I thank a loving and caring God who has allowed me to witness this watershed moment.
Like all Americans of good will, I say a prayer that a wise God will continue to guide and bless our new president as he navigates the ship of state through dangerous and challenging seas.
But I know too, as always, that the God on whom we depend did not bring us this far along the way to abandon us.
And, I know that what we are about to witness is an omnipotent God using his faithful and trusting children to continue the labor of bringing the Beloved Community to reality here on earth.
Somebody I used to work with commented that he was opposed to the Martin Luther King holiday, not because of Dr. King’s work or his color, but because Dr. King was a clergyperson and we already had too many religious holidays.
I did not believe it – not so much because the concern might not have been valid, but because I had heard the same person use the “n” word too many times.
But it is worth noting that Martin Luther King Day is indeed a holiday named for a clergyperson, a pastor from Atlanta.
But it is not for his pastoral work that we remember Dr. King, but instead for his prophetic work.And with all that happens since can we doubt that there was indeed a lot of truth in his message?
So many are too young to remember what the world was like sixty, fifty, or even forty years ago.And some of us who were around were too geographically removed from the worst of Jim Crow to appreciate its horror, its ongoing belittlement of so many of God’s children without acceptable reason.
But there were other injustices, ongoing belittlements, going on and Martin Luther King knew it.
Dr. King not only made certain that all America, indeed all the world, knew of America’s, indeed the world’s, injustices and linked Jim Crow to evils facing peoples of all races and ethnicities.
Our President-elect has received a lot of grief from two sides on his choices of clergypeople to participate in inauguration ceremonies.His choice of Rev. Rick Warren raised a lot of concerns.Some people seemed to think that he was going back on what he had run on.
Cathleen Falsani, religious columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, writing for sojo.net, puts things in good perspective, noting that the inventory of clergy participating included the first openly gay Episcopal bishop, the first female president of the Disciples of Christ, the female president of the Islamic Society of North America, three rabbis, Bono, and a Hawaiian shirt-wearing mega-church pastor.
This is the first post-Billy Graham inauguration.I don’t know how much the talking heads on television and radio will make of that, but it does seem worthy of note.And the choices made this year seem to provide good criteria, not only for future inaugurals but also for other civic events, large and small.
And, of course, who prays for the President? Well, it should be all of us.
I am not a theologian nor am I an ethicist. I am just a guy who is a member of a Protestant congregation and goes to church and asks questions sometimes.
