Much has been said in the last week about the first opening prayer of the 117th Congress, which was led by Congressman (are we still allowed to say, “Congressman”?) Emanuel Cleaver. The focus has been especially on how he closed the prayer by saying, “Amen and awoman.” While those words are disturbing—expressing an unfamiliarity with the meaning of terms and evidencing an attempt to be culturally relevant—those words were not the most disturbing in the prayer. Consider for a moment what this congressman prayed before those last three words.
The prayer was addressed, in the first two words, to “Eternal God.” That is a great start! There is one who is the Eternal God. The penman of Psalm 90 addressed his prayer: “Lord, You have been our dwelling place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, Or ever You had formed the earth and the world, Even from everlasting to everlasting, You are God” (90:1-2). When Moses asked the name of the God who was sending him to the children of Israel, the heavenly response was, “I AM WHO I AM” (Ex. 3:13-14)—the eternal, existing one! Jehovah (i.e., the “I AM”) revealed, “I am the LORD, and there is no other; There is no God besides Me” (Isa. 45:5). There can be no other God! There is no other God! The prayer began with these two words.
The congressman acknowledged in this prayer the “sacred supremacy” of the eternal God and contrasted God’s nature with man’s “fallible nature.” He went on to declare that he was praying to “the God who created the world and everything in it.” Interesting. He was quoting the Bible here. Did he realize it? When Paul addressed the idolatrous Athenians in Acts 17 regarding their idol to “The Unknown God,” he identified for them the “God, who made the world and everything in it,” who is “Lord of heaven and earth” (Acts 17:24). The congressman went on to address his prayer to Jehovah by quoting from the Bible again in Numbers 6:24-26. The prayer up to this point was Biblical and seemingly pointed to Jehovah God.
But, here is the most disturbing part. He closed with these words: “We ask it in the name of the monotheistic god, Brahma, and god known by many names by many different faiths.” A prayer seemingly addressed to Jehovah God (the only true, living, eternal God) then claims authority for such prayer from the Hindu god, Brahma. Among their dozens of types of gods and their millions of separate gods, Brahma is Hinduism’s “Creator God.” The congressman’s prayer hijacked words from the actual Creator’s book about the actual Creator and addressed them to a false god. This ought to disturb us more than any other part of the prayer. Seven times in Isaiah 45, Jehovah told idolatrous Israel, “There is no other” God. May we hear it today!