All the Assembly Kept Silence
Download a PDF of this sermon Amos 7:7-15 • Acts 15:6-12 In 2008, a fragment of a sermon by Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ got clipped into the news cycle for some days. To the shock and awe of millions, that preacher, who was pastor...What’s A Human For?
We are so divided, they say. Blue and red, conservative and liberal, urban and rural pulled under separate enclaves like twelve-year old boys and girls at the edges of a dance floor; opposing sides never speaking. Laid on this story of division, of course, are some heart-warming ones about this tow n that is managing a spirit of comity, or that organization hosting hard conversations. The big scheme the media have latched onto is that all are contributing to social disorder because we are all stuck in our own minds, in our own tribes, unwilling to listen or learn, or to see the other’s side.
Called to the Stage
What is a prophet? Can it be said that it is God who calls a person to the stage of history? And how may they who speak, and they who listen, discern the impulse to speak as not mere psychological stimulation, or egotism, but a movement worthy of the name of God?
Resistance and Resilience
In the days before the inauguration, I viewed a four-hour documentary on PBS. Called “The Divided States of America,” it examined how Americans grew far apart during the presidency of Barack Obama. Grief gripped me as I watched. Frame after frame revealed the unrestrained hatred of countless Americans for our former president. . . What was its source?
The Bottom of the Waves
The blunt fact is that scriptures Old and New pronounce a fulsome God damn not on foreign nations but on the prophets’ own land. Stiff-necked Bible-thumpers prefer Micah mounted in museum glass to the real thing. But if we do not take scissors to our scriptures, then those blunt words of Rev. Jeremiah Wright exactly match the purpose of the prophets: to that land which perverts equity through greed and force the word is, God damn!
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