We're killing the messenger
I've been nothing short of saddened by the controversy surrounding The Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright, the former senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago -- the man at the center of Barack Obama's storm. Denounced as a "cranky uncle," "outrageous," "racist," "unpatriotic," and worse for his sermons, his life of service has been reduced to a few seconds of bad video propagated on YouTube and all the other media.
Three times over the last eight years, including last February, about 25 of us have had the privilege of sharing breakfast with Jeremiah Wright when he came to Michigan State University. It's an intimate gathering with no media invited. Here the man is kind, sociable, and funny as all get-out. He doesn't foam at the mouth. He doesn't berate others. But he also doesn't pull punches, sharing with great integrity his beliefs and stunning us with his courage.
Look at his life.
In the Vietnam Era, Wright walked out of a student draft deferment into two years of service in the U.S. Marines, and then four in the Navy. As a Naval technician in CPR, he was assigned to the team that cared for President Lyndon Johnson, for which he received three letters of commendation. Four academic degrees later, he was assigned to Chicago's Trinity, an 87-member congregation in 1972. Since then, Wright's achievements have been legion. At 6,000 members, Trinity is said to be now the largest church in the entire, mostly white, United Church of Christ denomination. He has established programs that have moved the church into the community -- meeting the needs of the neediest for dignity, health, and spiritual support. The author of several books, he has served on the faculty of a number of prestigious institutions, has received seven honorary doctorate degrees, and was named by Ebony as one of the 15 best preachers in the nation.
I had -- and have -- enormous respect and admiration for Dr. Wright. I was stunned at the reaction to his words.
Jesus on steroids
Many churches today have created a 21st-century Jesus Christ in one of two unhealthy images. The first is insipid: perpetually sweet, kind, offering blessing and solace and refuge. The second is a spiritual capitalist, promising good returns on your investments and a prosperous life. In stark contrast, the Jesus of a social justice church like Trinity has muscle. He whips the moneylenders into shape, compares public officials to the rotting contents of tombs, and singlehandedly stands down an angry mob armed with stones to defend someone surely guilty of the indefensible. This Jesus isn't nice or polite or politically correct, but every action is based on righteous love: he comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable. This is Jeremiah Wright's Jesus, and he'll follow Him anywhere, even to his own scourging and crucifixion.
Uh, you wanna rephrase that?
OK. I'll admit that had he asked, I would have suggested that the use of "nigger" and "God damn" in the pulpit might come back to bite him. Note, though, that he said "God damn" -- as in praying "God condemn" -- not "goddam," an expletive that would have violated a teaching of his own faith. Even a cursory reading of the Bible gives us plenty of insight into what God condemns. But what hypocrisy! A society that tolerates obscene and violent language without an eyebat gets frothed when a preacher from the pulpit tells what God condemns? And a man who has suffered the hateful sting of "nigger" should be criticized when he points out that a white person hasn't?
Red, white, black and blue
Many have, despite his six years of service to country in the military and an exemplary life, pasted Wright with the "unpatriotic" label. Righteously calling our government into accountability no more makes us un-American than rightfully disciplining our children makes us bad parents. In fact, the most basic of our freedoms is the ability to speak truth to power, and few have the combination of courage, interest and credibility that Wright has to do so. We are a great nation filled with good people, but Wright is correct in calling us into greater self-discipline. But when he holds up the mirror, we'd rather smash it than deal with the image we see. Here's truth. We are the only nation in history to drop nuclear weapons on millions of human beings. Here's another. A nation that trades in violence will ultimately become its victim.
Who does he think he is, anyway?
Jeremiah Wright's parents named him well. He is much like his ultimate namesake, the Old Testament prophet Jeremiah. The ancient prophet carried God's messages of repentance and warning to the rulers and the people, and they were not well received. Old Jeremiah knew how to get himself noticed, often using props or street theatre to draw an audience. He was castigated and often threatened, but continued his work. In fact, about the time of the American Revolution, the word "jeremiad" was coined to describe just this type of speech. I have no suspicion that Wright envisions himself as a modern-day prophet, but I also have no doubt that he in many ways fills a prophetic role.
He loves the skin he's in.
C'mon. Racist? It's clear that Jeremiah Wright is steeped in the pride, history, culture, music, language, political enterprises, spiritual health, and enhancing the lives of African American people. He's the epitome of Afrocentrism, and he developed a rockin' black church. But loving the skin you're in doesn't make you a racist. That requires hate, a commodity not in his store. Wright has moved beyond the society in which origin doesn't matter and therefore is ignored in polite company, to a paradigm in which our differences are celebrated, critiqued, contrasted and then embraced in common humanity. Vive la difference!
Sound bites bite.
In all of the media frenzy following the YouTubous videos, Roland Martin of CNN was one of the few reporters and commentators who bothered to look at the context of the clips. It was a fruitful exercise in objectivity. Wright's "chicken-roosting" comment about 9/11, for example, was actually part of a long quote from Edward Peck, the deputy director of President Reagan's terrorism task force and a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq, speaking on FOX news. The words, correctly attributed to Peck by Wright, were not Wright's at all, but he paid for them dearly. As a people, starved for stimulation in an overstimulated world, we're far too quick to report, believe and act upon what seems obvious rather than give truth its due, and we end up with cartoon perceptions.
At that breakfast in East Lansing in February, Jeremiah Wright shared his disappointment that after serving as a family's pastor for two decades, marrying the couple and baptizing the children, he was uninvited at the last minute to Barack Obama's announcement of his candidacy for president. He also said that we could expect to see him excoriated in the media in the near future. He was prophetic on that.
Jeremiah Wright deserves better than he's getting. Hey! How about a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t?
Copyright, 2008, Pat Grauer
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