The Los Angeles summer of 1965 produced the frustration-generated Watts riots - or Watts "revolt" as I was taught to call those days. That was the year our family went to England for a pulpit exchange. We were in London the day after Adlai Stevenson dropped dead on Oxford Street, the victim of a heart attack. Mr. Stevenson never became president, but he won a special place in the hearts of the American people. Those of us old enough to remember his campaigns will never forget him - especially the night he lost to Dwight Eisenhower and went on television with his concession statement, quoting from President Lincoln's story about the boy who stubbed his toe and said that he was too big to cry, and far too badly hurt to laugh.

That day is an easy one for me to remember because of the way the afternoon papers reported the incident. The headline used a phrase I had never heard before, though I think the British understood it clearly. I still see those big, black letters on the front page: "Adlai Stevenson Dies - The Kiss of Life Fails."

We would have said CPR.

Now it's Easter Sunday night. In a house with the doors locked. Jesus bestows upon those to whom the work of the kingdom would be committed the "kiss of life," telling us that he "breathed upon" the disciples and said "receive the Holy Spirit." Of the four gospel writers, only John includes this splendid detail.

Part of what brings us to worship is the need to have our lives reopened to the Spirit of God, whether we image that as a dove that descends upon our lives, or as a presence we feel in the early evening as we walk along the ocean with the sun falling into the distant horizon, or as huge forces out of control.

God may also seem vividly present to us as we enter upon new forms of experience. Like a first week at college - feeling alone, yet not alone. When two people marry. Or when a child is born, an event that starts the world over. God swoops, slides, or sneaks mysteriously into our common life and life is suddenly different.

The breath of God. The breath of amazement. Of our best selves. Or of refreshment after days or weeks of vacation.

Wrote New Jersey poet Joseph Auslander: "I never pass a steeple by, but I must stop a while and linger, and catch my breath to see the sky take hold of prayer's tremendous finger."

Another word for breath is "inspire" - to breathe into. And when others inspire us, they impart their own kiss of life, usually without realizing what they are doing.

Our country has its own yearnings for new breath. Which may be making the focus too small. Maybe we should think not just about this land, but about a whole society struggling for rebirth, or a planet trying to get its respiratory system going again after finding out how environmentally threatened we seem to be.

Our malaise is deeper than economic.
We know that.
We admit it.

The end of the Cold War wiped out a large territory of meaning that we are still adjusting to. Space adventuring had us turned on for a time, but, breathtaking as it all is, even the exploration of the heavens has lost much of its power to get us up on our feet cheering new victories. Pride, eloquently expressed by the Statue of Liberty, has lapsed into arguments over multiculturalism. Candidates running for office talk much about change. But change of itself is neutral. We are waiting for Godot, but not sure we would recognize him if he appeared.

Yet we remain sure of this: That if our will fails, if our imagination remains impoverished, if we cannot find ways to stop ourselves from killing each other and get our moral nerve back, a basic dream may die.

And where we are trying to get back to is to being a people who are not intimidated by our times, and who would not trade places with any other people or time in history.

So we pray: God breathe upon us once more and save us from becoming a silent valley of bleached bones.

During the same trip that took us to London, then to Wakefield, England, to live for six weeks and to relearn a few things about the War of the Roses and the Royal Duke of York, we had stopped in New York to show our kids some of the special sights there, including a by-night look at the big city from the top of the Empire State Building.

There, at the top, I found a plaque on which these words by MacKinley Kantor had been inscribed - and which I copied down in the poor light:

Whence rise you, Lights? From this tower built upon Manhattan's native rock. Its roots are deep below forgotten musket balls, the mouldered wooden shoe, the flint, the bone. What mark you, Lights? Our Nation's doorway. Who sleep or toil beneath your good warm gaze? All who love this land: they who are of the Land's stout seed, and they who love the land because they chose to come. Sing you a song, proud lights? We sing silently. We chant a Mass and Spiritual, Doxology, and Kol Nidre, wheat and cotton, turbine, oil, and golden rod, the wildest mountains and the cities roar. This is a strange new time, Strong Lights, why never do you fear? There is something more powerful: the heart and soul of all Mankind. What build you with your beams? A bridge to the stars. What offer you to God, O Lights? Amenca's devotion.

