A Day for a Praise Song

I watched an inspiring spectacle today. You probably did, too.

Barak Hussein Obama, son of an African father and a white American mother, raised sometimes in Indonesia and sometimes by his single mother and sometimes by his grandparents, with an Arabic-sounding name in a time of war and terror, was inaugurated as the 44th President of the United States of America.

It was only forty-five years ago that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a brilliant man with an earned Ph.D. from Boston University who had followed his sense of calling back to the pulpit of a black Baptist church in the deep, segregated south, had stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and told the world, “I have a dream.”

At that time segregation and discrimination were legal and pervasive throughout much of the United States. Many otherwise good-hearted white people sincerely believed that those of African descent were somehow inherently inferior.

And now we have elected an African-American as our President, choosing him over a white man who was universally acknowledged to be not only a war hero but a very good and decent man, even though less than one in five Americans is African-American.

How could this happen in such a short time?

I believe the answer is in the sermon by Dr. King that I read in church this past Sunday, and in the incredible way millions of oppressed people responded to it. Dr. King’s sermon was called, “Loving Your Enemies.” His main point was that oppression and injustice must be met by love. Retaliation only creates a vicious downward spiral of destruction. Dr. King challenged Negroes (as he used the language of the time) to try Jesus’ method of countering hate with love. Millions responded. In ways that are only becoming clear in the lens of history, the mass application of Christian principles turned this country almost upside down in just one generation.

Today is a time to celebrate. Not to celebrate the victory of one politician over another, or one political party over another. It’s time to celebrate the victory of a principal, won by another principal. The first principal is Galatians 3.28, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” The second principal is love.

It is indeed a day for a praise song.