(RNS4-JAN18) President-elect Barack Obama speaks at the Lincoln Memorial for a public Welcome Ceremony on Sunday, Jan. 18, 2009. Religion News Service photo by David Jolkovski.
(RNS4-JAN18) President-elect Barack Obama speaks at the Lincoln Memorial for a public Welcome Ceremony on Sunday, Jan. 18, 2009. Religion News Service photo by David Jolkovski.
(RNS4-JAN18) President-elect Barack Obama speaks at the Lincoln Memorial for a public Welcome Ceremony on Sunday, Jan. 18, 2009. Religion News Service photo by David Jolkovski.
WASHINGTON-As the nation’s capital geared up for Tuesday’s swearing-in, two of the highest-profile-and most controversial-pastors kicked off celebrations for President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration on Sunday (Jan. 18).
Obama’s former longtime pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, held forth at a chapel service at Howard University, while openly gay Episcopal Bishop V. Gene Robinson prayed at a star-studded concert at the Lincoln Memorial.
Wright, whose high-octane and racially tinged sermons became a political drag on Obama’s campaign last spring, hailed Obama’s inauguration as a sign of God’s providence and the fruit of “the faith of Rosa Parks and the blood of Martin Luther King Jr.”
“The Lord stepped into a scrawny black kid’s ability,” said Wright, pastor emeritus of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, in a sermon at the historically black university. “The Lord stepped into his story and gave him a new attitude. The scrawny kid with the big ears said. `Yes we can. I got a new attitude.”‘
After arriving by train in Washington on Saturday night, the Obamas attended church at the city’s Nineteenth Street Baptist Church, where the second pew had been reserved for them. The first family has not yet chosen a church home in the nation’s capital.
Even though Obama was forced to leave Wright’s church and denounce some of his comments as “divisive and destructive,” Wright seemed content on Sunday to heap praise on the man he helped mentor in the Christian faith.
His sermon, about how God can give people a new ability, a new attitude and a new address, used Obama as a prime example. “Barack’s got a new address,” Wright said to an overflow crowd that stood and cheered. “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.”
Robinson, meanwhile, opened an A-list concert at the Lincoln Memorial by invoking a “God of our many understandings.” Robinson had said earlier that he would avoid explicitly Christian terminology in an attempt to be inclusive.
Robinson’s invocation was pre-empted on the exclusive HBO televised broadcast of the concert; some conservatives had complained about the choice of Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the Episcopal Church.
Robinson prayed that Americans may be “blessed” with anger at discrimination and with “freedom from mere tolerance.” Robinson also prayed that God would help Obama “to remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.”
“Please, God, keep him safe,” Robinson prayed for Obama. “We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking far too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe.
“Hold him in the palm of your hand-that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.”‘
Wright has preached at the Sunday chapel service preceding the holiday honoring King for the past five years, said the Rev. Bernard Richardson, dean of the chapel.
“Dr. Wright, I would often say … that you didn’t need an introduction but circumstances have arisen that would cause me to share with this congregation, indeed with the nation, what you have accomplished and who you are,” he said.
For his part, Wright spent little of his almost hour-long sermon to focus on the recent controversy. But he did put ABC and CNN in the category of “haters” near the close of his remarks.
“The Lord blessed me mightily but here come the haters,” he said. “But I’m still here because of his grace and his mercy.”
Robinson’s election as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003 has split the Episcopal Church and brought the wider Anglican Communion to the brink of schism; Robinson endorsed Obama during the Democratic primaries and has advised Obama and gay and lesbian issues.
Robinson strongly criticized Obama’s pick to deliver the invocation at Tuesday’s swearing-in ceremony-California megachurch pastor Rick Warren, who has worked to ban same-sex marriage. Picking the New Hampshire bishop to deliver Sunday’s prayer widely seen as a move to even the deck and quiet critics.
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