother was baptized when she was pregnant with me, and as she entered the—we say “the watery grave of baptism” (Seventh-day Adventists immerse), she prayed for a special anointing on her unborn child.

LAWTON: The chaplain’s lifelong friend, Purnell Jones, says Pearline Black never let anyone forget that.

PASTOR PURNELL JONES : When Barry was in the womb she would always say, “I prayed for my son and that the Lord would anoint him.” When Barry came out, he was special. He was just special.

LAWTON: Berea Temple Seventh Day Adventist Church in Baltimore became an anchor for the family. Adventists are part of the evangelical tradition. They place a strong emphasis on Scripture, keeping Saturday as the Sabbath and often following Old Testament dietary laws. Black and his family came here virtually every Saturday.

Chaplain BLACK (to worship service): Because my father was not around a great deal, to have wonderful, positive male role models in the church was a tremendous blessing and made a critical difference in my development.

LAWTON: Berea encouraged Christian education and Bible memorization, something Black’s mother reinforced at home.

Chaplain BLACK: My mother gave my siblings and me our allowance based upon memorizing Scripture—a nickel a verse.

(speaking to students at Andrews University): One day I came in—you would stand before her to give your Scripture—and I said, “The Book of Genesis.” She said, “Hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it!” She put me on a flat rate. “You’re not going to get more than a quarter even if you memorize the whole Bible, boy.”

LAWTON: Purnell Jones is now an elder at Berea. He says as a kid, Black also had a gift for memorizing sermons and imitating pastors.

Mr. JONES: Barry’s mom had them take notes. So some of us got in the habit that we would even try to keep up with note-taking and see how much we remembered. Then we’d get outside, and there’s Barry, “blah-blah-blah,” just spieling it off, the whole sermon, and we’d say, “How in the world did he remember all this stuff?”

LAWTON: Today, Black loves to tell the story of when he was eight-years-old and his mother brought home a record with sermons by Peter Marshall, who was Senate chaplain from 1947 to 1949. Black says he listened to that record over and over again and learned the sermons by heart, accent and all.

Chaplain BLACK (speaking to students at Andrews University, imitating Marshall): “There were the aged, stooped with years, muttering to themselves as they pushed through the throng…”

LAWTON: As Black puts it, only God could have orchestrated events so that he would one day follow in Marshall’s footsteps.

Chaplain BLACK (speaking at Crystal Cathedral): God set in motion a sequence of events that let that little eight-year-old go from the hood to the Hill. So what a mighty God we serve.

LAWTON: Black went to Seventh-day Adventist schools, including Andrews University in Michigan. He eventually earned three masters degrees and two doctorates. He’s married with three sons. Soon after seminary, Black learned that the Adventists needed military chaplains, so he joined the Navy. He rose to the rank of rear admiral and was the first African American to be named chief of Navy chaplains. Black says he experienced some discrimination along the way, but he never let himself dwell on race.

Chaplain BLACK: I was determined to create a resumé that would transcend race, and I wanted an individual on a promotion board who may have even been socialized to think of me as inferior to look at my paper and basically say, “We’ve got a problem if we’re going to stop this guy.”

LAWTON: There’s been a chaplain in the House and Senate since 1789. Some argue that violates the separation of church and state, but Black insists it is constitutional. Although Seventh-day Adventists actively spread their faith, Black says he’s well aware of boundaries in his job.

Chaplain BLACK: Having been a military chaplain in a pluralistic setting of religious diversity for 27 years, I am very, very comfortable with an environment where I am encouraged to support but not to proselytize.

LAWTON: He says he gets a front-row seat to history, and he’s been called on during times of national mourning, such as when Senator Edward Kennedy asked him to officiate during the at-sea burial of John F. Kennedy Jr. Senators come to him for counseling and advice, sometimes even on policy matters.

Chaplain BLACK: There are issues—biomedical ethical issues and issues of justice—that they are interested in: “Chaplain, what is your spin on this particular issue?” So I can tell them what I think, and of course they can use it however they desire.

LAWTON: It’s a lot of responsibility, and Black acknowledges that he must be on his guard to avoid becoming overly-impressed with the power. He says he works hard to maintain his moral authority.

