With the inauguration only days away, the Presidential Inauguration Committee has asked for a back-up third-string pastor to be ready to give the benediction should Luis Leon be pressured out. Sources close to the committee gave the IRD a sneak peak at the written version of a prayer to be given by an unnamed Emergent Church pastor.

The leaked remarks are provided below.

Almighty force of nature. All-encompassing Creator of both the stars and the stump. We feel the burgeoning of the cosmos, ever pressing the buckles and buttons of our straight-jackets of insecurity toward a humble nakedness — stripped before the glory of One.

We lay the fears of American Arrogance before you. The first of the flock. The high, not the Lost. Now the meek and the weak, we seek to relish and embellish at your feet. Not like the carrots that Cain once cast down – fake, artificial, genetically modified — but soft as a lamb, tender and cute as I AM.

But not of the Precious-Moments cast, filled with capitalistic crass. We embrace, instead, your ancient Word. Of the ancient hills. Of an ancient world. We enter now into an eternal forest—a sanctuary of trees and stardust, tigers and badgers, bugs and bungalows.

We twinkle ever on. Illuminating. Booming with a flurry of angelic echoes. We pray that you trap the fury of this earthbound crater in the chains of its own creation.

Whisper it. Speak it. Sing a song.

Now, today, we rejoice not in some man. Some idol to our own power and self-gratification. Some President Barack Obama.

No. We pray not to the Fast Brood Nation, instead orphaning our co-dependent thumbs from the revolver of the remote control. No. We now point ourselves toward the One True Jeopardy Host.

For in this inaugural, in this “peaceful” [note: use air quotes] transfer of power from the people to the president of the United States of America, we recognize and evangelize that without the mysteries of the mountain air that once whisked Elijah and Moses through the oak and the olive tree to sip tea with your son in his hour of need—without the heaving sighs from across the hemispheres and the planetary systems—we are dirt.

Dirt. Filth. Garbage.

Yet there is holiness in the dirt. In everything.

And the spirits will echo on, from Washington to Lincoln to Kerouac to Biden. Despite the imperialistic boom of the blinding, self-congratulating American canon, there is Jesus in the mud and the filth, speaking to us a sweet surprise in solemn whispers.

“I’m in the soap, too.”

Deliver us from self-righteousness. Deliver us from ourselves. Deliver us from the mechanistic industrial palaces we’ve built to shelter our humanity from the monasteries of your majesty. Return us to that deep, quiet, primordial wood.

For thine is the New York theater. Thine is Martha’s Vineyard. Thine is Midwest jello salad. Thine is the Biloxi Beach casino. Thine is the Hollywood Industrial Complex. Thine is the United States of Slavemerica.

Forever and ever.

Amen?

Joseph Sunde is the founder and lead writer of Remnant Culture and is a regular contributor to the Acton Institute and AEI’s Values & Capitalism. This article is used with permission.