Finding Wright's good message: 4-28-14
April 28, 2014
The Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., as most of you know, got into all kinds of trouble when his parishioner, Barack Obama, first ran for president in 2008.
Excerpts of some of his more provocative sermons lit up cyberspace and he was put on the defensive. Eventually he resigned as pastor of the United Church of Christ congregation he had led since 1972 after even Obama criticized some of his words.
That's just a bit of background for a few things I want to tell you about Wright's appearance last week at St. Paul School of Theology in suburban Kansas City, where he preached at a chapel service.
Wright took as his biblical text the famous "Good Samaritan" parable in the gospel of Luke and aimed many of his remarks both directly and indirectly at the modern state of Israel for oppressing the Palestinian people. He also took a swipe at journalists, too, so there was plenty of judgment to go around.
For today I will not focus on his strongly pro-Palestinian stand (which I found to be interesting but unbalanced and in some ways unfair). Rather, I will highlight an important point he made about where a literalistic reading of the Bible and in laws in general leads.
"What the law says and what the Lord requires are sometimes two very different things," he said.
He noted, for instance, that one of the people in the Good Samaritan story who avoided the robbed, wounded and naked man on the side of the road knew that touching a dead body could, by Hebrew law, make one unclean.
So that person apparently used a literalistic understanding of that law as an excuse not to help someone in need.
These situations can get complicated. A simplistic example: Suppose you're standing on a dock at a closed marina and someone quite near you is drowning. In that case is it against the law to break the window of the shuttered marina to grab a life-preserver ring visible in the window and toss it to the one drowning? Well, yes, it's against the law to break in and steal. But what's of more worth -- a window or a life?
Wright's point -- despite being made in a quite political way -- was a good one. If you read the Bible or even secular laws literally in all cases, you sometimes will not do what chapter 6 of the book of Micah in the Bible says the Lord requires of us: ". . .to do justice, embrace faithful love and walk humbly with your God."
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CAN SCIENCE PROVE GOD DOESN'T EXIST?
At our congregation's family camp this past weekend a group of us spent an hour or two on Saturday conversing with one of our members, a scientist, about the relation between science and faith. A great conversation. So in a bit of nice timing when I got home, I happened across this interesting piece that contends that science has not disproved the existence of God, despite some claims to the contrary. Nor, of course, will science ever be able to disprove the existence of God.
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A FINAL P.S.: Do you have my new book yet? It's Woodstock: A Story of Middle Americans, and I think you'll find it engaging. You can read about it here. If you want an autographed copy, e-mail me at [email protected] and I'll tell you how we can make that happen.
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