The Question: Jeremiah Wright's sermons continue to be an issue in the presidential campaign. Why? What do you think of his preaching style? What do you wish you understood better about it?

Senator Obama has built his campaign on the premise that Americans can reach out to one another across historic divides and regain national strength and purpose after decades of “divide and conquer” politics. It has become clear to me this week, and I think probably to many Americans, that this is who he really is and what he most deeply believes. It plainly pained him terribly to separate himself and his campaign so decisively from the statements of Rev. Wright, but he had to do it because their views of the future are so different.

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The United States has become a “liar society.” I regret to say that I think the electorate, and not the candidates and elected officials, are most to blame for the wide-spread acceptance of the fact that it’s pretty much okay for people in public life to lie to us. People may respond to pollsters that they find this or that candidate less than honest, but it doesn’t seem to prevent them from supporting the candidate.

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Like thieves who steal a car and cut it up in order to sell the parts, the radical right is now chopping up the sermons of Rev. Otis Moss, III, incoming Senior Pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ, and trying to peddle the parts to generate new controversy.

First, Newsmax.com's staff ridiculed a Moss sermon, objecting to ways in which the young pastor was plainly trying to make his message appeal to the younger generation and their cultural images. Then other right-wing pundits like Sean Hannity used those same spare parts this past weekend to attempt a further political spin.

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The Evangelical leaders who issued “An Evangelical Manifesto” do not mince words: Evangelical does not mean “useful idiots” for one political party or another. Well, that’s frank and frankly refreshing. These Evangelical leaders have come to rue the day they were discovered as a voting bloc by Republican strategists. They have been manipulated and “that way faith loses its independence.” All people of faith should heed this warning.

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Today the United Church of Christ, the national church to which presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama belongs, announced that the Internal Revenue Service has found “that the activity about which we had concern did not constitute …a violation of the requirements of the requirements of section 501(c)(3)."

The "concern" that apparently launched the investigation stemmed from a speech Senator Obama gave to the UCC General Synod, the all-church gathering held every two years, during the church's fiftieth anniversary celebration.

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The relationship between the church and the state, between morality and legality, has always been contentious on these shores, even before the founders took pen in hand. The Pilgrims, for example, considered marriage a civil affair and opposed the involvement of the church in marriage. They had had their fill of the state Church of England. This did not prevent the Pilgrims, however, once they were resettled in New England, from trying to legally impose their own views of morality on the residents in their colony.

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No matter where you stand on this current war in Iraq or the one in Afghanistan, every American owes it to the men and women who fight in war to remember war on Memorial Day. And the most important thing is to remember war as the troops remember war.

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Sin doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It is very revealing to think about a sin like greed in context. Certain conditions conspire to tempt people to be greedy and those conditions are part of how we think theologically about sin. When you confine discussions about sin to universals or generalities, you can miss the main point. What kinds of conditions led to this housing market crash, to this oil price spike and where, individually and collectively, do the responsibilities lie?

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I preached the first service at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago last Sunday. Rev. Michael Pfleger preached later that day.

I preached a sermon about how a sacred conversation on race has to have Christ at the center.

Father Pfleger, as America now knows, preached a very different message on race, one I greatly resent.

We in the United Church of Christ are trying to have what we call “A Sacred Conversation on Race” and I did not find Pfleger’s sermon to represent what we in the UCC are trying to do in having a sacred conversation.

Instead, Pfleger’s sermon was a bullying rant that was disrespectful of the members of Trinity United Church of Christ, disrespectful of Senator Hillary Clinton and really also disrespectful of Senator Obama and his consistent message of finding common ground.

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