Pastor of Obama’s former church in Atlanta

This may be the promised moment, but the Promised Land is still across the Jordan River, an impassioned Rev. Otis Moss III told an enthusiastic crowd of more than 700 people Thursday during the annual observance of the Emancipation Proclamation.

Moss, pastor of the Chicago church that was a centerpiece of campaign criticism directed at President-elect Barack Obama, adopted a historical parallel used first by Obama: The way that Moses relinquished leadership after leading the Jews to the edge of the Promised Land, leaders now are emerging who came of age long after the Civil Rights struggles.

“This moment is bigger than me and bigger than you,” said Moss, pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ. “It is about what God is doing in our lives.”

Organized by the Atlanta NAACP, the “Jubilee Day” event each year commemorates Lincoln’s order on Jan. 1, 1863 that freed — at least on paper — slaves in the Confederacy. Attendees jammed into the Cascade United Methodist Church Thursday heard handclapping, foot-stomping gospel, organizational appeals and prayers — all peppered with rafter-raising preaching.

Much of it had an excited political flavor.

“Nineteen days from now — 19 days — someone who looks like us will hold up his hand and take an oath as the president of the United States,” said Rev. Herman “Skip” Mason, pastor of Greater Hopewell C.M.E. Church.

Moss, the featured speaker, did not refer to the political fury last spring that was pegged mostly to the church’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. That controvery eventually led Obama to quit the church in which his daughters were baptized.

Moss, a Morehouse College graduate who was previously pastor of the Tabernacle Baptist Church in Augusta, focused on the long, often painful path of American blacks from chains to the White House.

“We no longer will see the world the way we used to,” he said. After reading the first several verses of the Book of Joshua, Moss made a tongue-in-cheek connection to the present. “Joshua is forced to take leadership during the worst economic period in the history of Israel.”

Those woes prove that the nation had not passed into some “post-racial” era in history, he said. Reciting a list of problems — insufficient healthcare, a struggling economy, poverty and illiteracy — he argued that the new generation has its hands full.

“Black suffering has not disappeared,” he said. “It is a promised moment. It is not the promised land.”

He approvingly noted the text’s emphasis on the plural.

“This is Jewish literature — it is the collective story that is sacred,” he said. “If one person crosses over the Jordan, that is not good enough. Everybody must cross over the Jordan.”

He repeatedly linked past and present, noting some Civil Rights leaders in the audience, including U.S. Rep. John Lewis. “We must never forget the Moses generation. This moment did not fall out of the sky.”

He recited a litany of leaders who led the way.

“These people died so we could be where we are. How dare we act as if we deserve this all by ourselves?”

The hard work is not over, Moss said.

He brought the cheering crowd to its feet with a rhythmic, sixty-second history that led inexorably from Moses, Joshua, Deborah and Gideon, through the kings, the prophets, Jesus, Paul, the Reformation, and the slave embrace of the church up to Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama.

That long march is not over, he said. “God is calling us to pass this thing on.”