Chaplain BLACK: Once people no longer perceive that you are the real deal, your power is gone. So keeping Chaplain Barry Black in the straight and narrow, ensuring that I don’t deviate from the path of unswerving integrity—that is my greatest challenge.

LAWTON: Black tries to keep his spiritual life on track by staying in regular conversation with God.

Chaplain BLACK (appearing on the Hope Channel): If you want to faithfully interpret the word of God, start praying the Scripture. It will energize your prayer life.

LAWTON: He prays with his well-used Bible open in front of him.

Chaplain BLACK: When you pray before an open Bible, you give God the courtesy of starting the conversation. And so I will open the Bible and I will read until something stops me, something impresses me, something warms my heart. And then I’ll talk to God about it.

LAWTON: Being Senate chaplain gives Black a lot to talk with God about. He often writes his prayers while looking out the window in his office—an everyday inspiration, he says, to pray for the nation.

Q: Let’s start with your work as the Senate chaplain. What’s a typical day like for you? What are your main spiritual responsibilities?

A: I’m the pastor for about 7,000 people on the Senate side of Capitol Hill, so I don’t simply provide ministry for the senators and their family members, but also for staffers and the many other people who work on Capitol Hill — janitors, waitresses, Capitol police officers. As their pastor I am interested in their spiritual well-being, so I have five Bible studies a week. One is for senators only. One is for the spouses of senators. And then there are two plenary Bible studies where anyone who desires to come may do so. And I have a Bible study for the chiefs of staff. I also have a spiritual mentoring class, a ten-week program where I take ten people and help them to learn how to practice the spiritual disciplines more effectively. I officiate at weddings and funerals. I conduct seasonal observances. I do pastoral counseling. I have an advisory function to senators and their staffs regarding the ethical dimensions of the various issues that are debated in the chamber. So, in short, I am a pastor for about 7,000 people.

Q: And you do the daily prayers as well?

A: I do a prayer to open each session of the Senate.

Q: What goes into those prayers as you craft them? What are you trying to do with each of them?

A: I see myself as an intercessor. I see myself as articulating the longings and the concerns of the people whom I seek to minister to. And so I, in my pastoral contact, I get a feel for what the concerns and the challenges are, and I try to incorporate those concerns and challenges into my prayer. I have a marvelous opportunity to frame the day for the senators, and it’s a wonderful privilege to offer that invocation at the opening of each Senate session.

Q: When you do the counseling sessions and deal with some of the ethical and moral dilemmas that the senators face, I think a lot of people wonder, do they come to you for policy advice when they’re facing a tough vote? How do you handle that?

A: Although my position is nonpartisan and nonsectarian, I am not expected to be neutral. There are senators who are interested in what is your opinion on this particular issue. Many of them know about my academic background — a doctorate in theology and a doctorate in psychology. And so there are issues, biomedical ethical issues and issues of justice that they are interested [in]: “Chaplain, what is your spin on this particular issue?” So I can tell them what I think, and of course they can use it however they desire.

Q: Do you ever get lobbied or pressured from people who say that if you have the senator’s ear, maybe you can try to sway him or her in a direction?

A: I have learned that everyone who comes to my office does not have pristine motives. That’s the succinct response. There are those who will begin in a very affable and neutral way. But eventually the bottom line will emerge, and of course I know what to do with that. I simply remind them that I am nonpartisan and nonsectarian.

Q: You speak about being nonsectarian. I know this is also something military chaplains, which is your background, deal with. How do you handle that? You come from a very particular background. You have your own deeply held beliefs. How do you maintain those beliefs, stay true to what you believe, but also respect another person’s beliefs, especially if that person may believe something very different?

A: I think from a Christian perspective — most Christians have more in common than they have differences. From my religious tradition, for instance, I can say a fervent amen to the Apostle’s Creed, and most people here on Capitol Hill who are Christian can do the same. So it is very easy for me to minister to Protestants and Catholics, and Protestants and Catholics come to my Bible study. When I am providing a ministry to Jewish people, to people from the Islamic tradition, to Hindus and Buddhists, I obviously have limitations, and so we have Torah studies here on Capitol Hill where I bring in a rabbi who teaches the Torah. I bring in an imam when there are high holy days for people from the Muslim tradition. It is an opportunity to cooperate without compromising. It’s really a lot easier than most people would imagine. When you look at what Christians have in common across the spectrum of religious traditions, you know — believing God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, Jesus Christ his son who was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, crucified, dead and was buried, descended into hell — you know, any of the creeds — most of the Christians on Capitol Hill can say an amen, so it’s really not that difficult.

