Orchard Ridge United Church of Christ

March 24, 2008
By Phil Haslanger

And you thought Jeremiah Wright said some inflammatory things?

Wright is the now-retired pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago whose rock-em sock-em style of sermons has put Barack Omama in a bit of a bind in his run for the Democratic presidential nomination. Obama is a member of that congregation and Wright has been his pastor.

The focus in the mainstream media has been on parts of various sermons by Wright saying things like the experience of blacks living in a society that has exploited and then excluded them over centuries would lead them to cry out not “God bless America” but “God damn America.”

Wright — widely regarded as one of the best African-American preachers of our era — is hardly the first to use vivid rhetorical images in his sermons. And, after all, one of the things preachers do is to call people – and nations – to account.

Try a few of these on for size:

“Listen … you rulers …should you not know justice? You who hate the good and love the evil, who tear the skin off my people and the flesh off their bones, who eat the flesh of my people, flay their skin off them, break their bones in pieces, and chop them up like meat in a kettle, like fish in a cauldron.”

That came from the Jewish prophet Micah writing in the eighth century BC. He might have been able to get a spot on talk radio, but he surely would not wind up as a speech writer in a modern political campaign.

Another one of those famous prophets of the Hebrew scriptures, Isaiah, was not really writing about Washington in the opening chapter of his book. He was talking about Jerusalem, the capital of his own nation: “How the faithful city has become a whore! … Your princes are rebels and companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts.” I suspect that the princes and their companions tried to keep their distance from old Isaiah.

On the eve of the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq war, you might think that some liberal preacher came up with these lines, but actually, it was Jeremiah (the original prophet of the seventh century BC, not the Chicago pastor of 2008): “How can you say, ‘We are wise, and the law of the Lord is with us,’ when in fact, the false pen of the scribes has made it into a lie … They have treated the wound of my people carelessly, saying, ‘Peace, peace’ when there is no peace.”

Those great old prophets could be pretty divisive at times, pitting the Israelites against their enemies. Surely their listeners cheered them on when they railed against the Babylonians or the Egyptians or the Philistines or other foes.

But their listeners might also been quick to label that original Jeremiah a traitor when he said things like this: “Conspiracy exists among the people of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. They have turned back to the iniquities of their ancestors of old, who refused to heed my word … I am going to bring disaster upon them they cannot escape; though they cry out to me, I will not listen to them.”

The good citizens of Israel were probably not big fans of Amos, either. Just image if they could watch this clip on You-Tube: “Strike the capitals until the thresholds shake and shatter them on the heads of all the people; and those who are left I will kill with the sword; not one of them shall flee away, not one of them shall escape.”

OK, so that was from days gone by. Once Jesus came, all was sweetness and light, right? At least that was Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, suggested during a discussion about the Obama/Wright flap on CNN Friday evening. He said the messages in Wright’s sermons were at odds with the tone of what Jesus preached.

Perkins must have skipped over the 23rd chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus is not exactly gentle with the religious leaders of the Temple who were collaborating with the Roman occupiers of Israel.

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites,” he begins, going on to call them “blind guides … blind fools … whitewashed tombs … snakes … brood of vipers.” He finishes with a flourish: “Upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth.”

My point is simple. Jeremiah Wright was standing in a long tradition of prophetic preaching when he stood in the pulpit at Trinity UCC, a large and dynamic congregation in Chicago. He used blunt language to make his points, to stir up his listeners. The prophets of the Hebrew scriptures and the sharp words of Jesus in the New Testament are fine red meat rhetoric, but their words did not stop there. They were aimed at reforming societies and institutions that had gone off track – something that inevitably happens to every human institution.

Is it discomforting to hear someone cry out ‘God damn America”? Sure it is. That is precisely the point. Wright was giving voice to the frustration of black Americans and using prophetic rhetoric to do that.

Of course preaching that draws on the cadence and imagery of Biblical prophets does not sell well in a political campaign where American flags are always the preferred symbol.

Nor, it should be noted, does Wright’s confrontational and provocative style of addressing the racial divide in America at all match that of Obama, who has stressed over and over that his approach is to try to cross racial divides and get the country working together instead of at cross purposes.

Personally, I’m a whole lot more comfortable with Obama’s style than with that of Wright. But if I listen to Wright in the context of the Biblical traditions that are woven into the fabric of the experience of his church, there is no reason to run away from his words as if they were some form of drunken hate speech. Instead, there is some value in hearing the frustration and anger he articulates and then following his words through to their call for reformation and renewal.

Wright is calling America to account. It’s a great role for a preacher. Don’t confuse that with the hard work of a politician trying to lead the nation to be its best self.

A slightly modified version of this appeared in The Capital Times on March 18, 2008. Phil Haslanger is a contributing editor for The Capital Times and an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ.