John 20:19-31 

For more than five years our nation has been involved in a war in Iraq that has cost over 4000 American lives as well as countless Iraqi lives. We have lost our credibility in much of the world. The American economy teeters on the brink of recession. Our recent Iowa winter notwithstanding, global climate change threatens all of us. Health care and social security remain unsolved and largely unaddressed. Much of our recent political discourse, however, has centered not on these issues but on the sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

When I mentioned last Sunday that I would be exploring those sermons in this sermon today there was an audible murmur through the congregation. I seemed to have touched on an issue that people were thinking about. Early in the week, several members emailed articles about this issue to me. Others asked, “So what are you going to say.”

In yesterday’s Press-Citizen I had a small article about the “Audacity of Rev. Wright”—in a sense a preview of this morning’s sermon. If I might take a moment for a personal note, I want to thank those members whose suggestions after reading the draft of my newspaper article vastly improved what I had written. The flaws, of course, are all mine. And I want to thank those who sent me articles about this issue—articles that I tried to avoid reading in the hope of writing something original, articles that I found helpful as I was finishing this sermon.

So, what are we to make of the preaching and the ministry of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, the recently retired Senior Minister at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, who for 20 years was the pastor to Senator and Presidential candidate Barak Obama?

Let me say first that I have been surprised to be reminded how much sermons can matter. I’ve been preaching for over 20 years. I have heard from church members from time to time that a sermon spoke deeply to them. I’ve also heard when my sermons have troubled people, from the polite: “I disagreed with one thing that you said this morning,” to the member of another congregation who shook my hand and saying: “You were absolutely wrong.”

Those who preach need both the encouragement and the criticism and we value both.

All this is to say, I know that preaching can touch people. But our popular culture often tends to disparage the sermon. And in some sense I think I might have forgotten about the power and import of preaching.

Yet suddenly the preaching of Rev. Wright is seen on You Tube. It is discussed on Meet the Press. It caused one presidential candidate to deliver a major speech. And just when it seemed like the issue had gone away, another candidate was talking about the choice of pastors. I thought it might be old news by now, but there was Obama talking about sermons on The View and just two days ago people were discussing the issue on The News Hour.

Sermons matter. Clergy know this. It’s why we stay up late. It’s why we enter the pulpit with fear and trembling. Still, it’s surprising to hear of sermons carrying such great import beyond the congregation.

I know it sounds like pointing out the obvious, but sermons are public events. The preacher stands up in front of an assembly of people and speaks.

I mention this because of preaching’s contrast with the Gospel lesson that we heard this morning. In the evening of the first Easter day, John tells us that the disciples were gathered in a house behind locked doors out of fear. A week later they were again in the house with the doors shut and presumably locked.

In that setting, the risen Jesus comes and stands among them.

The risen Christ does not know the barricades of locked doors or locked hearts.

The risen Christ is not limited by our closed windows or closed minds.

The risen Christ will not be constrained by our fears.

Look as Jesus stands among his followers. I don’t know how—perhaps modern particle physics could give us an answer. I’ve always appreciated the suggestion of C. S. Lewis that the risen Jesus could walk through walls because he is more real than them—in the same way that an airplane can move through the clouds that look so solid.

How this happened is not central to John’s story. What strikes me as I hear this story this year is that the good news of the resurrection began in private. What would later be told from the rooftops with great boldness was first heard by fearful disciples, hidden away.

When African Americans were kept in slavery in the United States, they often would hold secret meetings out of the sight and hearing of the White slaveholders. Many slave narratives mention “Brush Arbors”—hidden churches built from brush cane and reeds—where slaves could, in the words of the spiritual, “Steal away to Jesus.” [And when we really listen, that song, along with so many of the spirituals, seems to be singing more of escape than heaven. “Steal away home, I ain’t got long to stay here.] Sometimes these gatherings were prayer meetings. Sometimes they would talk of escape. These were opportunities to speak freely in private, to say what couldn’t be said around the slave owners.

It’s said that with the end of slavery, the churches were one of the few places where African Americans could continue to speak freely. Largely out of the sight and hearing of white Christian America, African American congregations developed their own style of worship and of preaching that was honest and, to outsiders, sometimes shocking.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., shocked people when he spoke of American society “gone mad on war,” when he said that “We’ve committed more war crimes than almost any nation in the world.” Forty years ago, on March 31, 1968, King preached “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” In what would be his last Sunday morning sermon, he told those with ears to hear, “I come by here to say that America too is going to Hell, if we don't use her wealth. If America does not use her vast resources of wealth to end poverty, to make it possible for all of God's children to have the basic necessities of life, she too will go to Hell.” Strong language from the pulpit. The words shocked us but we should give thanks that someone was audacious enough to speak the truth.

