In any age, a prophet draws wrath

"The Almighty God himself is not the only, not the, not the God just standing out saying through Hosea, ’I love you, Israel.’ He’s also the God that stands up before the nations and said: ’Be still and know that I’m God, that if you don’t obey me I will break the backbone of your power, and slap you out of the orbits of your international and national relationships.’"

Those words sound like something by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, Sen. Barack Obama’s minister. He was much quoted over the weekend as having said: "God damn America." But the quotation comes not from Wright, but from the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s first address to the Montgomery Improvement Association on December 5, 1955. Both African-American preachers have understood prophetic biblical preaching far better than those who feign shock at and condemn Wright’s words.

Critics of Wright never cared that for 36 years he labored to build a community of redemption on Chicago’s Southside. They didn’t notice that his congregation had become the largest congregation in the United Church of Christ, a denomination rooted in the traditions of Puritan New England. They wouldn’t care that it claimed to be "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian." Wright’s words become significant for them only as a means of damaging Wright’s most prominent parishioner, Obama.

But Wright’s and Obama’s critics are too far removed from biblical study to recognize that Wright is following in the footpath of the biblical prophet Jeremiah, whose oracles interpreted the sufferings of the kingdoms of Israel and Judah as punishment for their failure to live up to their covenant with God. To be in covenant with God, to be "under God," is to be blessed by the divine when we are faithful. But woe be us, the prophet Micah said, when we have failed "to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God."

Wright would take his first name very seriously. After all, he’s the son of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Sr., who was for 62 years the pastor of Philadelphia’s Grace Baptist Church. From 1959 to 1961, young Wright attended the Afro-Baptists’ Virginia Union University in Richmond. There, he would have known Vernon Johns, who had recently left the pulpit of Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church and had been appearing to preach regularly at Virginia Union for 30 years. A blogger recently wrote: "The first time I heard of a sermon preached about ’G-d Damn America’ it was given by Johns, then preacher at Ebenezer Baptist church just before MLK was hired as its preacher. This was back in the 1960s. I suppose old Vernon had every right to preach that sermon back then."

The prophet Jeremiah, Vernon Johns and Jeremiah Wright Sr. often spoke truth to power in ways that would be awkward for public relations specialists.

Wright Jr.’s 36 years at Trinity United Church of Christ has been a far more stable career than Johns ever had. Johns was driven out of every pulpit he ever held and, twice, subsequently rehired into them. So the right-wing chicken-hawks can cackle and crow about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. all they want. Unlike them, he is a decorated veteran of the United States Marines, with three presidential commendations from Lyndon Johnson.

"G-d damn, America," indeed. It should have more men like him.

The prophet Jeremiah made statements that, at the time, seemed outrageous and made him unacceptable as an adviser to King Josiah. Jeremiah Wright has resigned as a member of Senator Obama’s Spiritual Advisory Committee, and Obama has distanced himself from Wright’s offensive speech.

A prophet never sits at ease in Zion.