Right and Wright

There is a difference between liberating truth and oppressive lies and vitriol.
This week, I listened to an interview of President Barack Obama’s campaign manager, David Plouffe. He has written a new book called, “The Audacity to Win.”
Every time someone uses that word, I bristle, especially when those people are part of the group that helped vilify Jeremiah Wright.
In his book, “The Audacity of Hope,” the president cited a sermon by that same title preached by his then-pastor, Jeremiah Wright. I remember that sermon. It was a masterpiece. It shared how African American people had the audacity to hope in spite of a nation, a culture and a religion that so actively worked against them.
The sermon was liberating truth. If the goal was to lift some of the burden of oppression off the shoulders of his listeners, Jeremiah Wright achieved that.
Pastor Wright’s sermons were typically like that. They were a fine blend of history, sociology and theology, an amazing mix that was able to penetrate minds, hearts and spirits of people who wanted and needed to know that God cared for them.
Never was there hatred preached against a people. The history of Africans in this country was told, but hearing that truth was liberating. It made oppression make sense, in a weird way. Being oppressed just because one was black didn’t work. Being taught the history helped us understand how oppression could thrive.
We could begin to move past that which we were beginning to understand.
Wright always taught us how the government was not for “the least of these.” The government was about money and power. That is true, always has been. We needed to be aware of the government’s role in our oppression if we were to know how to navigate through the mine-filled waters. Because at the end of the day, he would teach, oppression could not be the excuse for us not doing what God had equipped us to do.
Our ancestors died so that we would have the right to read. So, he taught, you’d better get your education.
Our ancestors died so that we could apply for jobs that had previously been closed to us because we were black. So, he told us, you had better go through the doors that had been opened to us.
Yes, it was audacious to think that we could overcome oppression, but, he taught us, our ancestors had done it, and their ancestors before them. Now, it was time for us to pick up the baton and look up. We were to look back only for what lessons we were supposed to use as we moved forward, but we were never to forget what the past had taught us.
It was liberating. In true prophetic form, Pastor Wright criticized the government, not only for being racist, but for its classism, its homophobia and its sexism. He taught us that we were not to be racist, homophobic, or stuck in classism. He was as hard on black folks as he was on white folks when it came to not living up to the life God demands of us.
He would not allow us to forget that the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration of Independence – were all documents that professed to be “for the people.” This was a government that was supposed to be “of the people, by the people and for the people.”
We were not to forget that we were part of the “people” that the government was supposed to protect. We were to remember that God made no mistakes, and that we were as precious to God as were all of the other people God created.
In the end, his messages were about this God who did not condone bigotry or racism or sexism or homophobia or militarism or classism. This God, Wright taught, had an agenda for humankind that people on earth just did not understand, or if they did, just would not follow.
The people surrounding President Obama’s campaign did not understand any of this. They reacted to that 10 second sound bite. The talk show hosts were only interested in fanning the flames of dissent and hatred so that possibly, Mr. Obama would not be elected.
Limbaugh, Beck, O’Reilly, Hannity, Coulter … pride themselves on their Conservatism. What they say, though, has little to do with God, as opposed to Wright’s messages. In the Bible, God did say he would damn countries that did not follow God’s words and keep God’s covenant.
The word used over and over was “cursed.” Cursed be those who do not listen to God and do what God commands.
Why it is that intelligent people, news people, cannot take the time to separate the truth from the lies, why intelligent news people will not call out the hatred from the sources from which it is really coming, I do not know.
I do know, though, that Jeremiah Wright did not preach hatred. Someone needs to have the courage to say it.
I just did.