There's a saving optimism wrapped up within those words and phrases we may have lost. But it's not too late. Only too late if we give up on our ability to accommodate the kinds of changes that have brought us a new world of women, new worlds of opportunity for disabled persons, and for those who are sexually oriented in ways different from ourselves - perhaps even the faint beginnings of the end of racisms that have poisoned thinking for almost as long as people looked at each other and noticed that they were different - differences that are intentional, beautiful, given of God, good that we change into the opposite of good.

And truth and love abide. Forgiveness abides.

We can make the world young and kind again.

A renewed nation, of course, must consist of renewed people - convinced that they are and can make the difference. This is always part of our agenda as we reassemble in our churches each fall to pray, study, act, and try to determine what part each of us can play as tippers of the balances toward a society reconciled and whole.

It has been said that it is no tragedy to die. Only tragic if we allow wonderful things to die within us while our hearts go on pumping away without our having been animated and refreshed by the kiss of life, which is what preaching is mainly all about.

For a year now I have been putting up a fight against cancer. And so many have supported and encouraged me in that struggle. Such battles wind up making people like myself newly aware of how many people there are who have the same adversary, or many that are worse. But also how aliveness of soul and aliveness to God are not dependent upon receiving favorable treatment at the hands of a life process that defies rational explanation. One of the oldest truths we have is that the best nobilities are frequently exhibited by those who suffer the most. We see their courage and, slightly ashamed, embrace our own tomorrows with thanksgiving.

So we will go on praying and working for a revived nation, attempting to be part of the implementation of our own petitions by being alive to the grandeur of the world itself, alive to the differences that keep it interesting, alive to children, alive to love, and to the divine within the ordinary - the kinds of awareness that prompted Edna St. Vincent Millay to write:"God, I can push the grass apart, and lay my finger on Thy heart."

The church, too, is on its own quest for renewal. Statistics about growth, if Presbyterians are normative, continue to be dismal. But if I had my life to live over, I would want to repeat the course in much the same way, and keep the church as the compass of my existence - a place not where answers are kept in a vault, but where people practice faith, grow in wisdom, and work for justice in ways that keep us restless so long as so few have so much, and so many so little.

In an essay former Time editor, Henry Grunwald, looked ahead to the end of this fabulous century, and reflected on what were, or are, the most notable developments of this particular moment of history. While two of his observations didn't surprise me, the third one did.

The first event was the communism which has deeply affected everything else that has gone on in the Western world since 1918.

The second was the new globalism that is already busy replacing national and regional economies - and general thinking - with a new world economy and point of view. Teilhard du Chardin, it appears, was right from an evolutionary standpoint. There is evidence that after eons of diversification, Life now seems to be on a course of convergence and reunification. A simple one-celled beginning that became a complex multiverse is trying to become a universe again.

But it was the third that really surprised me. He wrote that we now come to the conclusion that life is a spiritual enterprise for which no secular achievement, no source of pleasure, and no material convenience is a substitute.

A Walter Brueggemann book titled Finally Comes The Poet borrows its name from a passage in Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass that offers a hopeful note to end on.

After the seas are all cross'd, (as they seem already cross'd,)After the great captains and engineers have accomplish'd their work,After the noble inventors, after the scientists, the chemist, the geologist, ethnologist,Finally shall come the poet worthy of that name,The true son of God shall come singing his songs.- Walt Whitman

"As the Father has sent me, now I send you." And when he had said that, he breathed on them. And gave to them new gifts of power and love. "Receive the Holy Spirit," he said.

That should be enough to make us more than conquerors. And in the fullness of time to fit us for eternal life within an eternal kingdom.