Oh No He Didn’t!

March 17, 2008 by djackson.

Philips Brooks has famously posited that preaching is truth through personality. Barack Obama caught considerable flack last week when it appeared to some that his former pastor, the Reverend James Wright, percolated pulpit truth through a personality so pronounced as to leave the resulting brew distinctly unpalatable.

Wright, pastor for 36 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, evidently drew parallels between the terrorist attack of 9/11 and America’s sponsorship of regime change in other countries. He apparently claimed that the federal government unleashed the AIDS virus on the African-American community and even suggested a colorful rewrite of the lyrics to “God Bless America.” And then he got mad.

Now, I don’t claim to know whom we should elect president come fall. I would presume even less to possess any real understanding of what it means to be black in America. But I do pretend (some of my students would say that is indeed the correct verb) to know something about homiletics and the dynamics of preaching. From that standpoint, I’d like to see if I can speak to the current uproar.

First of all, it interests me that while Pastor Wright cannot say anything in his preaching about politics, politics certainly has free reign to say something about his preaching. The media seem content for the wall of separation between church and state to remain as porous as the fences along our southern border so long as the traffic is all one way. My point basically is this: a sermon is not public property. It is not a speech by a statesman to the general populace but a word from a prophet to a select segment of the body of Christ. You can broadcast it, podcast it, fly-cast or diecast it, you can upload it, download it, frontload or backload it but the sermon as a sermon belongs to the relationship between the one who speaks and those who hear in the moment of proclamation. This truth rests, not on some Masonic code of secrecy which excludes outsiders from the internecine plots of the initiatives, nor from a spiritual snobbery that snubs the unsaved but upon the very nature of the case. Sermons may be printed on paper and shouted in sound waves but they exist in the ethos of a common set of beliefs and traditions shared within a community of faith.

Reporters, I think, sit in someone else’s church like the bewildered new boyfriend at a family Thanksgiving feast, able to make nothing of the inside jokes, lifelong traditions, even the barely hidden - or brazenly open - hostilities that seem to threaten an outright riot but somehow only reinforce the fellowship. If he sticks around, marries the girl, endures this kind of thing on a regular basis as part of the bargain he has struck, he may eventually come to speak the language of Zion - and learn that it is suitable for laughter and poetry, even for blessing and cursing. Reporters, however, appear to me more like johns than boyfriends. They come to church for a quickie quote, hoping for some headlines in return for a minimal investment of time and no investment of themselves at all. It may not be their fault if the whole thing fails to make sense - but it isn’t the church’s fault either.

The second thing I’d say about all of this is that it rests on faulty assumptions regarding faith and patriotism. The unspoken syllogism seems to be that Pastor Wright may not love America - or at least not everything about America, the man is a former Marine after all - and therefore Barack Obama can’t be president. As I say, I don’t know much about politics but I think I know a little about prophetic preaching. To point out a nation’s flaws, and to do so using outrageous language, does not violate Scripture. In fact, it IS scripture!

Amos circled eighth century Israel like a B-1 bomber homing in on its target. He strafed the surrounding nations but his ever-tightening orbit eventually dropped the payload on those who considered themselves the very people of God. (Amos 1-3-16)

Jeremiah stood on capitol hill in Jerusalem and decried the union of faith and nationalism which spawned the bastard love-child of social arrogance. (Jeremiah 7.1-15)

In the “Little Apocalypse” of Mark 13 Jesus deflected his disciples’ praise of ecclesiastical architecture and told them instead that a house of worship must forfeit immunity when it wreathes itself in the meshes of earthly power.

John the Revelator looked on a military-industrial complex that made soldier and salesman, king and capitalist alike go all tingly and foresaw it sink like an upper-millstone slam-dunked by a body-building avenging angel. (Revelation 18.1-24)

That’s three pretty good preachers and the Son of God who set the example of outrageous attacks on the power structures of nations. The fury felt by some religious conservatives over Reverend Wright’s remarks seems to me like a case of special pleading: sure, God might go jawbone hill on Israel and go Rambo on Rome, but we’re America so all bets are off. Both scripture and history beg to differ and invite us to wonder if the good pastor hasn’t done us a favor of which we’d best take full advantage.

I said I don’t claim to understand the African American experience and I repeat that I don’t. For all that, I’d like to see if I can’t offer at least an outsider’s insight on that angle of the situation as well. Charles E. Booth, pastor of the Mount Olivet Baptist Church in Columbus, Ohio, gives it as his opinion that “the unique genius of African American preaching has been the ability to wed biblical truth with social justice. . . .The passion, imagination, and articulatory skills of the African American preacher have historically been wed to the Scriptures as thrust and lift for our liberation.” I am not saying (nor do I believe Pastor Booth is saying) that only African Americans have the right to preach social justice, or that even African-Americans have the right to say things that are not true. I am saying that the boundary between politics and pulpit is necessarily more porous for those who have for centuries had access only to the latter.

And this leads me to an important point. I believe that Pastor Wright has done - or has at least attempted to do - a favor for white America: he has trusted us with a direct truth. This took great courage on his part, and requires great gratitude on ours.
Here’s what I mean. William Edgar of Westminster Theological Seminary points out that public expression by African Americans tends toward “signifying,” which he defines as “speaking a double language: to white people, he delivered the required stereotype and got lots of laughter; to blacks, he made coded in-jokes which signified, ‘We shall overcome someday.’” This is less a matter of honesty than one of survival, not so much an issue of duplicity as one of necessity. Edward Gilbreath, an African-American writer and editor, in his book Reconciliation Blues, agrees that there is an “unspoken social contract” of falsehood between blacks and whites. “For years,” he claims, “African Americans have found freedom and power in cloaking their protest and brokenness in the colors and rhythms of their creative passion.”

Ralph Ellison, in his seminal novel The Invisible Man, narrates a young, southern black man’s introduction to this concept. Berated for exposing a white trustee to an unpalatable reality of African American life, the student protests that the man ordered him to do so. “Ordered you?” thunders the college president. “He ordered you. Dammit, white folk are always giving orders, it’s a habit with them. Why didn’t you make an excuse? My God, boy! You’re black and living in the South - did you forget how to lie?” Later in the same interview the president bellows, “Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie!”

We might want to dismiss this as cynicism but when one ponders the fate of Ralph Abernathy or Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., that option disappears. And this makes it all the more impressive - and humbling! - that Reverend Wright blessed white America by at least telling us - or at least trying to tell us - the truth - his truth and the truth of his people. If we make the mistake of rejecting Barack Obama’s candidacy because of an effort at honesty, an invitation (offered clumsily, perhaps, as African American blogger Raymond Leon Roker suggests, due to lack of practice [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/raymond-leon-roker/guess-whos-coming-to-din_b_91666.html]) into a world we helped create and then suppressed - if we do this, we drive our African American siblings back into the secret world of signifying and condemn ourselves to another generation of talking past, above, beneath and beside - instead of to - one another.

I’m not telling you to vote for or against Barack Obama. I am pleading with you not to vote against him for the wrong reason.

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