Q: Seventh Day Adventists in particular stress spreading the gospel, bringing people to faith. Is there a temptation to do that?

A: I believe it was Francis of Assisi who once said, “Preach the gospel. When necessary, use words.” I have to know the difference between providing support to people and proselytizing. Having been a military chaplain in a pluralistic setting, a religious diversity, for 27 years, I am very, very comfortable with an environment where I am encouraged to support but not to proselytize.

Q: Was it a challenge for you as a member of the Seventh Day Adventist (SDA) tradition in the military chaplain program? You write there weren’t a lot of SDA chaplains when you started in the program. Were there aspects that made that challenging? A lot of people are not familiar with your faith tradition.

A: Seventh Day Adventists believe in the deity of Christ. Seventh Day Adventists believe in salvation by faith, salvation by grace through faith — Ephesians chapter 2. Seventh Day Adventists believe in the inerrancy of Scripture. Seventh Day Adventists believe in the second coming of Christ, the soon return of Christ. So if you go down the list of major doctrines, the Holy Spirit and on and on it goes, Seventh Day Adventists believe that. So it really was not that much of a challenge. I conducted thousands of Bible studies during my 27 years as a Navy chaplain, and I always had a wonderful attendance. I conduct Bible studies here. We can get as many as 200 at some of our plenary Bible studies, and people are very, very comfortable with the presentations I make, because it is critically important, I believe, to find the common ground, and there are tremendous opportunities to do that. I think there was some curiosity on the part of people, because as you probably know a significant number of Senate chaplains have been Episcopalian. In fact, the first eight or nine were Episcopalians. A significant number have been Presbyterian. Four of my last five predecessors were Presbyterian. But, again, I think we’re at a point where people are willing to say let’s hear this individual and see what he or she has to say. And most of them seem to be quite pleased with what they’re hearing because, quite frankly, many people are not that familiar with Seventh Day Adventists, and they will sometimes mistake the doctrines of the Seventh Day Adventist church for the doctrines of some other religious traditions. So it’s an excellent opportunity for me to, many times, demythologize their perceptions regarding the Seventh Day Adventist faith.

Q: What is distinctive and particularly meaningful? What has kept you in that tradition your whole life?

A: I am very appreciative for the emphasis of the Seventh Day Adventist church on Christian education. We have one of the strongest Christian education programs, I think, in the world. And so although I grew up in the inner city of Baltimore in a public housing project, my seven siblings and I matriculated at Christian schools from grade one through graduate school. I believe it provided a cocoon that enabled us to develop our wings. That is just one of the things that I celebrate about the Seventh Day Adventist church. There’s also, as you probably know, a tremendous emphasis on health. There have been studies that revealed Seventh Day Adventists, because of their emphasis on health, live longer. I have made the observation that one commentator said “if you can call that really living.” For instance, I’m a vegetarian. I grew up that way. Now although all Seventh Day Adventists are not vegetarian, there is an emphasis on a healthy lifestyle — fresh air, pure water, exercise, and not a lot of red meats and that kind of thing. In fact, we abide by the dietary law of the Old Testament — Leviticus chapter 11 and Deuteronomy chapter 14. So there are foods on the hit list. But, you know, I’ve been a vegetarian, so that’s not been a problem. But I appreciate the emphasis on health in the Seventh Day Adventist church.

Q: Talk a little more about the importance of the church in your background, especially given the tough circumstances of your neighborhood.

A: I grew up in a church that became for me an extended family of tremendous support. My mother was on public assistance. She could not afford the tuition for Christian schools. And yet the church that I grew up in, Berea Temple Seventh Day Adventist Church in Baltimore, Maryland, had a program where the church would supplement financially the tuition needs of students so that any child, regardless of socioeconomic level, would receive a Christian education. I just think that was tremendously critical. Also, because my father was not around a great deal, to have wonderful, positive male role models in the church was a tremendous blessing and made a critical difference in my development and in the development of my siblings and so many others who were able to take advantage of that opportunity.

Q: You’ve said your mother had a real impact on you. Talk about the role she played spiritually for you.

