Perhaps it’s best that it had to wait for this morning because it fits well today with the theme of National Women's History Month. It also fits well with our theme of welcoming new members into the congregation. I’m afraid, it's also applicable as we try to make some sense out of some of this week's more disturbing news stories, like the shooting in Flint, Michigan. It’s interesting and peculiar that there’s a relationship among all these topics, but there is one that is well worth our noting.

What is the difference between a parable and a paradigm? That’s the question. It hadn't really occurred to me that there even was a relationship between the two until that BYOT session. There is a relationship though, a religiously important one.

Both words come from the same Latin and Greek root, para meaning comparison or analogy. In the Christian biblical tradition the parable has been used as an allegorical or moral narrative. Within the framework of a story, it provides a metaphorical guide to the kingdom of heaven.

Most of us in the Western tradition are familiar with the parables Jesus used to teach his followers. The Mustard Seed, the Prodigal Son, the Steward and the Workers in the Vineyard and The Lost Coin to name a few. He even used parables to teach about parables. In our reading this morning from the book of Luke, Jesus refers to the parable as a lamp that sheds light upon the truth.

In our BYOT class, one of the participants suggested that parables were the lessons that Jesus used to teach people about how to live. I think that's just about right–they are stories that provide how to lessons on how to live right. But there's more to it than that.

The suffix digm in the word paradigm means to show. The word paradigm has usage in both mathematics and grammar, but in its more generic sense it means a pattern, an example or a model. In recent times paradigm has taken on the meaning of a foundational pattern or model. So, the paradigm is a cultural grand schema of things that provides much of the framework out of which we shape and draw meaning in our day to day lives.

Ideas on right living are not random thoughts. They’re based on considerable and well-developed ideas about the universe and the meaning of life. If one ought to love their neighbor, it must be because they have an understanding of things that provides them with an experience of connection to that neighbor, that enables them to value the connection and, as a result, value the other person.

The paradigm provides an overall structure and context, while the parable provides specific lessons for living within that structure. Paradigms are about how things work. Parables are about how we do our part so those things will work well. The larger scheme in which the parable or story unfolds is the basic model upon which we have molded our understandings of life, as we know it. The parable is the daily narrative that, in the best of all worlds, is based upon the paradigm. If one were invested in shifting the paradigm, a millennially slow process, they might begin by attempting to change the narrative.

This may all sound well and good or it may sound terribly academic or it may even sound perfectly irrelevant, but it’s none of those. Both parables and paradigms play an almost invisible role, and yet have a nearly invincible impact on our lives. In her book, Metaphorical Theology, feminist theologian, Sally McFague writes, "Religion is one of the most powerful legitimators of our social constructions because it grounds our precarious creations in [our religious paradigms of] ultimate reality."

I would hasten to say that the paradigm is the most powerful legitimator of social construction because, woven into the fabric of the culture, it invariably uses the divine to sanction and protect the status quo. It can bless the use of power by those who have it over those who do not. And when a paradigm starts to fall it can create a chasm of cataclysmic proportion in which people struggle to find footing on one or both of the landings.

The old paradigm is that of patriarchy. The Old Testament established in the Judeo-Christian tradition, and to a great extent in the Western World, the concept of a sovereign, male, white-light creator. God the Father’s throne rested at the pinnacle of the power pyramid of the universe. He was the cosmic top dog in a top-down structure of power, privilege and dominion.

In the story of creation, man was fashioned in the image of God. And so was the world, including its social order, structured to mirror the heavens in its hierarchical stratification of lord and subject. If man was created in the image of God, God was created as the image of ultimate power and authority.

Patriarchy, as a social system, applied that clout to those who most resembled the imagined, anthropomorphized if superhuman God. Emperors, kings, princes and lessor lords took their places in the structures that provided them with accountability, but also with power and authority over others. In our Western culture of course that power and authority was always white, always male. Women, people of color or of lower class, children, and those who deviated from the acceptable expectation of their role in this schema were relegated to influence over smaller and smaller realms of those who had even less influence than they had.

This was the religious way of things. Our repudiation of this religious way brings many of us to Unitarian Universalism, this island of religious freedom that relies upon reason and promotes tolerance. It’s not enough though, to simply throw out the old and bring in the new. None of us arrive here with a tabula rasa, a clean slate. We come bearing with us centuries of cultural residue and custom. Paradigms do change very slowly. Still, they change.

We see the patriarchal paradigm of that older religious way to be based on an inadequate cosmic view. The creator god of superhuman character doesn’t provide us with a large enough answer to the question, what we are doing here? The social constructs that place women, people of color, and others under the domain of the god-like white man come undone when even the model god can’t uphold the old ways.

Here’s the rub for us. We’re not the first in this culture to recognize the need for the demise of that patriarchal god and the subsequent structures that hold some superior to others. I’m not sure where it began. There have been many prophets along the way, but it may well have been Jesus who was among the first to promote a feminist or liberation theology.

His message was to love our neighbors as ourselves; he said that the kingdom of heaven is within. Two thousand years ago, he was the harald of the Age of Aquarius, the dawning of a paradigm based on egalitarianism and the fulfillment of human potential. Here is where the theological seed of equality and democracy was planted. Here was the forging of a plow that would eventually turn over the sod of social fealty.

The problem was that in Jesus’ day people tried to plug his parables of a new unfolding story into the old paradigm where they no longer fit. To a very large extent, that has been the way things have gone ever since. Our parables have been out of synch with our paradigms. Some people have responded by discarding any notion of the divine, others by claiming that we all deserve ultimate, god-like powers.

