Sermon: Six Words
The National Constitution Center has been having a contest, called Address America: Six Words to Inspire a Nation. The rules are thus: write a six-word inaugural speech. All the winners would be submitted to Barack Obama and his speech-writing team. Here’s one of my favorites: These are testing times, study hard. Another favorite: Invest in civic energy. It’s renewable. The winning six-word inaugural speech is, “Divided by fear, united in hope.”
As the week went on, I discovered that there were many threads running through the week. Martin Luther King, Jr. day is Monday. Barack Obama is being inaugurated Tuesday, beginning at 10 a.m. An airplane crash-landed into the Hudson River on Thursday afternoon, and everyone survived. Plus, I’ve been reading Truman, the biography by David McCullough. Add that to the economy and what’s happening in Gaza. And then, to boot, I watched the movie Helvetica last Sunday. Yep, a movie about a typeface. Not a font, as was pointed out to me, that’s what’s on your computer, but a typeface.
So I set about thinking about a six-word inaugural speech for all of the people and events running through my head.
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