It’s hard to be a clean up hitter when there is nothing left to clean up. Everybody has hit a homerun. In this day and in this hour when we are looking for the right words to say, it is good to turn to a prayer that was taught to us, 2000 years ago. When Jesus told His disciples to pray for the kingdom, to pray that the kingdom might come on earth as it is in heaven, this was no pie-in-the-sky, bye-and-bye when you die kind of prayer. It was a prayer that the kingdom might be done here and now, and that His will might be done here and now. When we pray that prayer, we pray give us this day our daily bread; and that prayer cannot be prayed in the first person singular. We have to pray for all of God’s children to have bread. No child should go to bed without bread; no homeless person should despair for lack of bread; and we must not forget the people in the third world on this day when we celebrate America.

I stood at a grass landing strip when a woman tried to give me her baby in Haiti. I was waiting for the piper cub to come and take me back to the capital. She begged me to take her baby. I tried to tell her that I couldn’t, but she kept on saying, “If you don’t take my baby, my baby will die, my baby will die,” and I looked at this child with its swelled stomach and its arms and legs hanging limp, and I knew I couldn’t take the baby. I was relieved when the airplane came into sight and touched down. I brushed by her and ran towards the plane. She ran after me yelling, “Take my baby! Take my baby! Take my baby!” I climbed into the plane. I closed the plexiglass door. She was alongside the plane banging on the door yelling, “Don’t let my baby die! Don’t let my baby die! Don’t let me baby die!” And the engine revved up and we pulled away from her, and into the air. And half way back to Porto Prince it hit me, I heard a voice saying, “I was hungry; did you feed me?” And I said, “But I balanced the budget!” “I was naked; did you clothe me?” “But you don’t understand; I took care of the affairs of state.” “I was naked; did you clothe me? I was in prison; did you visit me? I was a stranger; did you take me in?”

And I knew that I had left the one who was sacred there because God comes to us, to those who are in need, and to this great President and this great Vice President, I say embrace the Lord. As the Lord waits to be embraced in those who are in desperate need, for the Lord blesses the nation that remembers the poor. And as it says in Ezekiel, “As Sodom was destroyed because it neglected the poor, so shall we be if we neglect the poor.”

We must pray for daily bread, but we must pray with the awareness that we cannot live by bread alone. There is a spiritual reality that is even more important than physical bread, and it is the bread that come from the word of God. And this is the word of God, “You are forgiven because the blood has been shed. You have been forgiven because I am a God who says to you, ‘if you will confess your sins, I am faithful and I am just, and I will cleanse you from all unrighteousness.’” And oh, how we need a cleansing in this nation. Not just this person and that person, but each of us needs to be cleansed, needs to be purified. We must ask God to forgive us, and we cannot expect to be forgiven says this prayer unless we are willing to be converted into forgivers. Oh, how we need to become forgivers! Across party lines, across religious lines, across national lines, America is tired of the politics of bile; America is tired with partisan acrimony; America is looking for a new day when people come together and let their sins be blotted out and buried in the deepest sea, and remembered no more. This President is tired of a politics of bile; this speaker of the house is tired of the politics of bile; enough of this accusing, and let us move on together, forgiving each other even as God has forgiven us.

Lastly, if we are to be the leaders that God has called us to be, and all of us here are called to be leaders, then we must indeed be ready to resist the dark forces. And people, there are dark forces. We wrestle not just against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers. There is evil out there. It expresses itself in racism, in sexism, in homophobia, in pornography. And worst of all, in that kind of religion that is arrogantly triumphalistic and dares to say, “If you don’t agree with us, we will persecute you.” There must be an end of this!

Mr. President, Mr. Vice President, let me just say, it’s good to be here. I didn’t think I was gonna be at home ‘cause I belonged to an African-American church, and white people scare me! But in my church you know when you are doing good, ‘cause in my church even when you’re not doing good they let you know. I was half way through a sermon and some lady yelled, “Help him Jesus! Help him Jesus!” And, I knew it wasn’t going well. Likewise, in my church they let ya know when you’re hot because the deacons -- we, we have a Baptist church not like this -- 'cause the deacons sit right up front, and when you say something good, they say, "Preach! Preach!" You know what that’s like. And, and the women, the women in my church, when you are on, they wave at you like this, and they go “Well.” And the men, and the men in my church, when you are pumping on all cylinders, they don’t yell “Amen”, they yell “Keep going! Keep going!” Now you don’t get that on Inauguration Day. They don’t yell, “Keep going!” They yell, “Stop! Stop!”

Once a week, once a year in my church we have a preach-off. See, now you white guys don’t know what that is. That’s when you get a lot of preachers back to back to see whose best, you never say that, you say it’s for the glory of God, but we know what’s its about; we know what it is about. And, and I finish my sermon, and I thought I was good, I mean I don’t want to brag, but I was good. Women were yelling, “Well,” and people were yelling, “Keep going,” and I was. The more I did it, the better I got. And the better I got, the more I did it. I got so good, you’ll understand this Jesse, you’ll understand this, I got so good, I wanted to take notes on me!

And I, I came, I came today, into that sermon and I sat next to my pastor, hit my knee, and he said, “You did alright boy.” I hate it when he calls me “boy”, and I turned to him and I said, “Pastor, your next. You gonna be able to top that?” He said, “Son, sit back, the old man is gonna do you in!” And he did, with one simple line, “It’s Friday, but Sundays comin’! It’s Friday!” He started off nice and soft; you, you always start off soft. “It was Friday, and darkness was in the land, and darkness ruled the land, but that’s because it’s Friday. Yah! Sundays comin’! Friday! Friday! People are saying this, ‘things have been so they shall be, you can’t change nothing in this world, but in it know it’s only Friday!’ Sundays comin’! Friday! Friday! People are saying, ‘You can’t lift the darkness, you can’t bring in the light because, because it’s Friday.” Now, I thought I would get more out of you than that; I’ll give you one more shot. They’re saying, “This administration cannot be an instrument for changing the world for God,” but they don’t know it’s only Friday! Sunday’s comin’. He did that over and over again. When he finished, I was exhausted, and he just ended that sermon by yelling at the top of his lungs, “Friday!” And with one voice the people yelled back, “Sunday’s coming!”