WHERE THE RUBBER MEETS THE ROAD

By Edwin Cooney

'Heavenly Father, we come before you today to ask your forgiveness and to seek your direction and guidance.  

We know Your Word says, 'Woe to those who call evil good,' but that is exactly what we have done.  

We have lost our spiritual equilibrium and reversed our values.  

We have exploited the poor and called it the lottery.  

We have rewarded laziness and called it welfare.

We have killed our unborn and called it choice.  

We have shot abortionists and called it justifiable.  

We have neglected to discipline our children and called it building self-esteem.  

We have abused power and called it politics.  

We have coveted our neighbor’s possessions and called it ambition.  

We have polluted the air with profanity and pornography and called it freedom of expression.  

We have ridiculed the time-honored values of our forefathers and called it enlightenment. Search us, Oh God, and know our hearts today; cleanse us from every sin and set us free. Amen!'

The prayer you just read was sent to me by two friends believing that it was issued by the Reverend Billy Graham, who turned 94 on Wednesday, November 7^th, one day after a majority of Americans had reelected Barack Obama President of the United States.  The prayer asking God’s forgiveness for America’s sins appears to be an indictment of not only our sins, but of the social and political factors or forces represented by the outcome of our politics.

One doesn’t have to read between the lines of the above to gather that the author of this prayer believes that we once had high moral values and have allowed them to be corrupted by our appetite for the material and the carnal.  Clearly the author of this prayer believes that:

We were once morally directed by principled forefathers who have since been replaced by ambitious politicians; we once had stellar human values to a greater degree than any other people on God’s green earth; and that the values expressed by the outcome of the 2012 election represent the yelpings of a craven materialistic and Godless people who lack both standards and principles.

What the utterer of this prayer doesn’t appear to acknowledge is incredibly revealing:

That our forefathers wrote the tolerance of human slavery into Article 1 of the Constitution by valuing congressional constituents who were Indian or black as "three fifths of a white male" rather than as children equal in God’s sight; that as late as 1845, another generation of Americans justified our destruction of Native Americans as our “manifest destiny;" and, most important of all, that we’ve spent the better part of the last 112 years granting God’s children of color, children with disabilities, children of lesser financial means, children of the foreign born, and so on, the rights and the equities that George Washington, Patrick Henry, Ben Franklin and Thomas Jefferson (just to name a few) should have granted them back in 1787 and 1788 when the Constitution was written and ratified.

One doesn’t have to be religious to fully acknowledge that our societal mores have a direct link to those things the most influential among us vote for and adapt as our national policy.  Still, it’s equally true that where religion and politics intersect is where the rubber meets the road.

Thus, a prayer of this eloquence invariably has a special meaning if it is uttered by a man of the Reverend Billy Graham’s stature.  However, the real question is whether it should!  One of the major forces that governed the Protestant Reformation beginning in the Sixteenth Century was the insistence that all sincere prayers to the “almighty” are created equal.  Hence, neither the Catholic, Protestant, nor Jewish clergy possesses a monopoly over you and me on what is sincere or worthy of God’s attention.

What makes the above prayer even more intriguing is that it actually didn’t come from either the pen or the heart of the Reverend Billy Graham.  It was offered to the Kansas State Legislature on Tuesday, January 23^rd, 1996 by Pastor Joe Wright of Topeka Kansas.  It was initially called “The Prayer of Repentance.”  Since then it has been attributed to the late Paul Harvey as his “on air prayer” and finally to Billy Graham.

As one who seeks to be both Christian and authentic, I find this sort of misattribution to be both presumptive and disturbing.  As I see it, every generation and every nation has sinned since the beginning of time.  Modern America has no monopoly on sin.  In short, all sins are created equal.

Hence, I believe that a prayer, offered by even the most saintly among us (such as Billy Graham or Pope Benedict XVI) has no more weight than that offered by the humblest parent or the most innocent child!

What say you?

RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED,

EDWIN COONEY