Either way, we’ve managed to hold onto at least a part of that old paradigm. For some, especially those of greatest privilege and power, it’s difficult to give up the notion that their dominion over others somehow fits within the divine scheme of things. There are others of us though, who straddle the chasm, who have been somewhat enlightened by the paradigm of equality, for whom there are still vestiges of the old structures. These among us might not intend to be dominant over others, and wouldn’t want to interfere with anyone else’s attempts at self-fulfillment, but they’d just as soon have their rewards on the level of what a duke or a king once enjoyed.

Last fall I was down in Texas on some denominational business. Across the road from the center where I was staying there was a brand new high-end housing development. Each lot was a couple of acres in size, and each home was like a palatial palace or a castle. I was struck by the apparent attempt at creating side by side kingdoms.

Since the Middle Ages, hierarchies have toppled, not because those in power have chosen to make it available to their subjects, but because those below (or paradigmatically below) have demanded their right to also exert power and influence. No one has ever wanted less, only more…of everything. The feudal system of princes and principalities gave birth to artisans, who became entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, reaching for more, created businesses that became industries. Labor formed unions, organizations that reached for more, for the profits industry enjoyed.

Jesus didn’t say that we are all kings and queens. He said the kingdom of heaven is within. It’s two thousand years later, and we still haven’t been able to fully apply his parables to the new paradigm that he was promoting. In all fairness though, we ought to acknowledge that even Jesus wasn’t always clear of ambiguities as he struggled between the two paradigms. In the Good Samaritan he clearly embraced the need to love our neighbor as ourselves and defined our neighbor as every man, woman and child. In the Prodigal Son, on the other hand he emphasized love and forgiveness, but also the old paradigm hierarchy of the primacy of the father. But he was the guy on the cusp, and we’ve had a lot of time to work on things since then.

Yet so far, at each leg of the journey we have failed to embrace love in our struggle for power. The old paradigm was about power. But the new paradigm is about is about cherishing life and those we share it with. There are a couple of areas in which it’s becoming more and more crucial for us to make the shift from the old paradigm to the new paradigm, and we need to engage in the kind of parables that will help us to make that shift.

When the battle over great expectations reached the gender divide during this past century, it didn’t focus on the invaluable significance of women’s contributions to the human experience. It focussed mostly on the power that had not been shared. That doesn’t mean that the power shouldn’t be shared, of course it should. We miss the point though, we lose some irreplaceable depth to our experience when both men and women forsake true egalitarianism–the capacity to both nurture and provide–and instead get lost in the now degenderized quest for power.

Many of us are stupefied by the rate of expansion of commerce and communication and other activity levels in the world. We’re aghast at the work that’s required of our family members and ourselves in order to maintain that expansion. It doesn’t matter where you go these days; you are bound to hear as the number one complaint, "I’m just too busy. Everything is going too fast." That’s the result of the unbalanced male energy that we’re all got caught up in.

I’m certainly not laying the blame for this condition on women or on the feminist movement, nor am I laying it on men. I’m saying that we have to completely let go of an old religious notion that power is godlike in order to embrace a new religious ideal, one that’s only two thousand years old. If humankind wants equality between men and women–and I pray we do–we will need to find a way of honoring more than power. We will need to find a way to honor a new model of divinity in one another and ourselves.

At the beginning of the sermon, I mentioned that this topic is related to the news events of this past week. When six-year-old, Kayla Rolland, was shot and killed by another six-year-old child in Flint, Michigan this week, we witnessed yet another manifestation of our unwillingness to fully step into the new religious paradigm.

Our children are not exempt from, nor are they safe from this unbridled contest for power. It is in the air that they breathe, in every form of their entertainment, in every game store, and in every advertisement that tells them that they are or ought to be number one. Whether it’s in Flint, Michigan or Littleton, Colorado or Montclair, New Jersey, we do not religiously prepare our children for responsible citizenship in this world unless we help them to see that these messages all around them are lies.

Children need our moral guidance; they need to know that they are not independent little deities always deserving of the lion’s share. We do not religiously prepare our children for responsible citizenship in this world unless we help them to see and to understand the new religious paradigm. They need to know, we all need to know, that we are in this together and that survival or salvation is for none of us more than it is for any of us.

We need more parables, more moral narrative that promotes this message. For it is in this message that our hope for the future lies. It doesn’t lie behind the walls of our gated communities, nor in the comfort of our late-modeled Lexus. It doesn’t lie in the ownership of semi-automatic weaponry that encourages us to imagine that we can simply take what we need from others. It lies in our willingness to engage with one another in a true democracy of compassion and connection and equity.

What is the difference between parable and paradigm? At this point in time the difference is in the lag–a two thousand-year lag–between our understanding of the world and the stories we tell our children and ourselves in order to learn how to carry out those understandings. It’s time we create more and more new parables so that we can promote the new paradigm before we are destroyed by the old one.

We need to turn to the prophets of this new paradigm to find guidance and narrative. It’s there in the words of Jesus, and Gandhi, and Martin Luther King. It’s there in the words of feminist theologians like Rosemary Ruether and Sally McFague. The narrative is there; we need to make it our own.

So that men and women of all cultures and races can live as the equals they truly are. So that children can live as children, cared for by those with whom they’ve been entrusted. So that we might make of our parables pathways to the new paradigm, we gather together in religious pursuit of that which yet can be. May our fellowship here, blest by the Spirit of Life and Love, hold us on that path.