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Today, brothers and sisters, I want to preach to you about the teaching of evolution in our public schools.

First, to those of you in this congregation who are educators, bless you. Thank you for your service to our community. Your struggle to seek economic justice for the education of our children is a righteous one and we stand with you and we pray with you.

According to what I read in the newspaper, our superintendent of public instruction, Diane Douglas, bless her heart, has decided to poke her head into our kids’ science classrooms in order to tell their science teachers to tone down all this talk about evolution and the Big Bang theory, and to give creationism a fair shake.

We understand our sister’s heart in this matter. She aches for the fundamentalist creation story to be taught in our schools alongside scientific theories that have survived the rigor of scientific method.

Creationists believe that 6,000 years ago, the world, and all the life on it, was created over a period of seven days. That is one view out of many. The people of our nation believe a wide range of different creation stories.

The first people, the Tohono O’Odham, believe I’itoi brought the Hohokam people to this world from the underworld.

Here in our church, the Tortolita Tabernacle of Love, we believe the creation story is an amalgam of Mesopotamian myths that challenges us to practice loving stewardship of God’s creation.

Just as I would not welcome a high school science teacher like Mr. Higby, here in the second row, sorry to wake you up, telling us what we should be teaching our children in our beautiful Sunday school class, I would never think to force our religious views on Mr. Higby’s students down at the public school. Up all night grading papers again, Mr. Higby?

Our friends in perdition — sorry, I mean our friends in Phoenix — mean well.

They are afraid that our children, once they are exposed to scientific thought, will reject a faith-based approach to living, or worse, that their ancient stories will wither from secular American life.

When people shoehorn their beliefs into the public square, arguing the primacy of one belief over another, they risk igniting the fires of religious tribalism that produced the refugees who founded this secular democratic republic more than 200 years ago.

As the inheritors of this refuge from the Old World’s inquisitions, theological wars and genocidal crusades, let us resolve to preserve the sanctity of our nation’s civic square with the same vigor with which we defend the sanctity of this house of worship.

We are blessed to live under a Constitution that protects our freedom to worship as we wish, and to teach what we wish, from this pulpit.

Glory be to God. And glory be to Thomas Jefferson, the author of the doctrine of separation of church and state, the doctrine that has permitted religion to take root and flourish here.

We are blessed to live in a nation that protects scientific thought, a discipline once considered heretical, from those who would corrupt it. God bless the courageous heretics Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galilei and Charles Darwin. And may God have mercy on their persecutors.

And may God bless ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥â€™s superintendent of schools and may God grant her the wisdom to let science teachers teach science.

And now the little ones, bless their beautiful little hearts, are free to go to their Sunday school classes.

Let us stand together and sing.