My brother's/sister's/neighbor's keeper

In her message to the National Prayer Service, the Rev. Dr. Sharon Watkins called the president and the nation to greet the worst of times with loving generosity of spirit:

America’s true character, the source of our national wisdom and strength, is rooted in a generous and hopeful spirit.

"Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, . . . Send these, the homeless, tempest‐tost to me, ..."

Emma Lazarus’ poetry is spelled out further by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

"As long as there is poverty in the world I can never be rich, even if I have a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people in this world cannot expect to live more than twenty‐eight or thirty years, I can never be totally healthy . . . I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. This is the way our world is made."

Often addressing President Barack Obama directly, she ranged across native American myth, Biblical prophets, Muslim scholarship and historic values. She called upon the president to lead us on the right path, and cast these as times that can teach us what we really are as a nation:

A land of abundance guided by a God of abundance, generosity, and hope – This is our heritage. This is America’s promise which we fulfill when we reach out to each other.

The entire sermon is here (.pdf).

Release your women, Southern Baptists

Christian Church president Rev. Dr. Sharon Watkins will in a week be the first woman to give the sermon at the National Day of Prayer service capping the inauguration of the first black president in U.S. history.

Thus Pastor Wade Burleson's timing was exactly right when in his blog this week he hinted at the value of a change in the Southern Baptist Convention's view of women in the pulpit.

Officially, they despise the idea, and the SBC's drive to subjugate women is costing the huge but shrinking denomination in lost churches and member anger.

With introductory hints, Burleson merely reprinted a blog post by Mimi Haddad which appeared at Sojourners.

Haddad recounts how a South Korean megachurch grew to 830,000 members by giving "gifted women teachers" places of leadership. The church's pastor is quoted as responding to the "small size" of churches in another country he visited:

I told them to release their women, but they insist that's not the problem. They ask me, "What’s the key to your church?" I tell them again, "release your women ... . "

The reform-minded Oklahoma pastor does not directly challenge SBC policy but is certainly aware of addressing himself to a church which is foundering on growth problems when he writes:

I have two questions: What fault, if any, do you find in Mimi's biblical reasoning? Has Beth Moore been released within the Southern Baptist Convention?

Might Southern Baptists reasonably ask, without being cursed as apostate, if their fundamentalist leaders were misguided when they generated the self-crippling theologies which bar women from their pulpits?

Rick Warren: Anvil of reconciliation

Frink:

Our first black president-elect, whose campaign was fraught with both false and real issues of religion, has created for his inauguration a faith collage of the culture wars which have racked the nation for four decades.

Together, the voices he has chosen to pray and preach compose the elements of needed and otherwise unlikely dialog toward reconciliation.

Those voices are gay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson, Southern Baptist megachurch pastor Rick Warren, black United Methodist minister Dr. Joseph E. Lowery and Christian Church president Rev. Sharon Watkins.

Now that the table is set, it is clear that Warren's inclusion created both dramatic contradictions and through them an opportunity for greater reconciliation.

Warren, then will be through his presence and in his two-minute prayer the anvil upon which is forged that reconciliation.

Read it all.