Bishop brings prayer and challenge to Washington

Bishop Felton E. May returned to Washington, D.C., where he served as episcopal area from 1996 to 2004, to preach at Asbury UMC Sunday morning, Jan. 18.

"This is a morning of what was and is going to be," Bishop May said. "We are on tiptoe peering into this new world. Something is going on in the whole constellation of God's universe; it is the Spirit of God in us, moving through us."

Asbury United Methodist Church is one of several in the Washington, D.C. area offering programs, hospitality, food and drink to hundreds of thousands of visitors in the capitol for the inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44^th president of the United States.

Bishop John R. Schol, who followed Bishop May as the current episcopal leader in the Baltimore-Washington area, spoke briefly at the 8:30 a.m. worship service. He offered a pastoral prayer of gratitude for the Obamas, "Let the Obamas' joy be full and sustain them," he said, and "for President and Laura Bush as they transition to a new life".

Preaching to a nearly all black congregation, Bishop May referred often to "us" as a people sustained by God through a history of oppression.

"It is God who holds us, who has sustained us over the years of wickedness and turmoil, God who has protected us in all these ways; sometimes we forget, we think we survive because of our own intelligence, our position, the church we belong to, but it is God."

Bishop May said he was skeptical when he first saw Barack Obama during the campaign. "I said, who's going to follow this young adult, he's got to be kidding. ... But there was something about the way he spoke, a connectedness on a different wave length."

Obama connects with a generation the church should have been communicating with all these years, the Bishop said. "He doesn't identify himself as a born-again Christian, but he communicates genuine Christianity without the labels."

The worship at Asbury UMC was also a celebration of the anniversary of martin Luther King. Bishop May made many linkages between King and Obama.

The first time Bishop May heard Martin Luther King Jr was in Chicago, and King's message: "Either we will learn to live together as sisters and brothers or we will die as fools," stuck with him.

Those days in the 1950s and 60s "we lived in a black and white world," the bishop said. "Now the world is in many colors, and we have moved from the black and white to this multicolored world.

But, he continued, "some of us are still living in black and white, but we serve a rainbow God. That may be the problem with our church."

Bishop May cautioned that the expectations on Obama are very high. "People are dying at the hand of crazies," he said referring to wars in several places, climate change, a devastated environment, a crashing economy and immigration problems, "and we say ‘he (Obama) can clean it up.'"

Bishop May has served since retirement as interim executive of the General Board of Global Ministries, and heading a global health ministry.

Bishop May did not let the audience off without a strong message of their responsibility to make the change happen that is promised in the election of an African-American president.

"We know we can say ‘yes, we can,' but what is standing in my way, to say ‘yes, we will'?" he asked. "Of course we can do it," he said. God has given us the talents and skills and intelligence, but what prevents us from doing it, that keeps us so locked in and uptight?

"Brother president," he concluded. "It is the Gospel of Jesus Christ that you live. We have a God who lifts people out of mire and muck. ... We can claim this world as our own in the name of Jesus Christ, the God I serve with joy."