Wright and Wrong
Rev. Mark Stringer
First Unitarian Church of Des Moines
6/15/08

 

“Truly speaking, it is not instruction, but provocation, that I can receive from another soul.  What he announces, I must find true in me, or wholly reject, and on his word…be he who he may, I can accept nothing.” –Ralph Waldo Emerson

 

Reading     from UU minister David Rankin

“…the pulpit is a symbol of freedom.  Four hundred years ago the liberal religionists of Poland and Transylvania raised the banner of religious freedom.  Their ministers were imprisoned; their churches were burned; and many were banished from their homelands. … The pulpit is a symbol of personality.  Each preacher is a mixture: soft-hard, passive-aggressive, serious-humorous, biting-consoling, and everyone is different from another.  The appeal is also different.  But the pulpit demands the essential truth of the individual.  It will not abide for long the objectivity of the essay, the abstraction of the lecture, the remoteness of the dissertation. It requires rather a vulnerable, subjective truth which is not often expressed in our society.  It is more of a confession than a speech, as each preacher is saying, ‘Here I am! I can be no other!”  It is a symbol of personality and that is a heavy burden.”…

The pulpit is a symbol of intimacy.  If the preacher is free to confess, then all feelings, opinions, and convictions are appropriate in the pulpit.  Those who attend regularly might know the preacher better than their husband or wife or even their mother and father.

… ”the pulpit is a symbol of prophecy….Only the spoken word, from the depths of freedom, personality and intimacy, can convey the biting edge of criticism.  If the other elements of worship soothe the sensibility, it is through preaching that the hard, the hated, and the unspeakable are heard.  Thus no preacher should ever seek comfort in a pulpit.  No minister should ever plan for security of employment.  None should ever fall in love with a particular institution.  It destroys the biting edge.  “I will say what I will say” must never be compromised.  The pulpit is a symbol of prophecy and that is a heavy burden.”[1]

Sermon

In the bubble that was my five-month sabbatical, now past, I had a lot of time to pay close attention to the hoopla and the horror of the presidential primary season, what The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart has labeled “The Long, Flat, Seemingly Endless Bataan Death March to the White House.”  And despite the different politics or preferred candidates of those present here today, I think we might agree that one of the low-lights of this season has been the time spent slicing and dicing the comments of the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, the 20-year church home (until very recently anyway) of Senator Barack Obama and his wife and children. 

No matter if you are inclined to consider Rev. Wright as a victim or as an assailant, as a righteous prophetic preacher in the black liberation theology tradition or a reckless purveyor of racial prejudice,

no matter if you think Barack Obama should be held accountable for Wright’s words and apparent beliefs or if you think Obama is a hapless victim of a minister who chose to self-destruct in the spotlight of national media attention,

or…as this is after all a complex situation for sure…if you fall somewhere in between, maybe even wavering back and forth, unsure what to think or believe,

I’m thinking you may be as frustrated, if not appalled, by this whole affair as I am. 

 

Before I get too far into this topic, let me assure you that my sermon today is not intended to be an endorsement of Senator Obama, nor is it meant to be a blanket defense of Rev. Wright.  I merely want to point out a few things that I feel have been mostly, if not entirely, left unsaid throughout this saga and then leave you to form your own opinions, as I always expect and encourage you to do.

 

Even as my intention is not to spend too much time defending Rev. Wright, I do want to come clean with a confession.  I had what I still believe was the extraordinary privilege to attend Rev. Wright’s three-hour presentation to several hundred of my UU ministry colleagues at our annual Ministry Days last June.  He had been invited to give the keynote address because his ministry at Trinity United Church of Christ remains a model for church vibrancy and growth. When he began there in 1972, the church had around 80 members.  Today, it has over 6,000 members and features over 70 ministries, many of them service oriented, offered to, as its website claims, “enhance the Christian journey.”

