I went back and looked--courtesy of the ever-helpful YouTube --at a longer clip from Wright's sermon, which the now-infamous phrase climaxes. Here's what Wright says, in essence: Governments change, God doesn't. It's a pretty solidly biblical argument. To illustrate the first half of his point, he mentions the Roman Empire, the British Empire and the United States. He castigates official American treatment of Native Americans, African slaves and Japanese immigrants (during World War II). Then he says that God "damns" America when America mistreats its citizens, because (he says) such arrogance is evidence of an overweening pride, by which America would substitute itself in its own eyes for God. That's how I hear it.

Harsh talk, vastly beyond what most Americans--certainly white Americans--hear from the pulpit. Is there a way to say it? Probably, but it's best done with great humility, not to say fear and trembling. Of course, it's going to upset people.

Wright didn't clear the bar. But that's a moot point, given how the vast majority of Americans now simply know him by the briefest of sound-bites. Problem with that phrase is it sounds as if he's calling down a curse on the United States. Or did he mean it as a warning, in the style of an Old Testament prophet--God is angered by evidence of gross injustice, so watch out?

If that was the point, we might remember that it's been said before publicly in American history. Never better than by Abraham Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural Address. By then, Americans had practiced slavery for a quarter of a millenium, Lincoln noted. He said it was possible that slave-holding was so offensive to God's sense of justice that "if God wills that it [the Civil War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said 'the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.'"

Lincoln's thoughts about the possibility of our national wealth being "sunk" bear a haunting resonance today. The nation is caught in a long war, one that is costing us very dearly in terms of dollars and irreplaceable, young human lives. Amidst this, our leaders appear less than satisfying. (To borrow a phrase: "Where there is no vision, the people perish...") These are exceptionally daunting times. And one might even argue that their challenge bears more attention than all that being meted out to a single, intemperate phrase from a Chicago minister.