Ponderings

He was a local businessman not given to flattery and certainly not expected to appreciate the intentionally provocative sermons of the female preacher in town. A conservative to my liberal, Doug and his wife were new members in the small town church that I was serving. I was appreciative of their presence and did not interpret it as affirmation of the questions I raised in the pulpit.

I have always believed that preaching is not about community assent but rather about community empowerment, that provocative preaching is ultimately more nurturing than a steady diet of affirmations. With a passion for the edginess of the prophets, a particular appreciation for the social critique offered by Amos and Micah, I am painfully aware that my voice is sometimes grating. At the end of the day, however, my ego much prefers everybody to be happy.

Aware of this tension, I was all the more touched by Doug’s comment. It came a couple of years after I had moved away, when Doug and I were together for the funeral of a mutual friend. As I was walking across the cemetery, Doug came up to me and said, “I really miss your sermons.” I stopped abruptly and stared. “What? Really?” I asked, quite surprised and not very gracefully. “Well,” he explained, “I didn’t always agree with you, but you always made me think.”

From him the unexpected compliment was all the more meaningful. He was affirming that a sermon isn’t about assent but rather about growth. He could appreciate and learn while not necessarily agreeing with each assertion. His brief comment to me that day in the cemetery affirmed my thesis that provocative preaching can be life-giving.

So I admit to being a bit perplexed by the media’s interest in Barak Obama’s pastor and preacher, Dr. Jeremiah Wright (Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago). Jodi Kantor of the NYTimes wrote a lengthy article in Monday’s paper about a purported rift between the two and speculated on the ‘racism in reverse’ of Wright’s ‘Afrocentric theology’. While Obama’s theology is worthy of report, and perhaps even the moral character and theology of his advisors bears note, but reporting provocative sermon sound-bytes as news is at best misleading.

We chose our churches because they are places that enable us to encounter the sacred. We chose our churches sometimes because of the preacher, sometimes in spite of the preacher. We chose our churches, and our pastors, not because we agree (or disagree) with each word spoken, but because in the context of the worship experience and the community, we encounter that which is greater than ourselves. Clearly, Jeremiah Wright has been an incredibly effective pastor for Barak Obama, enabling Obama to name and claim an experience of the sacred that is profound and personal. As for each provocative word spoken by Wright in the past few decades?

I shudder to think that the public would assume that members of my congregation espouse every provocative idea that I share from the pulpit. Believing that in the tension we encounter the sacred, I emphatically defend my right to wonder about life as we know it and to ask the politically incorrect questions. In the spaces raised by the questions, the sacred is sometimes more visible. In a culture obsessed with sound-bytes, nuance and wonder are often the casualties. I applaud Jeremiah Wright for daring to ask the hard questions, and Obama for daring to wonder with him. I may not always agree with Obama or Wright, but they make me think. And that is a rare commodity in today’s world.