A: My mother was baptized when she was pregnant with me. I have three older siblings, and as she entered the — we say “the watery grave of baptism” (Seventh Day Adventists immerse), she prayed for a special anointing on her unborn child. I don’t remember ever not wanting to be a minister, a preacher. It was just as if there was a call on my life from birth, and my mother, of course, reminded me that I had been set apart by God. My mother gave my siblings and me our allowance based upon memorizing Scripture — a nickel a verse. She eventually put me on a flat rate because it was breaking the family budget. But that was a tremendous inspiration. And her wonderful modeling of spirituality, her commitment to her faith — I think that that made a tremendous difference, a positive difference in my life and in the lives of my siblings. Someone said, “What you do speaks so loudly people can’t hear what you say.” My mother backed her rhetoric with substantive action.

Q: How much of the Bible have you memorized?

A: Quite a bit. I’m memorized quite a bit. Those nickels — you know, with monetary motivation, obviously — and I love the Bible. I believe that it is a success manual. Growing up in the inner city I fell in love with the Book of Proverbs because the verses are short, so the nickels came more quickly. We call that picking the low-hanging fruit. And so this was an amazing success manual for me. I remember reading Proverbs 3:5-6: “Trust in the Lord with all your heart. Lean not upon your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your path.” And that, to me, was like an epiphany. It was just this amazing blueprint for ensuring that there would be a loving providence behind the unfolding of your life. So simple verses like that made a tremendous impact upon my thinking, and they had a tremendous impact upon how I lived my life.

Q: You are the first African-American Senate chaplain. What challenges do you face?

A: I believe that God equips people for the doors he opens. I guess I may be a bit different, but I didn’t think a whole lot about race, you know, except for the human race, and though I was a pioneer in a lot of areas — I would sometimes be in a room of 50 people and I would be the only African American — I never sat there thinking, you are the only African American in this room. Or when someone would say to me, you know, “Barry, what do African Americans think about this?” it always startled me that people expected me to speak for an entire race. Just didn’t seem logical. So I think one of the reasons why I was placed in positions where you could call me a pioneer was because people sensed that racial labels were not really a big part of my perception of the world or my perspective on the world, and that I believed in a meritocracy and that individuals who were qualified — they are the ones who should be given the opportunity to play on that level playing field. I think one of the reasons why I ended up with three master’s degrees and two doctorates was because I was determined to create a resume that would transcend race. I wanted an individual on a promotion board who may have even been socialized to think of me as inferior to look at my paper and basically say, “We’ve got a problem if we’re going to stop this guy.” So I was more interested in doing my best. Martin King once said, “If it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go out and sweep streets like Michelangelo carved marble, like Raphael painted pictures, like Beethoven composed music, and like Shakespeare wrote poetry. Sweep streets,” he said, “so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his or her job well.’” My focus and my determination [were] to be the best that I could be. I competed against myself and to maximize the potential of the God-given talents that I was given, and that focus transcends race, and I think people pick up on it.

Q: I know that Martin Luther King Jr. was one of your role models for being a good preacher. What do you think makes a good sermon? What makes someone a good preacher?

A: I have a chapter in my autobiography, From the Hood to the Hill, where I talk about learning to preach. I think a passion for Scripture — it’s critically important because I think sermons that are not rooted in God’s word are nice speeches, but the power of the sermon comes from the scriptural content. I think that a minister must study himself or herself full — that there should be as much light as heat, okay? A lot of people are very passionate, and you’ve got the heat but not the light. Then he or she should think himself or herself clear. You need to know what you want to say, and that gives you an element of being free from notes. I think there should be a liberty in freedom. If standup comics, if defense attorneys can discipline themselves to go without a lot of paper, then I think those who are blessed with the opportunity to present treasures, divine treasures, should discipline themselves to think so clearly that you know what you’re going to say, and you’re not tied to notes. One old lady heard a young preacher, and he was reading, and at the end of it she said, “Son, you made some mistakes.” She said, “Number one, you read it.” She said, “Number two, it wasn’t worth reading. And number three, you read it poorly.” She said, “If you can’t remember it, how do you expect us to remember it?” So think yourself clear, and then pray yourself hot. I think that there should be a spiritual dimension — that a minister should never enter the pulpit without a sense of dependence upon a divine power. And then let yourself go. There should be a freedom. You shouldn’t be inhibited. Those are four of the Chaplain Barry Black commandments for presenting an effective sermon.

