If you missed it live, you can watch Rick Warren’s prayer at President Obama’s inauguration here.
As with any prayer at a civic function, I got a bit nervous towards the end. Is he going to pray in Jesus’ name? Will he be polarizing or compromising?
I think he resolved it brilliantly.
He personalized it — “and so I pray in the name of the one who changed my life” — in a way you knew he didn’t presume to speak for you.
But then he universalized the name, by speaking the name of Jesus in a number of different tongues: Yeshua (Hebrew), Isa (Arabic), Jesus (pronounced as they say it in Spanish), and then, finally, the English translation, Jesus (with a hard “j”).
It made me think of the mural in our lobby which has the phrase “Jesus Is Lord” in many of the languages spoken on our planet:
