JustASC

My brother called me excitedly to say that Rick Warren recited the Shema in his inauguration invocation. Here’s the quote:

Almighty God, our father, everything we see and everything we can’t see exists because of you alone. It all comes form you, it all belongs to you, it all exists for your glory. History is your story. The Scripture tells us, ‘Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one’ and you are the compassionate and merciful one and you are loving to everyone you have made.

Technically, he was quoting  Deut. 6-4. I appreciated the Hebraic shout-out, but to me it sounded like a bit of a non sequitur (note the odd transition between what the Scripture tells us followed by “you are the compassionate and merciful one…”).

It didn’t bother me that Warren invoked Jesus in his penultimate paragraph (right before the Lord’s Prayer). It wasn’t as obnoxious as Franklin Graham’s prayer at George W. Bush’s first inaugural, when he prayed  for all Americans to “acknowledge you alone as our Lord, our Savior and our Redeemer. We pray this in the name of the Father, and of the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

What Warren said was, “I humbly ask this in the name of the one who changed my life-Yeshua, Esa, Jesus, Jesus-who taught us to pray” the Lord’s Prayer. Warren was speaking personally –”the one who changed my life.” I think it appropriate for any clergy to acknowledge his or her own beliefs, so long as he or she doesn’t presume those beliefs are shared by everybody else.

Steve Waldman had a good piece in the Wall Street Journal on Friday on how the inaugural prayer has gone “from pluralistic to solely Protestant”:

In fact, if one looks at the roster of clergy and the prayers they gave over the past 70 years, it appears that America has actually become less inclusive and pluralistic over time.

Including the two prayers at Barack Obama’s inaugural, 12 prayers will have been delivered at inaugurations since 1989. All of them will have been delivered by Protestants. By contrast, in the previous 48 years, fewer than half of the prayers were offered by Protestants. Every president prior to George H.W. Bush had a Catholic and more than half also had a Jewish or Greek Orthodox clergyman.