 

It may seem odd that a minister of a church with the motto “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian” would be asked to speak to a collection of UU ministers who, let’s face it, mostly serve congregations that are undeniably white and oftentimes unimpressively Christian-phobic.  I’ll admit his scheduled appearance seemed odd to me, too.  At least until I heard the man speak.  Over his time with us, as he discussed the power and promise of religious community, he conveyed compassion, scholarship, humor, intellect, insight and wisdom that has remained with me ever since.  He spoke without notes, weaving and bobbing through subject matter with skill that awed and inspired everyone I know who was there, and repeated several times a theme I have since heard him preach again in his media interviews and appearances: “Different is not deficient.”

 

This theme is at the foundation of the life of the congregation he led for 35 years and his ministry there because it is a message that had to be embodied by the Afro-centric community the church serves in order to live up to its motto of “Unashamedly Black”.  You see, Trinity is a member congregation of the United Church of Christ, a denomination whose racial diversity, or more specifically lack of racial diversity, is much like that of our own Unitarian Universalist Association of congregations. Furthermore, the UCC and the UUA are very close cousins theologically and historically, growing from the same foundation 200 years ago. I’m sure those facts led the planners of the event to invite Rev. Wright to speak to us.   If a vibrant, ground-breaking Afro-centric church in the UCC is possible, greater diversity in our UU religious movement is not a pipe dream.  Trinity Church and Rev. Wright’s work there proves that progressive religious values can and do speak to all people.  

 

That is not to say that what goes on at Trinity is the same thing that goes on at any one of its sister UCC congregations, like Plymouth UCC here in Des Moines.  Clearly the video snippets many of us have seen from Rev. Wright’s sermons at Trinity, indicate that the public and prophetic message of that congregation is much more in line with the Afro-Centric experience…or at least one man’s interpretation of that experience… and that experience comes across (at least in the clips that have dominated the reporting of this drama) as angry, suspicious, and even unpatriotic (depending on how one defines patriotism).

 

Should any of us be surprised? 

 

No matter how far the attitudes, perceptions, and predispositions of our nation’s citizens may have evolved over the years toward equality and justice for all people regardless of race, a simple survey of our history as a nation clearly shows that African-Americans, from the time of slavery on, have been the recipients of systemic disrespect and disregard if not downright denial of their inherent worth and dignity.   The message of a church that has chosen to boldly embrace its Afro-centric heritage can not, it seems to me, be expected to gloss over the very heritage it celebrates, or pretend that all is now well, even when evidence rises to suggest that it is far from well.  We should expect an Afro-centric church to honestly communicate its history and heritage, warts and all, and to reflect the experiences of its members in ways that elsewhere in the culture may be virtually impossible.

 

The Rev. Rob Hardies, my colleague at All Souls UU church in Washington, DC, recently preached his own sermon on this topic called, “Is Jeremiah Wright?” in which he focused mostly on the cultural context of the “black church”, reminding his congregation that going back to the time of slavery, the church has been one of the only places where African Americans could share in bold terms their “anger and frustration with a white, racist majority.”  He described how on the plantation, enslaved people would worship as far away from the “big house” as possible, where it would be safe to express not only their anger, but their joy and love as well.

 

Rev. Hardies’ words now:

 

“Every once in a while, the folks up in the big house would get wind of what was happening down by the riverside.  They’d be sitting on the porch, sipping tea, and they’d hear some music coming over the breeze and they’d get all anxious about what was happening down there.  They wanted to know just what those slaves were up to.  And so, from time to time the master would send a spy or two, down out back, to see what was going on down there.  And then when the spy returned to the big house, he would sit down at his computer and upload everything he saw onto You-Tube…. So that everyone in the big house could see what was happening out back.  And through this kind of espionage, the fox sometimes made his way into the henhouse, to try to disrupt what was going on.  And whether it was the fox then, or Fox News now, the message that gets sent back to the big house goes something like this….

 

You know those nice, black people…[you work with, or live nearby?] Did you know that, on Sunday mornings, when we are still sipping our coffee and reading the paper, they get in their car and go back to the old neighborhood, because that’s where their churches still are?   And they go to their churches, and they close the door and then they admit how much they hate America.  Then they admit how much they hate white people.  You just can’t trust them, and you certainly can’t trust a politician that comes from them.  You know, don’t let him fool you, for lurking behind that calm façade, that well-spoken manner, is a crazy black pastor, shouting and preaching hate.”[2]

 

You know, much of this may be true, certainly true enough for me to feel the need to share Rev. Hardies’ words with you this morning. Certainly there are many who share his characterization of the cultural divide evidenced among the churches, what Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed to be “the most segregated…institution[s] in our nation”.

