Rev. Petersen of Newton (Presbyterian)

Inspired by the Inauguration 2009 Sermons and Orations Project of the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center, the Globe invited local clergy to e-mail the texts of inauguration-related sermons and prayers for posting here on the Articles of Faith religion blog. You can find all of the submissions by clicking on the Inauguration Sermons category in the blog’s right rail.

Sermon by the Rev. Rodney L. Petersen, executive director of the Boston Theological Institute and moderator of the Presbytery of Boston (PCUSA), delivered to the inter-denominational group at the Scandinavian Living Center in Newton:

"Reverse the Curse.

Commonly reserved for Fenway Park, this made-in-Boston slogan might carry into our national life. With the election of Barack Obama to the presidency, the United States has “reversed the curse” of 40 years ago.

It was 40 years ago, in 1968 that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy were assassinated – and the riots of Chicago and other cities ensued. In 2008 Barack Obama delivered an acceptance speech in that same city of uncommon eloquence to the presidency of the United States of America, after an election that might have been a global mandate for leadership.

40 years of wandering in the wilderness has been ended with the challenges of full participation in national political life for Americans of African descent. While political pundits are filling radio talk shows, editorial pages and blogs, we might think how to evaluate theologically the election of Barack Obama as President of the United States, a man with half brothers in Kenya and school mates in Indonesia.

First, his election is certainly a part of an ongoing “rights movement” in western culture that has now caught up the world. Without going all the way back to the struggle of the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Reform, this movement has certainly included such benchmarks as the American Declaration of Independence, the Civil War between the northern and southern states of the United States and the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Such names as John Witherspoon, William Lloyd Garrison and Jacques Maritain and Charles Malik are names that carry a certain degree of theological resonance with each of these events in the evolution of human rights consciousness.

Apart from human rights as a domain in itself, there is, second, the issue of their promotion through national governance, and this with respect to the careful balance in our national polity through checks and balances, of the interests of states’ rights versus national policy. Here, ever since the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, compounded by the programs of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, the rights movement has been promoted by means of national policy standing in contrast to states’ rights. The governance of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, while not necessarily in opposition to those rights in themselves, has bent toward their promotion or inhibition by states rather than by centralized programming from Washington. While we are a long way from Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion and its caution concerning human cupidity, we are not distant from scandal and misrule.

Then there is the question of religion in national life, seen pointedly in Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama and with reference to his faith. Powell’s reply to the question of Obama’s faith: “Well the correct answer is, ‘He’s not a Muslim, he’s a Christian, he’s always been a Christian’. But the really right answer is, ‘What if he is?’ Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer is ‘No’, that’s not America.” This exchange exemplifies and challenges prevailing civil religion in the United States even more so than as recognized by Will Herberg in 1955, drawing in Catholics and Jews into what had once been Protestant hegemony. The likely place for further treatment of this topic will come in Obama’s Inaugural Address, January 20, 2009 – and this seems more interesting than even the Red Sox victory in the World Series of 2004, 86 years after 'the curse of the Bambino.'"