Mayor Daley, friends, let me begin with a point of clarification: When Bill Moyers was press secretary for President Lyndon Johnson, one day at a dinner in the White House at opposite ends of the table, President Johnson said, “Bill, would you say a blessing?”

Bill started the prayer. The President interrupted him and said, “I can’t hear you!” To which Bill said, “With all due respect, Mr. President, I wasn’t speaking to you.”

I am speaking to you.

What is this world coming to? The metaphorical pillars of the universe, the ecological foundations of the Earth, the moral underpinnings within religion, and the political pillars of government are shaking. Or at least that is the perception of many people: instability is expansive in government, race relations, the economic order, matters of sexuality, religion, issues of health care and possibilities of war and peace.

Typically when spiritual recognitions of shaking foundations are made, they illicit the question: What have the righteous been doing? But that inquiry lures us into the past, mires us in old debates, incites guilt, invites us to, as the mayor said, cast blame, which we should not be doing, and offers very little hope for the future. The fact is, most of us know the reasons the foundations have been shaking in our common life and in our neighborhoods. The better question in response to an observation of shaking foundations is: What should we be doing now?

Our agenda is the future not the past. Renewal, not rehearsal, is the order of the day, whether we have no religious affiliation or whether we identify ourselves as Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Jain, Sikh, Buddhist, Hindu, Zoroastrian, Pagan or some other tradition.

After pondering that question, what should we be doing, I call your attention to two necessities, prerequisites, I think, for those who want to stabilize the foundations so essential to our well-being as individuals and a nation: First, is authentic spiritual renewal personally, and that brings us to the subject of prayer. Prayer is important here. But let me remind you that most effective prayer is one of praise, in which we are renewed but also inspired to become at least a part of the answer to the request we have conveyed to God. It comes back to us. We ask God for help and God says, “I have something for you to do.”

So strengthened spiritually, we come to the second observation, and that is that we will have to commit ourselves to innovative forms of inter-religious cooperation, courageous political involvement, which is not a stranger to this city, and compassionate social change. Let me emphasize that our response to these challenges is not to be an “either/or” response: either meditative or actional, either prayerful or behavioral. It has to be both, both and. I might suggest that we be a little bit careful about what we pray for in our conversations with God because whatever we pray for, we may be asked to be a part of the solution to that problem. Prayer is not detachment, rather a part of loving engagement.

Praying for stabilization of shaking foundations will thrust us into the future to form unusual, some would even say heretical, friendships; friendships that defy stereotypes and cross social boundaries that will lead us into a discovery of commonality and, possibly, community. Important in that process is compliance with the constitutionally prescribed relationship between the institutions of religion and the institutions of government. If we fail in those two major endeavors then the future will be even more difficult, if not impossible.

So where do we start? Personally, of course, exploring how the substance of our individual prayers finds expression in the thoughts and words and actions of our lives. Let’s begin by agreeing at least this: that different is not a moral issue. Being different is neither inherently dangerous nor evil. To be sure, not all agree with that assertion, and I hear from those people all the time. But that’s no surprise. Our own American history teaches us that relating to people who are different from us, and moving into engagements with other religions, always, always have prompted protest. Right now, Muslims in this land are experiencing precisely what Jews and Roman Catholics experienced previously in this land.

The Church of St. Peter in New York City stands only two or three blocks from the bitterly controversial site on which Muslims want to build an Islamic study and community center. In 1785, plans to build St. James Church, the first Catholic parish in New York City, met with bitter hostility and opposition from people who did not want Roman Catholics a part of this nation. But this troubling tendency has an even longer history than that. Within Christianity and Judaism, every time a religious leader has called for a more universal faith and inclusion within the fellowship of God’s people, many have complained angrily and others have reacted negatively and vigorously. Thankfully, movement toward inclusion seems as inevitable as it is objectionable.

At the heart of our corporate religious traditions is a kind of divine propulsion moving us toward a larger fellowship, characterized both by greater diversity and more meaningful unity. Our nation has passed effective laws to assure acceptance of everybody and we have the first amendment to the Constitution, yet there is a lot of work to be done. Inclusion is a religious mandate as well as a civil necessity. Judaism has equated acceptance of the stranger with acceptance of God. Islam understands diversity as God’s gift to us in order that we may know one another. In Christianity, the legacy of Jesus’ ministry and the gift of God’s spirit catapulted a small sect in Jerusalem into an embrace of all kinds of people and a religion with an international vision. In other words—and this is important—people in diverse religions who engage each other and seek a better fellowship and community do that not despite their respective faiths, but because of their respective faiths.

Inter-religious work is difficult beyond measure. It requires the discipline of prayer, careful listening, and an honest examination of each of our own traditions. That’s hard. But we dare not critique the traditions of others without looking carefully at the lineage of our own faith. Painful though essential in each of us is acknowledging that parts of our religious traditions contribute to division and spark hatred rather than strengthen reconciliation and solidify cooperation. Some of our traditions affirm a type of religious imperialism that even threatens democracy.

