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But in this service we come together to acknowledge that, in order for America to have a future, we will first need to find a deep and abiding faith in God. It is this faith that calls and compels us to humility and compassion and concern for the nobodies. It is this faith that helps us discover the kinds of visions that are worthy of our great nation and worthy of the sacrifices we can make. It is this faith that sustains us when we feel like giving up, a faith that comes from trusting in the words of Jesus who said, “Lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.”

— The Rev. Adam Hamilton of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in the Inaugural Prayer Service sermon.

Read a copy of Adam Hamilton's Sermon, "Compassion: Vision, and Perseverance: Lessons from Moses

View the service

By Michelle Boorstein
Washington Post

Bishop Marcus Matthews and other United Methodist leaders joined rows of pastors and priests, imams and rabbis to offer prayers for President Obama at an inaugural worship service Tuesday, their diverse depictions and requests of God seeming to embody the challenge of unifying an America divided on everything including the role of faith.

“To many Americans, we feel like a house divided that cannot stand. We find ourselves divided and desperately longing to find common ground,” the Rev. Adam Hamilton, leader of a 16,000-member Methodist church in Kansas, said in his sermon to Obama and 2,200 invited guests at the inaugural prayer service at Washington National Cathedral. “This may be, this bringing together of our country, a more important issue than anything else we face.”

Several prayers were offered, dramatically, from the center of the nave. Imam Abdullah Khouj, from the Islamic Center of Washington, gave a traditional call to prayer in Arabic just after Cantor Mikhail Manevich of Washington Hebrew Congregation intoned a prayer in Hebrew.

Obama was offered a quilt of prayers to a God described using different names and personalities. Wuerl gave a reading describing humanity as “afflicted in every way but not crushed; perplexed but not driven to despair.” National Association of Evangelicals President Leith Anderson called to “faithful God . . . you are gracious, O lover of souls.”

Yet leaders of organized religion are distinctly aware of the challenges of reaching a changing America. The fastest-growing faith group in the country consists of people who say they are religiously unaffiliated.

Hamilton, the Methodist minister from Kansas, seemed made for this time, this president; he has written on embracing “the gray” area and calls himself a “passionate centrist.” His sermon was a plea for the shaping of some shared priorities, ideally — to his mind — ones revolving around “a deep and abiding faith in God.” It tried to forge U.S. history to scriptural history, weaving the story of Moses seeking freedom for Hebrew slaves with the poem on the Statue of Liberty (“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free . . .”) and with the anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation

Hamilton leads one of the biggest mainline Protestant churches in the nation, but in his sermon he noted that America’s pews are filled with deeply divided people.

Many “congregations often don’t know why they exist, nor do they have a compelling picture of the future that unifies them. Sadly, this feels true of America today,” he said.

He concluded his sermon by speaking directly to the president. “There’s a lot of darkness in the world. Lead us to be a compassionate people, to be concerned for the marginalized," Hamilton said. "Help us rediscover a vision for America that is so compelling that it unites us and calls us to realize the full potential of this country to be a ‘shining city upon a hill.’ And when you feel your lowest, don’t give up. Wait upon the lord; he will renew your strength that you might lead us as a nation to knock holes in the darkness. Amen.”

The service featured other readings and song. The President led a standing ovation after Children of the Gospel Choir sang “Determined to Go On”:  “Say yes! I believe it. / Say yes! I believe it. / For I am determined yes, I am, to go on."