Preaching Makes the News

It has been a long time since a major story in the news originated from the words of a minister preaching in the pulpit. It used to be that city newspapers would regularly print the entire text of a sermon or homily delivered at a prominent church on a Sunday evening. This was back in the time of two Sunday services. The morning service would focus on the relationship between God and the faithful, while the evening service would speak directly to the issues of the day, the life of the city, nation, and world. But those days are gone. The message from the pulpit rarely makes news outside of the congregation.

But that all changed a couple weeks ago, when the words of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the former senior minister at Trinity United Church of Christ in south Chicago, made the news. Sadly, all the news centered on very short, incendiary excerpts that were pulled apart from their context, and the reason for all the attention is the presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama, who is a member at that church. I am saddened by the way all of this was handled for several reasons. The issues of Christian faith are more complex than a brief sound byte can handle. We should be having responsible conversations about these issues, instead of oversimplifying them. I have listened to a longer portion of two of Rev. Wright’s sermons, and I can tell you that he was not justifying or condoning the attacks of September 11, 2001. He spoke unequivocally against violence against innocent people, but he also extended this message to a difficult self-examination. Worship should call us to honesty such as this. I can also tell you that when Rev. Wright pronounced God’s judgment on the wrongs that our government has committed (and I join all those who wish he had used different words), it was in the context of a sermon that proclaimed God’s faithfulness and righteousness which does not change, even as we, God’s people, have failed to live up to it. We need a larger context.

I thought that Mike Huckabee, Baptist minister and former presidential candidate, was insightful in a recent news commentary. He spoke about how statements are often lifted out of the context of a larger sermon. “Sermons, after all, are rarely written word for word by pastors like Rev. Wright, who are delivering them extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment. There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them on paper and looked at them in print, you'd say ‘Well, I didn't mean to say it quite like that.’” He also reminded us of the larger context of the history of race in this country: “I grew up in a very segregated South. And I think that you have to cut some slack…to people who grew up being called names.”
There is at least one more frame that we need around those words that made the news, and that is the context of a congregation that has never been content to sit back and criticize others. Trinity United Church of Christ is a leader in outreach programs to encourage individual responsibility toward the issues of family, work, crime, disease, and education.

There is a place to faithfully disagree and to call on our Christian leaders to do things differently, but first we need to have a complete understanding, so that we don’t react to an incomplete story. The tradition of the United Church of Christ and the Congregationalist Church is of a place where we realize that we have different views and different experiences, and we are in covenant to be in honest, respectful relationships together. We worship God as one, and God holds us together.