Q: What’s the toughest part of the job you do now, the biggest challenge?

A: The biggest challenge in this job is to make sure that I maintain my moral authority. Aristotle in his Rhetoric said that there are three aspects of persuasion. There’s a tripod for persuasion, and he used three Greek words: ethos, pathos, and logos. Logos has to do with the ability to present reasoned arguments. Pathos has to do with the ability to engender emotions. But ethos is when people perceive you to be ethically congruent, when they perceive that your rhetoric is backed by your actions. We see a great televangelist and spiritual leaders who have a moral lapse, and their power is gone. Once you lose ethos, once people no longer perceive that you are the real deal, your power is gone. So keeping Chaplain Barry Black in the straight and narrow, ensuring that I don’t deviate from the path of unswerving integrity — that is my greatest challenge.

Q: How tempting is it to be surrounded by the power that’s here in the U.S. Capitol? You’ve got one of the best views in this city in your office. Every day the most powerful people in the world come to you.

A: This can be a very seductive environment, and yet I think that if you keep your devotion in life strong and — the first thing each day involves greeting the sovereign God of the universe and having an interaction with him. There is something about being in the presence of God that enables you to keep the baubles of mere time in the proper perspective. I often think of Daniel, who’s one of my heroes. Daniel had an amazing governmental career that spanned the decades. He was an advisor to Nebuchadnezzar. He later became an advisor to Belshazzar, the grandson of Nebuchadnezzar, and then to Darius when Babylon fell and the Persian empire arose. I often say that I doubt if Daniel had paintings of himself shaking hands with Nebuchadnezzar in his office. Once I was asked, “Admiral, you have two stars, but you advise four-star admirals. Is that intimidating?” And my answer was, “It is difficult to become intimidated by someone wearing four stars when before you encountered that person on a particular day you commune with the one who made the stars.”

Q: Talk about that communion with God. You’re so busy giving to other people and trying to keep their spiritual life warm. How do you keep your own spiritual life on fire?

A: David said in the 119th Psalm — and I got a nickel for this when I grew up — “Your word I have hidden in my heart that I may not sin against you.” And so repeated exposure to sacred scriptures — I think that that’s a critical factor. I drive a 40-minute drive in order that I can listen to the scripture on CD. You can listen to the entire Bible in less than 80 hours. I’m listening to James Earl Jones read the Bible right now, which is a wonderful experience in itself. I sometimes think I’m listening to Star Wars, but, you know, that’s another matter. And so by that repeated exposure to sacred scripture — learning to worship when you’re not in church, praise music, learning how to pray and pray effectively, learning how to practice the spiritual disciplines, what I teach in my spiritual mentoring class, unleashing the power of fasting, journaling, learning how to meditate — those are some of the critical disciplines that you can use to maintain spiritual fitness. I call them spiritual calisthenics.

Q: In your book you called prayer the breath of your soul. What does that meant for you, and how does it work for you?

A: Prayer to me is conversation with God. 1 Thessalonians 5 says “pray without ceasing.” So the prayer should be like breathing. You inhale and you exhale. It’s an amazing privilege to talk to God whenever you desire. If I wanted to see the Majority Leader it would take me a couple of hours to get on his schedule. If I wanted to see the President of the United States, it’d probably take me a couple of months to be able to get into the White House. And yet I have the awesome opportunity to enter the throne room of the sovereign God of the universe, the one who created the Majority Leader and the President, and to have a conversation with him whenever I desire, and so learning that ebb and flow of prayer, of talking to God. Now one of the things that I like to do is to pray the scriptures, because I believe prayer is a dialogue, and so very often I will pray before an open Bible. I believe that when you pray before an open Bible you give God the courtesy of starting the conversation. And so I will open the Bible and I will read until something stops me, something impresses me, something warms my heart. And then I’ll talk to God about it. And then I’ll continue reading until, you know — and so it becomes an ebb and flow. It is one of the most beatific spiritual experiences you can have.

Q: You have had the opportunity to be part of some of big events in our national life — for example, when Rosa Parks lay in state in the Capitol. What were your thoughts then?