Jeremiah Wright has the gift of audacity, which my dictionary defines as “bold courage.” This audacity includes the ability and willingness to speak the uncomfortable truth. This audacity is in direct line with “the prophetic traditions of the Bible that regularly expose the failures of society in savage rhetoric” as the Old Testament scholar and UCC member Walter Bruggeman recently put it.

What was said at one time, if not in private, at least shut off from most of White America, has now become very public. In recent weeks, as they listened to a few thirty-second sound bites ripped from the Rev. Wright’s 36 years of preaching at Trinity many have felt they heard audacity in the dictionary’s second sense of “shameless or brazen boldness; insolence, impudence.” Senator Obama said it well in his recent speech: “The fact that so many people are surprised to hear…anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive…but the anger is real; it is powerful; and…to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between races.”

The Rev. Wright’s preaching is of concern now because he was Senator Barak Obama’s pastor for twenty years. The controversy ignited by his words has spread across the political spectrum. Even friends and admirers of Wright have pointed out his lapses as well as any talk radio host could do. In his speech on March 18, Senator Obama condemned Wright’s controversial statements including his “views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation.”

Why then did the Senator remain as a member of Trinity? Clergy have known for a long time that no one sitting in the pews agrees with everything we say. And for that we are grateful. The United Church of Christ strongly encourages its members to think for themselves. You know that. You come to this church—and stay here—because it is a place that respects questions, that calls forth our best thought. More generally, people do not stay in congregations simply because they agree with the minister. They stay because of ties to the body of people in that religious community and because of what that congregation is doing in the larger community.

Wright is audacious. At times, as when he claims that AIDS was a United States government plot, he can be wrong. At other times, he borders on the prophetic. The biblical prophets tell fierce truth out of love for their hearers and for the better way that would be open to them if truth were acknowledged. Following the advice of the late Rev. William Sloane Coffin, he comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.

Perhaps Rev. Wright’s courage, and his anger as well, should be forgiven their excesses, since he does indeed touch on painful realities our nation must face. His preaching has empowered a generation of African Americans on Chicago’s South Side, served their needs and promoted their well being. Far from practicing racial separatism, he is known for his extravagant welcome of members of white congregations who come to worship with and learn from the people at Trinity.

The audacity of Rev. Wright is most likely not an issue that will go away anytime soon. It will no doubt continue to be brought up during this seemingly endless (remember all the way back to our snowbound caucuses) primary season. Should Senator Obama win the Democratic nomination, you can bet we will hear more.

[I should probably say as an aside here that I am in no way suggesting whom you should or shouldn’t vote for—in case the IRS is listening. That, of course, is another sermon.]

And yet, I think there is an Easter story here—not the usual one with angels and empty tombs. As I think about this, I get a sense of resurrection possibility. It is an Easter story about what might happen when what is said behind shut doors becomes public.

In his speech a couple of weeks ago, Senator Obama talked about the rooms in which Blacks and Whites still gather out of eyesight and earshot of each other. He told us about the African American anger that isn’t expressed publicly to white friends and co-workers, but that “does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table…and occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning.”

He also spoke of white anger and resentment that “aren’t always expressed in polite company” but that shape the political landscape and that most of us have no doubt heard or maybe even expressed.

Black and white, Hispanic and Asian—with the doors shut for fear of one another we express our anger and resentment.

What might happen if we allowed the risen Christ to come among us in those secret places and call us out into new relationships and new conversations? What might happen if we stopped avoiding the issue of race in this country and approached it with honesty in the light of day? Here again we are confronted with what I called last week the challenge and the possibility of resurrection.

In his audacity Rev. Wright has done much good and also exposed his own very human flaws. And now, because of sermons of all things, we as a nation have an opportunity to address our long-standing racial issues in new ways.

It is no longer fashionable to speak of the judgment of God. Clergy are advised to speak words of comfort even to the comfortable. In a time of war, in a time of pending economic and ecological catastrophe, we need people like Jeremiah Wright who are bold enough, audacious enough to tell of God’s gracious judgment. It is only through listening to such words of that we might also learn of the audacity of hope.