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?
If Jeremiah Wright were like most pastors in America’s 300,000 or so congregations—baptizing, marrying, visiting the sick and burying—his sermons wouldn’t be an issue. But like the name he bears. he speaks often in the thundering tones of the prophet.
Any pastor’s sermons can be an issue for the folks in the pews. But these sermons are now in the relentless news cycle. And there, blinded by the bright lights and passions of a presidential campaign, most observers will miss the real dynamics of the pastor-parishioner relationship.
I wish we had a shared context for evaluating such things, but we don’t. Many people, and most journalists, are not churchgoers. If they were, they would be more sympathetic to Pastor Wright’s plea to hear a whole sermon, not just a sound bite. And they might have a chance to grasp that real preaching is a conversation that takes place over time, sometimes a long time.
That’s not to say that any of us who preaches is not wholly responsible for what we say. How I wish I could take back some of what I’ve dropped on my parishioners. How I rue the times when I lost focus or discipline and wandered from the point I was making, indulged in a side comment, or drifted further than I intended to go in a sermon. Those are often just the points that form the memory, obscure the real point, or give rise to a flash of anger at the church door.
Though I know both the glories and the agonies of the pulpit, I am a white man preaching in the largely staid Anglican tradition. The Black Church practices and values preaching in a different key. Passion is full-bodied. The particularity of the prophet is expected, where in many white churches such particularity would scandalize.
My professional preacher’s heart is with Pastor Wright when I hear him defend long years of work—and his singular accomplishment in building a very large, very healthy congregation—by trying to put his flashpoints back into that context. But he and Senator Obama are no longer shaking hands at the church door.
And the mystery of what really goes on at 11 o’clock on Sunday in America, or between preacher and pew sitter, is now an issue with full fury and little light. And, sadly, still a mystery.
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