A: I feel extremely humbled because there are many, many others who are just as qualified who could have this opportunity. In this job and in my previous job as chief of chaplains for the United States Navy, you have an opportunity of having a front row seat to history. For the Rosa Parks ceremony, I was the first person that the coffin went by in the rotunda, and of course I offered a prayer for that. For the Ronald Reagan funeral, the same thing. For the Gerald Ford funeral, the same thing. With the eyes of the nation riveted on this state funeral, I had a front row seat to history. A couple of weeks ago we gave a Congressional Gold Medal to the Tuskegee Airmen. I had the wonderful privilege of offering the prayer for that event, of officiating at the re-internment of the bones of Matthew Henson, the African American who was a co-discoverer of the North Pole. Providing ministry to the Kennedy family by officiating at the burial at sea for John F. Kennedy Jr., of offering a prayer at the USS Cole memorial ceremony. At the 9/11 ceremonies of being able to read a scripture, offer a prayer. You literally have the wonderful privilege of having a front row seat to history and of being a participant in history and providing ministry many times to a hurting nation or hurting families. So I thank God for this great opportunity.

Q: John Kennedy’s burial at sea must have been a very emotional time for the family and for you.

A: I remember when John Kennedy was assassinated. I remember Camelot. I remember Jackie. I remember seeing John-John playing under the chair in the Oval Office, and Caroline. I remember the salute. I was watching television when Oswald was shot. I know what this family has gone through. And so it was with some sense of reverential awe that I provided a ministry for a great family during a very painful time in their lives and a painful time in the life of the nation and experienced the grief with them because this was, I think, a time of national mourning. What an awesome opportunity. Instead of having to sit back and have nothing to do with it except to be a spectator, what an awesome opportunity to be a participant.

Q: As a chaplain, you understand these people that we may look at as icons or political figures, but you really see them as human beings, don’t you?

A: They come to my Bible study on a weekly basis. We have a weekly prayer breakfast here at the Senate. We just had one this morning that they come to. I interact with them on the floor when they have the roll call votes. They drop by my office. I drop by their offices. So you get to know them as real people, and it is a marvelous opportunity to provide pastoral support.

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: Many churches encourage their young people to memorize Scripture. In the Free Methodist Church, they do it through a friendly competition called “Bible Quizzing.” This year marks the 50th anniversary of Bible Quizzing in the evangelical denomination. Last week, 123 teams from across the nation competed in the Church’s National Bible Quizzing Final Tournament. Kim Lawton takes us behind the scenes.

Voice of Quizmaster: Give the reference and quote the passage about being free…how did Jesus answer the disciples…what did John’s disciples testify…?

KIM LAWTON: At the Gowanda Free Methodist Church in Western New York, the questions are flying fast. This is the last practice before the National Bible Quizzing Finals.

Quizmaster: The Samaritan woman asked Jesus if he was greater than whom? Yolanda?

Yolanda: “Are you greater than our father Jacob, who gave us the well and drank from it himself, as did also his sons and his flocks and herds?”

LAWTON: It’s not exactly “Jeopardy.”

Quizmaster: Sorry, I can’t accept that.

LAWTON: The teams are quizzed not on Bible trivia, but on Bible memorization.

Gowanda Team Member: “They do not realize that it is better for one man to die than the whole nation perish.” Finished.

Quizmaster: That is correct.

LAWTON: Competing teams from churches across the nation are assigned the same section of Scripture to study. This year, it’s the Gospel of John.

Unidentified Young Girl: Blessed are those who have not seen, and yet have believed. John 20:29.

Quizmaster: That is correct.

LAWTON: Each team has three quizzers and at least one alternate who face off against each other. A “Quizmaster” asks the questions. The quizzers sit on special cushions that are hooked up to a light box. They jump up to answer the question, and the light box indicates who got up first.

ERIC YOUNG (Regional Bible Quizzing Director): Obviously, it’s very competitive, and that competition aspect is the incentive for kids to study God’s word.

LAWTON: Eighteen-year-old Peter showed me how it works.

PETER: So we sit on these chairs; they got little sensors in them. You have to have enough weight on there to put the light out. Your feet can’t be touching any part of the chair, nor can your hands. So you have to sit mainly like this. Some people like to go like this, some people, it’s weird. It all depends. And you just listen, and you get ready, and you jump.

