Good Morning, America!

January 18, 2009
The Reverend Barbara Fast  

Good Morning, America!   This Tuesday is your Inauguration Day, 2009. Your 44th President, Barack Obama, will take the oath of office and swear on the Bible Lincoln used at his 1861 inauguration, “to preserve, protect and defend” your constitution. 

America first let me say ‘thank you, thank you, thank you’ for existing! For being the ground on which I was born, and the grounding of the many freedoms which I enjoy.  You are a land of opportunity.

I know, even though I complain about what you haven’t been, and that, as I discovered in my adolescence, you never were perfect, and I admit that I lay so many expectations on you, instead of owning, since I am your citizen, that I am responsible for the state of our democracy. (I always vote though, you have to give me that).

Speaking as a straight white English speaking person I have enjoyed the privilege to be able to take my civic, political and cultural inheritance for granted most of the time.   Speaking as a woman, 2nd generation child of immigrants, I know there are still many aspects of your public life yet to be perfected.  It is hard work and most of us retreat to the sanctuary of our insular comfort zones.  Isn’t that why Sunday Morning is the most segregated one, America?

I know that you never said you were perfect!  You were born “ in order to form a more perfect union.” For all! Which is taking some kind of time.

I know, as your beloved Abraham wrote “the arc of the universe is long, and it bends towards justice” when he witnessed the sacrifice of so many, in order to preserve the union of states and end the enslavement of black human beings.

He also said that you are “A government of the people, by the people and for the people.” (If might mention that he got those words from the writings of Unitarian minister and abolitionist Theodore Parker.) 

So thank you for existing, thank you for so many freedoms, especially for freedom of speech and assembly and from the establishment of religion (which has fostered our flourishing diversity) Thank you for not only enduring so much talk but for emerging the stronger for such debate. 

On a personal note, America, I wanted to point out that in one of your houses of worship, on Adelaide Avenue, Providence, RI, once Unitarian, now an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, has a stained glass window with a quote from your beloved Abraham:

“When any church shall inscribe over its altar as its sole qualification for membership: thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul and with all thy mind and thy neighbor as thyself, that church will I join with all my heart and with all my soul.”

Abraham Lincoln never joined a church.   But those who founded that congregation found within Mr. Lincoln’s life a legacy of inspiration, of moral leadership and of courageous sacrifice.

FYI America, the Bible being used is not Lincoln’s personal Bible. While, many people have used the bible to enslave, which purpose gives some reasonable and compassionate people cause to spurn the book as inherently flawed and dangerous, others read it for its wisdom and its call to act justly and love courageously.  You and I know America, I feel we are family since I am a part of you, that neither you nor the Bible, nor any institution, is good or bad, but we the people use it for such ends and make it so.

Lincoln had his own Bible and its pages show much use.   Lincoln spoke of the Book this way: “Take all of this book upon reason that you can, and the balance on faith, and you will live and die a better man." In it he found strength, consolation, guidance, clarity.

America, are you happy?  President Elect Obama is smart, steady, inspirational, devoted to you, and prepared for the sacrifice the job requires. The office is a demanding one even in good times, and these times are troubled.

Some suggested that he was not black enough, but leave it to white opponents and pundits to remind America that he is black.  He faced that challenge, unpacked the race conversation.   His analysis, his capacity to appreciate all you are America, to value the complexity of the experience of black and white Americans, in part because of his story, changed this attempt to stall the future dreamed of by Dr. King and worked for by so many and moved us onto a new and hopeful place.
 
He wrote:  “We cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.”

He spoke of his “…firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.”

And then he brought us back to scripture, that echoes our Lincoln of Adelaide Avenue in Providence:  “In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.”

America, let me thank you for your ability to be perfectible. Maybe you read the story about Kristin Rothballer, 36, in the New York Times?  How the morning after the election, as she traveled a train to work, after she kissed her female partner goodbye, how a black woman came and sat next to her and said that she was sorry that Proposition 8, the amendment to ban gay marriage in California, looked like it was going to pass.  She described how they grabbed hands and she said to the black woman  ‘Well, I really want to congratulate you because we have a black president and that’s amazing.’ 

Then they talked about how they were talking and then Kristen Rothballer apologized the black woman for slavery.   She told the reporter, “For two strangers riding a train to Oakland to have that conversation about race, it wouldn’t have been possible if Obama hadn’t been elected… to say to a stranger on the train, ‘Hey, I’m sorry about slavery,’ that just doesn’t happen.”

Lincoln said, “If slavery is not wrong, then nothing is wrong.”
 
I am so sorry about slavery. 

We have come a long way.   America can you believe it? You will swear in a black president! America, he is black and he and his family are so beautiful, body and soul, it just makes me want to cry! 

Can I get an Amen!

The Bible Obama will swear upon was used only that one time when the risk of a divided nation was grave.   Lincoln ended that first inaugural speech with these words:

Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.
The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave
to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land,
will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, 
as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. 

America, you are older now. The chords of memory, the wounds of slavery and racism call us to more talking and walking to strengthen the bonds of our shared future.  We have a long way to go.

America, the whole world, needs not just your grudging participation, but your leadership for the very survival of our planet.
 
We the people are imperfect. We are not Abraham. We are adults and children, women and men, black and white, gay and straight and we love you, America. We bless you and we seek your blessing for ourselves, our lives, our loves, and our futures.

We are still struggling to form a more perfect union.

This inauguration is about the U. S. - us.  “We ,the people.”  “E pluribus Unum.  Of the many one.”  This inauguration is about us.

My prayer for you, America, is a prayer for us. May this President be our stand in, our stand for, the one who calls us to greatness, calls forth the angels of our better natures, calls up his story as our story, and our story as our neighbor’s story, and thus our mutual hopes become our shared responsibilities.

America, your blessing is that you are and ever will be incompletely perfected. That is as it was intended. If you ever became perfect, you would begin to decay.  The genius of your intriguing come hither harsh vitality is your promise of unceasing future possibility, unyielding hope for all.  The only condition for becoming an American is a deep desire to change the imperfection of what was has been, into the larger vision of what might be.   It is the promise that gives us hope and in it we place our faith as one people.

I used to stand at the Lincoln memorial when I was in school in your capital and I would contemplate the inscription on the wall from the second inauguration.

“ With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation's wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan -- to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.”

So America I close with the words from your beloved son Martin, our Rev. Dr. King. His last sermon, on behalf of sanitation workers striking in Memphis, April 3, 1968, the night before he was killed,

“Let us rise up with a greater readiness. Let us stand with a greater determination. Let us move on in these powerful days, these days of challenge to make America what it ought to be, We have an opportunity to make America a better nation. And I want to thank God, once more, for allowing me to be here with you.” 

America, you are so beautiful!  


Copyright Barbara Fast   2009