denunciations. It has threatened the presidential campaign of one of his church members — who is being publicly excoriated for associating with this minister. Many a preacher has warned many a child not to associate with people of ill repute. Few ministers have imagined themselves to be the ones ruining others’ reputations.
The school of the Spirit offers some painful lessons for those of us who preach in pulpits and sit in pews. What lessons will you take away from this?
So how do you respond to the Jeremiah Wright episode? Most pastors would be thrilled to discover that after one’s retirement from pastoral ministry millions of people watch videotaped excerpts of their sermons. Wright probably isn’t thrilled.
The broadcast on YouTube of excerpts from some of Wright’s sermons has generated widespread denunciations. It has threatened the presidential campaign of one of his church members — who is being publicly excoriated for associating with this minister. Many a preacher has warned many a child not to associate with people of ill repute. Few ministers have imagined themselves to be the ones ruining others’ reputations.
The school of the Spirit offers some painful lessons for those of us who preach in pulpits and sit in pews. What lessons will you take away from this?
One obvious lesson is always tell the truth.
No doubt, most of what Jeremiah Wright preached throughout his illustrious career was biblical, true, prophetic, and transformative. His leadership has produced fruit in the lives of thousands. But not all he said was factual. Some of his statements were exaggerated beyond any possible connection to reality. Those statements were spouted in a pulpit dedicated to the proclamation of the Word of God.
Let no one among us defend the telling of falsehoods from the pulpit. Most all of us will indict as shameless liars those colleagues whose ideology we find obnoxious, and then we will rationalize the uttering of falsehoods by colleagues whose ideology we support. Wrong. Let no falsehoods be proclaimed in the name of Jesus. End of story.
On the other hand the finger pointing forward does connect to the three pointing back. Who among us wishes to play prosecutor to Wright, while the film editors prepare their set of excerpts drawn from our worst words — in pulpit or pub — for broadcast on YouTube, as Jesus bends down and writes with his finger on the ground?
Moreover, how could he — how could we — fall into the practice of exaggeration and public damning of others? The answer is simple. Crowds love it. Politicians of all parties in all nations have long understood that naming enemies, painting caricatures of them, and then spewing derogatory exaggerations and even falsehoods about them will excrete testosterone to surge through their hearers’ veins. The rhetoric of contempt rallies troops to take up arms. In the process the rabble-rouser gets congratulated for being a person of courage. Polls track their growing popularity, as undecided voters tilt in their direction.
It’s a great way to run a war. It’s a proven way to win an election. It’s an awful way to lead a church.
But many church leaders use the tactic unconsciously. Whenever we make a point by formulating the opposite idea and then trashing it, we likely are refuting a caricature of our own invention rather than a fair characterization of those other persons and viewpoints. Might we allow the Jeremiah Wright saga to shake us into truth-telling?
And might we, who sit in the pews, stifle our “amens,” and even take our own preachers and teachers to task — prodding them to speak only the truth?
This saga pushes us to open our eyes to one other lesson. The burgeoning growth of Trinity United Church of Christ, which is “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian,” presses us all to ask why race-specific preaching can be so popular in downtown Chicago, not to mention in many other places in our country. Answer: racial integration remains an unfinished project in America. As Barack Obama’s speech on the matter has reminded us, the great gains achieved in race relations over the past 50 years have moved in the right direction, but we have so much further to go.
As a denomination in covenant partnership with the United Church of Christ, we rightly ask how many of our own Africa-centered congregations are thriving as is Trinity UCC? What efforts are we investing toward the realization of our denomination-wide goal, set in 1996, of increasing our racial ethnic membership to 10% by 2005 and 20% by 2010? (Fact: in 2006 the number was 8.3%.) How are we doing at cultivating truly multicultural churches? (Fact: just a handful of congregations qualify.) And, perhaps most importantly, are we willing even to discuss these matters? As news commentators have been reflecting nationally, many white Americans find such a subject an inconvenience they’d rather avoid. They just may vote white simply to cut off the discussion.
These are painful topics to discuss and painful lessons to learn. Better to discuss and learn than to dismiss and live in blind ignorance.
-JHH
