Was Jeremiah Wright -- Wrong?

That's the question Frederick Russell, pastor of the Miracle Temple Seventh-day Adventist church addressed in his Sabbath sermon on April 26.  More on that below.

As a result of his performance at the National Press Club on Monday, April 28, the condemnation of Rev. Jeremiah Wright has extended even more widely, with many former sympathizers now expressing dismay.  Yet, to a large extent, the controversy remains more about style than substance, about isolated overstatements than the predominant thrust of his message and ministry.

Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, for example, emphatically declares “I’ve had it with Wright” because the pastor’s response to his critics was so “egocentric” and overreaching in identifying his kind of church and ministry with so diverse a reality as the African American church.

Yet, says Robinson, Wright “made some good points yesterday when he entered the lion’s den of the National Press Club. I especially liked this one: ‘My goddaughter's unit just arrived in Iraq this week, while those who call me unpatriotic have used their positions of privilege to avoid military service while sending . . . over 4,000 American boys and girls of every race to die over a lie.’”

It would be to our own spiritual detriment if we were to use Wright’s rhetorical overkill and confrontational style as reason to avoid what he has to say about the “prophetic tradition” of the Bible and what that has to say about race relations, peace, and economic justice in our time and culture.  If anyone is truly interested in finding out who Jeremiah Wright is and what he stands for, the interview with him on Bill Moyers’ Journal is a good place to start.

And whatever we may think about Wright’s views, there are still more fundamental issues at stake for Seventh-day Adventists, as Pastor Frederick Russell brought out in his sermon last Sabbath at Miracle Temple in Baltimore, Maryland.  In his message, “Was Jeremiah Wright – Wrong?,” Dr. Russell addressed “the dangers of patriotism gone awry, so much so that it seeks to destroy anyone who speaks contrary to what it believes about itself.”

He noted that the political and religious culture of Jesus’ day joined together to “take him out, because he dared to speak something against what they perceived as loyalty to the temple, and loyalty to the culture.” This kind of patriotism “can become a religion in itself,” Russell warned, leading us to “unwittingly begin to worship the country itself.”

Will “the church of the living God” be silent while this kind of “dangerous patriotism” leads to the vilification and demonization of a religious community and its pastor based on distortions?  “As a Seventh-day Adventist Christian,” the pastor declared, “I must stand for religious liberty.”

Pastor Russell’s sermon can be view on PraizeVision or at the Miracle Temple blog

Comments

[Johnny A. Ramirez]

Great post. Significant I think is the fact that so many pastors, including Hillary Clinton's, are standing behind Rev. Wright.