LAWTON: Every quizzer develops a jumping style for competition.

PETER: Some just like twitch; some jump straight up because they’re excited because they know the question. Some people are mad that they jumped because they have no clue why they jumped.

LAWTON: Are there special exercises that you do so that you get the jumping down?

PETER: No, it’s all instinct.

LAWTON: It’s also a matter of delicate timing. If you jump too soon, you have to complete the question before you can give the answer.

Quizmaster to Gowanda teammate: That’s a pre-jump, Gowanda. Finish the question.

LAWTON: Sometimes, you’ve jumped before there’s enough information to even guess what the question might be. If you’re wrong, the other team gets a free shot at the answer.

LIZ: You can’t be too late, but you definitely can’t be too early. I have a problem with jumping too early, and I don’t get to complete the question correctly, and then it goes to someone else. And it’s a simple question that I know.

LAWTON: Quizzers have only 20 seconds to answer. The correct answers are usually Bible verses. Everyone uses the New International Version of the Bible, and the answers must be given exactly word for word.

The Gowanda teams, like all the quizzers headed to Nationals, have been getting ready for a year now….

Coach to quiz competitors: You know your work is something special.

LAWTON: …with weekly practices and regional competitions. Many say their friends at school can’t understand why they put so much into this.

AMANDA: They think it’s really weird that I would, like, memorize Scripture, and they think I have no life whatsoever. But I tell them that it’s really cool, and I’m really hoping to invite them to one of my tournaments and show them how interesting it really is.

LAWTON: Fourteen-year-old Liz says she doesn’t care that other kids call her “church girl.” She says learning the Bible through quizzing has had a deep spiritual impact.

LIZ: Knowing the Scripture can change you a lot. I mean, we’re not just learning stuff like stories that Jesus told his disciples. We actually have to put it into our own lives.

LAWTON: This year, the National finals are at Roberts Wesleyan College, just outside Rochester, New York. A total of 400 quizzers are here. It’s a week of competition, and every day begins with a worship service.

Nationals Quizmaster: Question, when Jesus saw that his disciples wanted to ask him about…

LAWTON: Teams are put into divisions based by age, experience and ability. On the last day, double elimination rounds take place simultaneously all across campus. In each quiz, team captains introduce their members, and every round begins with a prayer.

Young Woman: I just pray that we all do our best.

LAWTON: Tensions are high, with lots of pacing. Sixteen-year-old Ashley from Bedford, Indiana, is among the quizzers who have memorized the entire book of John — all 21 Chapters.

LAWTON (to Ashley): Quote some of the book of John for me.

ASHLEY: OK, I’ll start with John 1 and 2. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning…”

LAWTON: Top competitors, such as Ashley, learn to speed-quote, so they can be sure to get their answers in during the allotted time.

ASHLEY (speaking very rapidly): “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.”

LAWTON: At quiz headquarters, engineers keep the electronics in good working order, while computer experts keep track of the statistics. Youth Pastor Eric Young is co-director of Nationals. He’s a former quizzer himself.

Reverend ERIC YOUNG (Co-Director, National Bible Quizzing Finals): One of the great things about the quizzing program is that we’re developing leaders for the church for the future. Certainly by studying God’s word, they have the ability to bring scripture back into situations when they could really use it. And it’s because they’ve studied it, they’ve memorized it, that they’re able to do that, and that’s what gives them their foundation for the future.

LAWTON: Many of these kids say Bible quizzing is already shaping their lives.

ASHLEY. When I try to make decisions about like, going somewhere with friends, like, a verse will pop up and I’ll be like, “Oh, I’m not supposed to do that,” and it’s really helped me make the right decisions and stay on God’s path.

AMANDA: I think it’s just awesome to fellowship with other quizzers and to get to know people and at the same time get to know Jesus more and take in his word. It’s all about him and putting it in my soul and not in my brain.

LAWTON: For the Gowanda teams, this year’s Nationals were a mixed bag. Peter and his team got eliminated early on. Liz and her team placed sixth place in their division. Ashley and Amanda’s team took second in theirs.

And Ashley, the speed-quoter from Indiana? She and her team were named the 2003 National Bible Quiz Grand Champions.

I’m Kim Lawton in Western New York.