There's an interesting article in this week's issue of The New Yorker, about Jeremiah Wright, the retired pastor of Barack Obama's church in Chicago. The writer of the piece gives a lot more thought to Wright's ministry of more than 30 years at Trinity Church than we have seen in the uproar over the not-even-30-second-long sound bites that have become so vilified. "God bless America? No! God damn America!" Those few words have come to overshadow everything else he did in more than three decades of ministry at Trinity.

In his oratorical style, Jeremiah Wright is solidly in the line of the Biblical prophets. Our shock and offense over his incendiary words? That is precisely how nearly everybody received Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, Ezekiel, and all the rest in the Hebrew Scriptures.

There have always been two reactions to prophets, from Biblical times to today. They have been killed. Or, they have been dismissed, sanitized, edited.

For instance, both of these things happened to Martin Luther King, Jr. The brouhaha over Jeremiah Wright happened in the weeks leading up to the 40th anniversary of Dr. King's murder. I have been re-reading some history of the civil rights movement through the lens of the Wright controversy. One of Martin Luther King Jr.'s favorite preaching texts was the parable of the poor man Lazarus and the rich man who passed him by every day. Remember that story? When Lazarus dies, he is taken to be in the bosom of his father, Abraham. When the rich man dies he ends up in the place of torment, pleading for relief. Martin Luther King Jr.'s point? If America does not care for its poor, the nation will be damned in the same way that the rich man is condemned!

Over the course of the past 40 years, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr. has been turned by white society into a secular saint. His rough edges have been smoothed. He has been romanticized. In the process, two things have been lost to history:
1. That he was always, always a preacher first and foremost. He never gave a speech. Eveything he said and wrote, in every context was preaching, full of Biblical imagery.
2. That he was extremely radical. (He can only be considered "moderate" in the context of his times, when compared to Stokley Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Malcom X.)