 

But as important as race is in this still unfolding saga, I also don’t want to oversimplify what’s been happening as merely racial tension or misunderstanding.  As big as the race issues are in our country, to simply suggest that those who don’t appreciate or agree with Rev. Wright’s statements are racist may not be telling the whole story.

 

I admit to having virtually no first-hand experience of what is referred to as “the Black church.”  But I also admit that nothing I heard from Rev. Wright, at least the snippets I saw, was all that shocking to me.  Controversial, yes.  Shocking, no.  In fact, mostly, I found myself wanting to give him the benefit of the doubt.  As someone who has the privilege and responsibility of standing before a congregation most weeks of the year and doing my best to speak the truth as I see it, I am inclined to assume that if something objectionable is said in a sound-byte from a sermon, I would really need to hear the whole sermon before I judged it too harshly.  What was the context of the comment?  What was the overall message the speaker was trying to convey?  Was space left in the speaker’s remarks for the congregation to disagree?  How did the remarks convey the overall message and mission of the church?  These are all important questions for anyone interested in passing judgment on what Rev. Wright has said.  However, in the aftermath of the surfacing of these sound-bytes, especially when several of them were looped together, spanning many years of sermons, and played non-stop on television and the internet, no one seemed to be asking these questions.

 

And, to my great frustration and disappointment, I have yet to hear anyone bring up what I believe may be the most important point of all.  Rev. Wright was serving a church that utilizes congregational polity, meaning not only that the congregation governs itself, but that it grants “freedom of the pulpit” to its minister.  A minister in a UCC church, just as in our own, is expected to, as my own letter of agreement with this congregation states, “express his values, views and commitments without fear or favor.”  The views of the minister are not necessarily the views of the congregation as a whole or even its individual members.  The sermon is offered in our “free church” tradition as a means of beginning a dialogue with the congregants, each entrusted to come to his own judgments, each respected enough as an individual to translate the message to the benefit of her own soul’s journey.

 

Liberal religious icon Ralph Waldo Emerson described the task of preaching as the communication of the preacher’s “life passed through the fire of thought.”[3]  But he also encouraged those listening to trust their own truth and intuition, to, in effect, pass the preacher’s words through the fire of their own thought and to trust their own intuition…to trust their own soul.

 

Preaching in our traditions is a two-way enterprise, many times over, as many times as there are people in this room, based not only on the preacher’s words, but the authority of each uniquely experiencing individual in the congregation to decide for herself what is right and true.  That’s why a sermon, whether preached by me, by Rev. Wright, or by anyone else, cannot be “objectified, isolated or taken out of the context of community within which it was prepared, delivered, and responded to….”[4]

 

And yet, upon examination of some of the spliced words of the Rev. Wright, people who had never set foot in Trinity Church felt empowered by the circumstances of the political and media frenzy that ensued to proclaim their certainty that not only was Rev. Wright wrong, he was dangerous, and by connection, so was his congregant Barack Obama. 

 

Pundits and Obama’s political opponents rushed to self-righteously declare that if they had been members of Trinity Church, they would have left long ago, which led me to wonder if any of them have ever experienced the privilege and responsibility of actually being a member of a free church, a church that does not organize around shared dogma or system of belief or even around a minister’s sermons, but around a covenant to walk together even when we disagree…especially when we disagree.  Somehow, people, through their fully formed, even if not fully informed, judgment of Rev. Wright, determined that Barack Obama was merely a puppet of his pastor’s perspectives. 

Never mind that in no time in his public life had Obama ever uttered anything in sympathy with Rev. Wright’s offending sound-bytes.

Never mind that the role of the preacher in the prophetic tradition is to shake things up, to agitate, to give voice to his own truth, even when it may make others uncomfortable.

Never mind that sometimes our greatest growth can come when people we love and trust and respect say things that offend our own sensibilities, and then we have to come to terms with how and why we differ, and how to move forward.

