Jeremiah Wright, the recently retired minister of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, strikes me as the best kind of prophetic preacher, someone who speaks without sugar-coating his moral and religious message for the comfort of his listeners. Jeremiah Wright now has the misfortune of being Barack Obama’s former minister, and Wright is being trashed because he preached a prophetic message, a few seconds of which have been replayed as sound bites on national media in recent days.<\/p>\n
But preachers have to answer to religious standards, not political standards. We are not bound to preach patriotism for the United States, we are bound to preach the permanent truths that we find in our religious traditions. It may not be politically acceptable to do so, but we preachers at times may be called to point out that our country cannot legitimately take the moral high ground until we face our own moral failings with candor. And we prophetic preachers may find ourselves called to proclaim, for example, that ongoing racism demonstrates that some white Americans do not treat their neighbors as they themselves would like to be treated. No one likes to hear that they have moral failings; this is one reason why some of the things we preachers say are not appreciated.<\/p>\n
Politicians, on the other hand, have a very different task from preachers. Politicians do not speak prophetically; they speak in order to build political consensus. As a preacher, I am not surprised when I hear Barack Obama trashing Jeremiah Wright’s sermons. Wright preaches a religious truth: Our country has done moral wrongs, and those of us who are religious persons need to engage in repentance and forgiveness for those wrongs. Obama’s political truth is different; he needs to distance himself from Wright and build a political consensus.<\/p>\n
It should be obvious by now that I’d rather hear Jeremiah Wright preach than Barack Obama speak. As a preacher, I might want to take Obama to task for sugar-coating our country’s moral failings. But then, I guess I should accept that he’s only a politician and thus is in the business of sugar-coating moral truths (from my point of view, anyway).<\/p>\n
One last point: I wonder why we have not heard about Hillary Clinton’s minister, and John McCain’s minister. If I had a presidential candidate in my congregation, I trust they would be embarrassed by some of the moral stands I have taken; if they weren’t embarrassed, I would take that to mean that I had been sugar-coating moral truths.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jeremiah Wright, the recently retired minister of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, strikes me as the best kind of prophetic preacher, someone who speaks without sugar-coating his moral and religious message for the comfort of his listeners. Jeremiah Wright now has the misfortune of being Barack Obama’s former minister, and Wright is being […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,309],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1240","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberal-religion","category-political-culture"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1240"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1240\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1240"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1240"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.danielharper.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1240"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}