The Question: How should Barack Obama have responded to inflammatory remarks made by his former pastor, Dr. Jeremiah Wright? Are you responsible for what your spiritual leader says from the pulpit?
Jeremiah Wright and I are retired clergy in America’s most liberal Christian denomination, and “inflammatory” remarks can be clipped from our archives depending on what the clipper wants to burn up. Currently, what the Wright clippers want to burn up is a former parishioner, who is said to be guilty of inflammation by association.
1. NONinflammatory speech gets nothing burned up, nothing cauterized, nothing welded. From Public Speaking 101 in 1935, I remember this: “Start Slow: Speak Low: Rise Higher: CATCH FIRE!” Without such oratory, nothing changes in religion or politics. “Tongues of flame” are associated with the birth of the Christian Church (Acts of the Apostles 2:1-4). From Wright, Obama caught the fire of the Gospel and became what he is today, a devout and faithful Christian.
2. What gets our attention gets us. Fire seizes our attention, so is the best metaphor for successful oratory – the essence of oratory being the getting and holding of attention.
3. ”We heard Jesus say ‘HATE your father and mother!’” That’s what the Jewish authorities’ spies reported back to them, as a fragment of what he actually said (Gospel of Luke 14:26): “Whoever comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” What! Jesus didn’t believe the Ten Commandments? Rather, he read them according to their beginning (Exodus 20:3 & Deuteronomy 5:6 [“no other gods”]): We are so wholly to love God that all lesser relationships – even life itself – are love/hate relationships.
“We heard Jesus say “LOVE your enemies!” Again, the spies’ report was accurate though fragmentary. For generosity of spirit, nothing else in ancient literature can equal the Gospel of Matthew 5:43-48.
(THINK how these two inflammatory statements reconstrue both "love" and "hate.")
Jesus’ oratory inflamed the multitudes with hope and the authorities with fear. Fear won until Easter, Jesus’ resurrection.
4. Rightly, and in the spirit of Lincoln, Jeremiah Wright condemns the unbiblical notion of an in-our-pocket deity at our service when we say “God bless America!” Rather, the Holy God provides in love and condemns (for short, “damns”) in judgment. The Lord’s Prayer (which we Christians pray daily) implicitly condemns all human governments in explicitly petitioning “THY kingdom come, THY will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”
5. Rightly, Obama dissociated himself from the Wright clips without dissociating himself from a man of high significance in his life – a significance he compared with that of blood-relatives. In his magisterial speech on race (18 Mar 08), he transformed the minuses into pluses, the past’s pains into encouragement in the present and hope for a better future. The wounds of the past can be cauterized by the fire of the will to work together. The confrontational words of the past need to fade into the past, and America needs to turn up the volume on Obama’s reconciliational words of change toward a better America and better world.
6. It’s good news that communication advances are making the public harder to fool with dirty political tricks and easier to inform about complexities. Our democracy is maturing, as the present presidential campaign evidences. Now if we could just stop taking wooden nickels, and cut once only after measuring twice....
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