I grew up in a Christian fundamentalist home. As a young minister at a denominational meeting I heard a man pray, “God, I thank you that I’m ignorant and I hope you will make me ignoranter.” It was the most quickly answered prayer in the history of religion! The weight of the world, saving the world, was heavy on my young shoulders though I didn’t have any real idea of what the world was and what saving meant. But I did as I was told, pledging to abstain from drinking alcohol and going to movies on Sunday. We thought that solved everything. I listened to warnings about the immorality of dancing. Oddly, sex never seemed to be a problem in our tradition unless it looked like dancing. So I repented of sins that I had never committed.

It has been a long but meaningful journey from that wonderful fundamentalist home to a position of leadership with the Interfaith Alliance. I still appreciate the tradition from which I came but I can be honest about the weaknesses in that tradition. And I can tell you, without reservation, that my own personal faith has grown most in interaction and cooperation with people of from other religious traditions. So I pray that our nation, now the most religiously pluralist nation in the world, will take a journey similar to my personal pilgrimage and learn that melding our diversity into cooperative ventures will make all of us stronger. Not weaker, stronger. Difference is not a moral category.

Second, let us agree to respect each other mutually and to recover civility in our words and actions. Now that’s not necessarily a religious word, civility. But it is synonymous with spiritual practices of reverence, respect, and sensitivity to other people that throb at the heart of true religion. Civility is a primary value among people who love democracy. The art of government involves people holding contradictory points of view, interacting with each other in a fervent search for common ground that identifies doable government policies and contributes to the public’s welfare. Destructive to democracy are people convinced that they are so right and others are so wrong that thoughtful debate is inappropriate. We know the consequences of that: a seriously divided nation and a government in gridlock.

But how do we do it? How do we recover civility?

An essential step in that recovery requires practicing patriotic rather than partisan politics. I know the value of partisan politics. But it is time, my friends, for us to have leaders who are interested in doing what is good for the nation and not just what is good for a particular party. Next is the necessity of depoliticizing religion and dereligifing politics. When political partisanship becomes the criterion for evaluating a person’s religion, the criterion tells us that we’re in trouble religiously and politically. We don’t need more God in our politics. We need more humanity, compassion, and common sense. Most of the people who talk so much about God in their politics and voice their desire to make the nation more of a theocracy are individuals aspiring to be Theo. I would suggest also that we reclaim the meaning and importance of religious freedom. It is indeed the contributor to the vitality of religion in our nation and it also contributes to the vitality of democracy.

It is so great to see diversity in this room. I remember a mayor’s prayer breakfast in Fort Worth, Texas, the first that occurred in that city. The invited guest speaker was a Christian evangelist. The program offered no recognition of any other religion and no respect for religious diversity. Along with another pastor, I was a senior minister in that city, we went to visit the planners of the program and the chair of the program committee seemed absolutely baffled when I asked why is this so exclusively Christian. And he said, “I don’t understand the question.” And I said, “Well, let me tell you, for starters the first song is “Onward Christian Soldiers.” And he said, I promise, “I didn’t know that was a Christian song.”

There is a new wave of religious majoritarianism marching across our nation and it has to be checked. A new emphasis on rights for the minority is crucial. Unless every religion has the right to build a house of worship, no religion has that right.

“Come let us reason together.” According to Isaiah, those are words from God. I love that divine invitation. It’s in a passage that I misunderstood for many, many years. I thought the passage was about assurance, a statement like Browning’s, “God is in his heaven and all is right with the world.” But I learned that the statement that I took as assurance was, in fact, a statement of irony. God said, according to Isaiah, “Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow.” What a promise, I thought. But that’s not what the text is about. In the Hebrew, you realize the text is asking, God is asking: Do you think that? You really think that’s the way it is? Come on; let’s reason together, people. Change doesn’t occur without change. If you want to change, you have to embody change yourself and you have to work for change among others. The task is a big one. I hope you will not be intimidated by it.

My mind this morning goes back to a day early in my ministry, just after I graduated as a seminary student. I stood with a small group of people in the Rose Garden of the White House when Lyndon Johnson was president of the United States. At that time the president was grappling with the difficulties related to passing meaningful civil rights legislation. As if it were yesterday, I remember looking into President Johnson’s eyes and hearing him say to those of us gathered there, “You can make a difference in how this struggle for civil rights turns out. You write the Sunday school lessons and the lessons for Hebrew school. You are in involved in the politics of your local communities. You preach the sermons and you offer the prayers that will alter other people’s actions and thoughts. You can help us in this civil rights struggle.” Those poignant, unforgettable thoughts experienced in the Rose Garden that day are in my mind now as I look at you, a group of people, professionals, each of you a leader in your own right, people willing to meet for a prayer breakfast on a Friday morning, individuals capable of expertise with a wide range of endeavors. This nation needs you. Your prayers will help. But if your prayers lead you to become at least a part of the solutions to the problems about which we are praying, we will make a lasting difference for good. And with that recognition in mind, my prayer is simple: so let it be, dear God, so let it be.