Preaching the Gospel of Obama

If you'd like to get your sermon entered into the Library of Congress, be sure to preach about Barack Obama and how he'll heal the world and stop the oceans from rising:

Inauguration-week sermons would be videotaped to highlight Barack Obama’s rise to power in an unprecedented quest by the Library of Congress to capture this transfer of power for future generations.

The folks at the library’s American Folklife Center are soliciting churches, synagogues, mosques and others for copies of sermons or passionate speeches that focus on the significance of the Jan. 20 inauguration of Obama as the country’s first black president.

The Folklife Center is looking for both video and audio clips, all to be preserved in a public collection that includes interviews after Pearl Harbor and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

“If a historian asks ‘How did Americans react to Obama’s inauguration?’ we’ll have immediate responses to this powerful event,” said Dr. David A. Taylor, head of research and programs at the American Folklife Center.

The “Inauguration 2009 Sermons and Orations Project” marks the first time the library has gathered this sort of material from a U.S. presidential inauguration. Taylor says the project is especially timely — with the inauguration coming a day after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday — and as it ties into King’s reputation as a great orator.

Undoubtedly many a church will waste their valuable sermon time bloviating about Obama, and that's a shame. If churches had been encouraged to preach about the rise of George Bush you just know there would have been all kind of outrage coming from the separation of church and state crowd.