An Invocation and a Speech -- more comments

I have been interested in reading the different responses to the various prayers and speeches that occurred over the past week. The responses are as different as the commenters. I heard Chris Matthews speak of the Prayer Service as cold and he couldn't understand what it meant to have a bunch of people who didn't believe the same get together in that fashion. Of course, it was apparent that Chris hadn't listened to Sharon Watkin's very passionate sermon.

I have seen Rick Warren's prayer be called exclusivist and inclusive (or as inclusive as an Evangelical can get).

Brad Hirschfield, a Rabbi, in his On Faith posting, has a very positive take on the prayer. He finds it very inclusive, noting that Warren took pains to make it clear that when invoking Jesus, it was as the one who had changed his life, not everyone's lives. I did find that an interesting choice of wording -- I could see that he was thinking about how this should work out. The fact that he quoted from Jewish and Muslim spirituality as well, shows he was thinking about the gathered community. I might have done it differently, but he was making an effort.

Tellingly, Pastor Warren, when he finally got around to mentioning Jesus (by his Hebrew, Arabic and Greek/English names), described him as "the one who changed my life and taught us to pray". He did not call on Jesus as the one who changes all of our lives, or the one who should do so. He simply shared the facts of his own spiritual journey and the role which Jesus played for him in that journey.

Warren expressed pride and joy in what he believes while choosing words that made it clear that no one else was expected to share that journey with him. And I challenge any person of any faith, including no faith at all, to tell me that we can not all learn about prayer from the poetic words of a document which only some of us consider to be the word of God. That is game-changing rhetoric and should be welcomed by all of us. And President Obama kept pace perfectly.

Hirschfield doesn't mention Joseph Lowery's prayer, one that I found very moving and reflective of the civil rights journey, of which he was such an important player. But his prayer has been widely panned, even as it was praised.

As for the big speech. I know that some on the right feel that Obama unnecessarily critiqued the Bush era. But, hey, when you go into office with not one but many crises to deal with, isn't a little critique in order. Some feel it's unfair -- read impolite -- to criticize George Bush, but it was under his watch that these problems developed.

Interestingly, Hirschfield has his take on the Obama speech as well, one that he sees as being very Jewish. It's not in the wording, of course, because Obama didn't say any thing there about Judaism or Israel.

Hirschfield suggests that Obama was borrowing, consciously or unconsciously, from Deuteronomy, reminding us that we stand on the shoulders of those who went before us.

Like Moses before him, he reminded a new generation that we have much to accomplish and can do so precisely because we stand on the shoulders of ancestors who, while not perfect, achieved so much.

He continues:

President Obama invoked both our collective past and our desire for a better future as he called on Americans to usher in "a new era of responsibility". He reminded us that we must confront the challenges we now face as a nation with both a dream of how the future could be and the memory of past times when we have achieved our collective dreams. That sums up a good portion of Jewish liturgical formation and a fair bit of the Hebrew Bible's great speeches as well.

But as Hirschfield suggests, he hopes others can see in Obama's speech reflections of their own traditions as well.

The point is -- we have a future that doesn't reject the past, but builds upon it. And so, we go forward!