From Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Jeremiah Wright: a pastor and a prophet

By MARTIN E. MARTY

Posted: April 5, 2008

Through the decades, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. has called me teacher, reminding me of the years when he earned a master's degree in theology and ministry at the University of Chicago - and friend. My wife and I and our guests have worshipped at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, where he recently completed his ministry.

Images of Wright's strident sermons, and his anger at the treatment of black people in the United States, appear constantly on the Internet and cable television, part of the latest controversy in our political campaign season. His critics call Wright anti-American. Critics of his critics charge that the clips we hear and see have been taken out of context. But it is not the context of particular sermons that the public needs as much as the context of Trinity church, and, above all, its pastor.

In the early 1960s, at a time when many young people were being radicalized by the Vietnam War, Wright left college and volunteered to join the U.S. Marine Corps. After three years as a Marine, he chose to serve three more as a naval medical technician, receiving several White House commendations. He came to Chicago to study not long after Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder in 1968.

Wright, like the gifted cohort of his fellow black students, was not content to blend into the academic woodwork. Then the associate dean of the Divinity School, I was informally delegated to talk to the black caucus. We learned that what Wright and his peers wanted was the intense academic and practical preparation for vocations that would make a difference, whether they chose to pursue a doctorate or the pastorate. Chicago's Divinity School focuses on what it calls "public ministry," which includes both conventional pastoral roles and carrying the message and work of the church to the public arena. Wright has since picked up numerous honorary doctorates and served as an adjunct faculty member at several seminaries. But after divinity school, he accepted a call to serve then-struggling Trinity.

Trinity focuses on biblical teaching and preaching. It is a church where music stuns and uplifts, a church given to hospitality and promoting physical and spiritual healing, devoted to education, active in Chicago life. It keeps the world church in mind, with a special accent on African Christianity. The four S's charged against Wright- segregation, separatism, sectarianism and superiority- don't stand up, as countless visitors can attest. I wish those whose vision has been distorted by sermon clips could have experienced what we and our white guests did when we worshipped there: feeling instantly at home.

Yes, while Trinity is "unapologetically Christian," as the second clause in its motto affirms, it is also, as the other clause announces, "unashamedly black." From its beginning, the church has made strenuous efforts to help black Christians overcome the shame they had so long been conditioned to experience. That its members and pastor are, in their own term, "Africentric" should not be more offensive than that synagogues should be "Judeocentric" or that Chicago's Irish parishes be "Celtic-centric." People do not leave Trinity ready to beat up on white people; they are charged to make peace.

To the 10,000 members of Trinity, Wright was, until just a few months ago, "Pastor Wright." Metaphorically, pastor means shepherd. Like members of all congregations, the Trinity flock welcomes strong leadership for organization, prayer and preaching. One-on-one ministry is not easy with thousands in the flock and when the pastor has national responsibilities, but the forms of worship make each participant feel recognized. Responding to the pastoral call to stand and be honored on Mother's Day, for instance, grandmothers, single mothers, stepmothers, foster mothers, gay and lesbian couples, all mothers stood when we visited.

Now, for the hard business: the sermons, which have been mercilessly chipped into for wearying television clips. While Wright's sermons were pastoral - my wife and I have always been awed to hear the Christian Gospel parsed for our personal lives - they were also prophetic. At the university, we used to remark, half lightheartedly, that this Jeremiah was trying to live up to his namesake, the seventh-century B.C. prophet. The Book of Jeremiah is so full of blasts and quasi curses that New England preachers invented a sermonic form called "the jeremiad," a style revived in some Wrightian shouts.

In the end, however, Jeremiah was the prophet of hope, and that note of hope is what attracts the multiclass membership at Trinity and significant television audiences. Both Jeremiahs gave the people work to do: to advance the missions of social justice and mercy that improve the lot of the suffering. For a sample, read Jeremiah 29, where the prophet's letter to the exiles in Babylon exhorts them to settle down and "seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile." Or listen to many a Jeremiah Wright sermon.

Friendship develops through many gestures and shared delights (in the Marty case, stops for sinfully rich barbecue after evening services), and people across the economic spectrum can attest to the generosity of the Wright family.

It would be unfair to Wright to gloss over his abrasive - to say the least - edges. So, in the "Nobody's Perfect" column, I'll register some criticisms. To me, Trinity's honoring of Minister Louis Farrakhan was abhorrent and indefensible, and Wright's fantasies about the U.S. government's role in spreading AIDS was distracting and harmful. He is aware of the now-standard charge by some African-American clergy who say he is a victim of cultural lag, over-influenced by the terrible racial situation when he was formed.

But I've been too impressed by the way Wright preaches the Christian Gospel to break with him. Those who were part of his ministry for years - school superintendents, nurses, legislators, teachers, laborers, the unemployed, the previously shunned and shamed, the anxious- are not going to turn their backs on their pastor and prophet.

Martin E. Marty is a professor emeritus at the University of Chicago Divinity School. This article first appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education.