 

As a minister doing my best to discover and share my own reality with you, I confess I want to serve a congregation that doesn’t agree with me all the time, but a congregation that still encourages me to speak my truth just as I encourage them to speak theirs.

 

Did Barack Obama disagree with Rev. Wright on occasion?  He says he did and why should we assume otherwise?  So why did he stay?  Why did he claim Rev. Wright as a mentor, spiritual guide and friend, even as he admitted that he often disagreed with his perspectives?  I don’t claim to know Obama’s heart, but I do know a story that might explain.

 

It’s a story about a minister and an important businessman in his congregation, whom everyone knew did not agree with many of the preacher’s views:

 

After one particularly troubling sermon, another member of the congregation approached the businessman and asked him why he continued to come to church faithfully even when he so often disagreed with the minister’s sermons.  The businessman explained that a year earlier he had been very depressed and on the verge of suicide.  He visited with the minister, spending over an hour with him in his study, but when he left, the businessman confessed that he was still intent on ending his life.  Early in the evening, he approached a bridge over a local river.  As he prepared to climb upon the rail of the bridge, he got the feeling that he wasn’t alone.  He turned and sure enough, there was the minister, about 30 steps behind.  The businessman called out to him, “Go away.  I don’t want your company.”

 

“I’m not accompanying you,” the minister responded.  “I’m just out for my walk, enjoying the evening air.”  Angry now, the businessman traveled even further into the park. Seeing that he was still being followed, he turned back into the city.  All night he walked the streets.  Every time he turned around, there was the minister, some distance behind him.  Finally, when morning came, exhaustion overwhelmed him and the urge to kill himself left.  Only when the businessman put the key in his own door did the minister turn to go home.  “Let me tell you,” the businessman said:  “Whatever the minister wishes to preach about, I will listen.”[5]

 

It’s a good story, but I suggest, that we could (and probably should in our tradition at least) substitute “the church” for the role the minister plays in the story.  After all, as important as a minister can be to the health and vitality of a church, it is the member’s relationship with the congregation that should and usually does finally determine whether or not the member will stay.  It is the relationship that each of you builds with one another that will help you determine if this is the right religious home for you or not, regardless of what I say.  Sometimes, even, in spite of it.

 

In the end the Rev. Wright saga is all about quality of relationship, on many levels.  If you just listen to the politicians and pundits, you might be led to believe that the only relationship that matters in this controversy is the relationship of a member to his minister.  But let us not forget that this is also about the relationship of a minister to his church, the relationship of the black church to the people it serves, and the relationship between different racial and cultural enclaves seemingly incapable of hearing the truth in each other’s experiences.  And for those with an interest in seeing this nation finally move across and beyond the lines that still painfully divide us and finally into a post-racial reality for which so many of us yearn, we know this is also about the need for real meaningful and meaning-filled relationships of each diverse, unique individual to another. 

Relationships based less in clinging to the traumas and suspicions of the past, and more in seeing the humanity of our sisters and brothers despite (and maybe even because of) the different things we have seen and experienced. 

Relationships willing to acknowledge the common, human needs for affirmation, for love, for respect, and for support. 

Relationships with enough space in them for us to see, experience and interpret things differently, yet still find a way to get together and get along because we know that despite our outward differences, we are all merely members of one family…one human family.

 

In his now-famous speech on race, prompted by the Rev. Wright controversy, Obama shared a passage from his book, Dreams of My Father, in which he described his first Sunday morning at Trinity Church.  He said the stories shared that morning became:

 

“…our story, my story…. The trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn't need to feel shame about...memories that all people might study and cherish - and with which we could start to rebuild."

To rebuild.

 

My hope is that, despite all evidence to the contrary, this Rev. Wright controversy may actually in the end mark a new starting point in which we Americans began to rebuild not the black story or the white story but the human story that we all share. A story with its share of pain, but also its share of possibility,

A story that could enable us to finally transcend our differences without disregarding them. 

A story that could lead us to acknowledge that “different is not deficient.” 

A story that our religious perspective asks us to build with all our sisters and brothers…

one precious

relationship

at a time.