Thursday, March 27, 2008, 12:36 PM
The media furor over the words of Trinity United Church of Christ Senior Pastor the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., has settled down slightly -- my Google News widget for stories about the United Church of Christ still had over 800 stories in it this morning -- and the words that describe Wright continue to be negative:
- The New York Times: "racially inflammatory and anti-American;"
- Knight-Ridder: "corrosive, paranoid, ungodly bitterness;"
- Everywhere: "controversial."
But last night, the Chicago Tribune ran an Op/Ed piece titled "Rev. Wright in a Different Light," by William A. Von Hoene, Jr. Mr. Von Hoene has been a member of Trinity UCC for over 25 years. He is a white man, and he tells a very personal story about Rev. Wright, one which does not describe a white-hating, bitter, inflammatory figure, but a reconciling, loving, truly Godly pastor. Read it to learn who Jeremiah Wright truly is:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-oped0326trinitymar26,0,2414760.story
So where did the media get these fiery, even shocking clips that station after station, web site after web site played over and over again? From Wright's own sermons, of course.
But. They got them by pulling a few seconds out what must have been hundreds of hours of video.
Take a look at this site, too:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/3/20/224958/631/841/481227
The videos here contain longer excerpts from Wright's 9/11 sermon and from his "God Damn America" sermon. And what do we find?
First, that Wright's comment on "chickens coming home to roost" was based on the opinion of an American diplomat. America was attacked, in part, because there are people who resent our foreign policy. I myself wrote, on September 16, "We have sinned against these others as a country, I am sure. We have angered them, perhaps injured them in terrible ways we do not know." More subtle, perhaps: but exactly the same thought.
What else do we find? That the comment was a "faith footnote," and where did it lead? Away from anger, and toward introspection and self-examination. Wright spoke of his own need to set aside anger against the hijackers and to look to his own soul. It's a rhetorical technique that I've used myself, and that many of my colleagues have: put a great deal of energy into building up a false alternative, and then pull back. In the quiet, invite the worshipers to consider another, better way.
To be honest, I prefer the wisdom in Wright's sermon to my own words from that terrible September.
In the other sermon, Wright's point is that America has changed -- remember, this is the man accused of believing that America has not, and cannot, change. In the longer section, he clearly says it. He names things that have oppressed African Americans that were done by government sanction. And he says, governments change. And this one has, both for the better and for the worse. It is when they do evil things, he cries, that God should damn, should judge, America.
Even in context, that's pretty harsh. But not unprecedented. Consider these words, delivered during the American Civil War:
"Yet, if God wills that [this war] continue, until all the wealth piled by the bond-man'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.'"
Or in other words, when America enslaves, then God punish America with war, death, and destruction. The speaker, of course, was Abraham Lincoln.
In 1938, Orson Welles' Mercury Theater of the Air broadcast "The War of the Worlds," and panicked thousands of Americans who believed that Martians had indeed landed in Grovers Mill, New Jersey. Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich have produced a remarkable episode of RadioLab on the event, and on the human ability to simply believe what we hear. It's worth a good listen here:
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/03/07
Among the things I learned is that the "War of the Worlds" has been broadcast not once, but three times, and has caused panic each time. People hear that Martians are landing, and they believe.
These excerpted few seconds of Jeremiah Wright, these frightening, inflammatory few seconds, have been presented to us, I think, from malice. Some people searched through hours of recordings looking for harsh rhetoric. They found it, and they cut out the surrounding words. I can't think of any of my colleagues, including myself, whose reputations would match every single fifteen second snippet of their sermons.
But it's pretty clear that some people did this to further an agenda of their own, and it didn't matter what it did to anyone else. It didn't matter that they would create a lie out of snippets of truth. It didn't matter that it would calumny a man, and that it would slander a congregation. That's a work of evil.
When the clips began to play, the War of the Worlds effect took over. People heard just these little pieces, they heard the condemnatory adjectives, and they believed. It no more represents the truth about Jeremiah Wright or about Trinity UCC or about the United Church of Christ as a whole than Orson Welles' script did about a Martian invasion, but people took it as such. That's not evil, but it is human. And it's sad.
More than sad, though, is that there are institutions that claim, at least, to be governed by a search for truth. These institutions have failed to do so. The American press has been just as subject to the frenzy as anyone else. Yet it is the pride of professional journalists that they will offer facts.
I understand the pressures as well as anyone does: it takes time, it takes effort, and it takes a willingness to resist the screamer headline. But they've failed. I've seen only one professional journalist online who has actually reviewed, in its entirety, one of the sermons at issue. One. That's sad. And it's lazy.
As Rev. Wright said, things change, but God does not change. I fully believe that God will reveal the truth to us all. As the hymn says, "We'll understand it all by and by."
I am not confident that I will see that truth revealed in our day and age. Not between the works of malice and evil, the propensity of human beings to uncritically believe the stories they hear, and the unwillingness of the story-tellers to do the work, and get it right. It will not be done for us by institutions, by governments, or even by the Internet. If you and I would know the truth, we will have to do the labor -- and pray the prayers -- ourselves.
