The national uproar over video out-takes from sermons of Jeremiah Wright, recently retired pastor of Trinity UCC in Chicago, has brought back all sorts of memories and feelings for me as I have reflected on my connection with African and African American Christians over the years.

       My earliest memories of contact with people who were called “Negro” in the 1950s included a black minister who was guest in my parents’ home.  I remember sitting at the breakfast table with him while my mother politely but stiffly engaged in conversation with him.  One could feel a certain tension in the air as we spoke and he showed us pictures of his children.  We weren’t used to being around people of different races.  Another time I helped my father bring a box of groceries to a poor, inner city St. Paul black family and remember the glee on the children’s faces as they looked at the food, but I started to panic when I felt caught at the back of the table and was relieved when my father took me to the car.

            The summer before I entered seventh grade my father directed a junior high church camp on Lake Minnetonka, which many years later would be the site of an infamous boat party involving members of the Minnesota Vikings.  Among other things the camp was a cooperative venture between the Twin Cities Congregational Churches and Evangelical and Reformed Churches and a first step in the movement to form the United Church of Christ.  Among the camp counselors was a young black woman from St. Louis.  She stayed at our house the night before the camp, giving me a chance to get to know her and like her.  She ended up teaching me to swim at camp and during the big dance on our final night I asked her to dance.  My parents were proud of me for this bold act of racial integration.

            During my years at Lakeland College there were a number of black students, in increasing numbers, and some of them became my fraternity brothers.  This was my first opportunity to relate socially with African American youths on a significant scale.   Over the years the percentage of black students at Lakeland was higher than most Wisconsin colleges.

            By the time I entered graduate school in 1967 Martin Luther King. Jr. had been active and well known and people were starting to appreciate the contributions of black people to American culture.  I ended up taking a black history course from a gay Jewish professor who had received a fair amount of flak in the 1940s for taking up “Negro History” as a valid field of study.  The course opened my eyes to the significant contribution of African Americans to our society and the deep cultural richness of their origins in Africa.

            The following spring Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and the country was in an uproar over race and Viet Nam.  After some soul searching and painful decision making I decided to enter Eden Theological Seminary in the fall of 1968.  Part of the seminary curriculum was field education, and my assignment was to participate as an ordinary member of St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church.  

Karen graciously accompanied me to worship each Sunday at this historical black church, even though the service lasted much longer than the hour we were used to experiencing.  The first Sunday we worshiped at St. Paul AME the hour came and went and then almost another hour before the Rev. Vinton Anderson pronounced the benediction.  We adjusted our watches and our mentality to the longer worship time and decided to become active members of the church by singing in the choir, participating in the Mr. and Mrs. Club, and helping with the Boy Scouts.  This was a significant experience for two kids from east and central Wisconsin!

At the same time I was becoming immersed into the black church, I also did some reading in black theologians like Joseph Washington, Jr. and James H. Cone, who was the first proponent of black liberation theology.  Cone was more militant than the Martin Luther King and reflected some of Malcolm X’s edge.  He challenged black preachers to be “hot” in their pursuit of racial justice.

Now some forty years later I watched a video clip of Jeremiah Wright engaging in a shouting match with a flippant white interviewer who charged Wright with racism.  Wright kept asking him, “Have you read black liberation theology?  Have you read James Cone.”  A light bulb went on inside my head.  Yes!  I had read James Cone way back in seminary.

I went back to Cone’s first book, Black Theology and Black Power, which I had read as part of a month-long course focused on black theology and it helped me to understand where Wright was coming from.  His church’s motto is “unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian.”  In his book Cone minces no words in calling for the church to stand up for the dispossessed and downtrodden, especially those of color.  One might get the feeling that in his opinion only black people can truly advocate for justice, but in the last few pages of the book he writes these words.

It is to be expected that many white people will ask:  “How can I a white man, become black?  My skin is white and there is nothing I can do.”  Being black in America has very little to do with skin color.  To be black means that your heart, your soul, your mind, and your body are where the dispossessed are.  We all know that a racist structure will reject and threaten a black man in white skin as quickly as a black man in black skin.  It accepts and rewards whites in black skins nearly as well as whites in white skins.  Therefore, being reconciled to God does not mean that one’s skin is physically black.  It essentially depends on the color of your heart, soul, and mind.

            Even though Jeremiah Wright is several years older than I am he was attending seminary about the same time I was and reading Cone’s books.  Of course one difference between Wright and me is that he immersed himself into the ministry of a south side Chicago church while I ended up returning to Wisconsin and ministering in small towns with virtually white populations.  However, I have never forgotten my exposure to black culture and the black church.  Perhaps my love of jazz is a remnant of that time in the late sixties when I studied black history and worshiped in a black church.

            Like our Conference Minister I am pretty buttoned down and reticent to share all of my opinions and feelings ---- quite in contrast to Jeremiah Wright who seems to “let it all hand out.”  I wish I had the courage of a prophet like Jeremiah Wright, because I know he is a passionately committed Christian.  I also know he is not a racist by any stretch of the imagination.  He simply stands in the line of an Old Testament prophet named Jeremiah who minced no words and sometimes spoke so passionately that he offended the people in power.  We could use some of that passion.     

            These are just a few of my thoughts and memories in this time.  I believe we in the United Church of Christ can be proud of our heritage on behalf of justice and the diversity of opinion and practice we encourage within our communion.  At the Church Council meeting shortly after this brouhaha over race erupted I asked the Council members if they would like to talk about the controversy or have me share what David Moyer had written.  The predominant opinion I heard was that our Neillsville people are glad to be members of a church with varying mentalities and opinions and that we can live with one another, even when things get tough and testy.  If that is true I am happy to be part of this church.