53408648.

doc
Page 1 of 3

March 23, 2008

Obama Talk Fuels Easter Sermons

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN and NEELA BANERJEE

This Easter Sunday, the holiest day of the Christian calendar, many pastors will start
their sermons about the Resurrection of Jesus and weave in a pointed message about
racism and bigotry, and the need to rise above them.
Some pastors began to rethink their sermons on Tuesday, when Senator Barack
Obama gave a speech about race, seeking to calm a furor that had erupted over
explosive excerpts of sermons by his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
The controversy drove the nation to the unpatrolled intersection of race and religion,
and as many pastors prepared for their Easter message they said they felt compelled
to talk about it. Their congregants were writing and e-mailing them: some wanted to
share their emotional reactions to Mr. Obama’s speech; others asked how Mr. Wright,
the minister, could utter such inflammatory things from the pulpit.
Some ministers interviewed over the last several days said they would wait until after
Easter to preach on it all, because Easter and headlines do not mix. But others said
there was no better moment than Easter, when sanctuaries swelled with their biggest
crowds of the year, and redemption was the dominant theme.
At Mount Ararat Baptist Church in Pittsburgh, the Rev. William H. Curtis said: “At the
end of the day, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ makes it possible for even an African-
American and a female to articulate the hopes and dreams of America, and do so
with the hope of becoming president. Isn’t that wonderful?
“It’s possible because we do believe that humanity has redeeming qualities, and the
resurrection of Christ gives us that faith,” said Mr. Curtis, who is president of the
Hampton Ministers Conference, a national association of black ministers.
Philip L. Blackwell, senior pastor at the First United Methodist Church at the Chicago
Temple, said he would weave an anecdote into his sermon about a black friend of his
who had been stopped by the police, who were suspicious because he was driving an
expensive car, which he owned.
“The church needs to be a community within which the pain can be shared,” said Mr.
Blackwell, who is white and leads an urban, racially mixed congregation. “The
grievances can be aired, and the power of that can be directed toward the ‘new
creation’ that is portrayed in the Resurrection.”
The whole controversy started, after all, with a minister, preaching, in a church.
Television programs showed recorded parts of sermons by Mr. Wright, who is
nationally known for his work in creating economic development programs in the
inner city, inspiring many other black pastors to do the same, and for his fiery,
prophetic preaching style. In the excerpts, Mr. Wright thunders that the government
has inflicted AIDS on black people, and that the United States deserved the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11.
53408648.doc
Page 2 of 3

Mr. Obama responded with a major address that examined race relations through the
eyes of blacks and whites, and called for Americans to open up an honest dialogue
about race.
Many ministers said they would preach without explicitly mentioning Mr. Obama
because they wanted to avoid alienating politically diverse congregations. They are
also aware that some churches accused of making political endorsements have seen
their tax-exempt status investigated by the Internal Revenue Service.
The response to the controversy from the pulpit will vary, of course, depending on a
church’s denomination, racial composition and political and theological leanings, as
well the predilections of the pastor. The Wright controversy is a natural topic for
those in the United Church of Christ, a predominantly white denomination that
includes Mr. Obama’s and Mr. Wright’s church, Trinity United Church of Christ in
Chicago (the largest church in the denomination).
Clergy members from Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and white evangelical
churches are, very generally, less likely to incorporate the Wright controversy into
their sermons than are those at black and mainline Protestant churches.
The Rev. Leith Anderson, president of the National Association of Evangelicals and
lead pastor of Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minn., said he would not be
preaching about the racial issues raised by Mr. Obama’s speech and expected few
other evangelical pastors to, either.
“Easter is about Easter and the Resurrection of Jesus, and it’s pretty unlikely that any
other topic would eclipse that,” Mr. Anderson said. “That’s not to say those other
topics aren’t important, but this is the most important.”
Most evangelical churches, he said, “are Bible-driven, not current-events-driven.”
In some churches, the evils of racism have long been common fare. In others, it is
barely ever mentioned. But with immigration changing the nation’s ethnic balance,
many congregations are struggling with the kinds of resentments that Mr. Obama
touched on in his speech.
Monsignor Patrick Bishop, of Transfiguration Catholic Church in Marietta, Ga., said his
parish had recently transformed from being almost all white to including blacks,
Hispanics and Filipinos.
He said that next week, on the second Sunday of Easter, he would say in his homily:
“Christ says in Him there is no east or west, north or south, slave or free, male or
female. If a person cannot look beyond the color of their skin then they don’t really
understand the Gospel.”
The Very Rev. Tracey Lind, dean of Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Cleveland, said she
would preach about when Mary Magdalene and “the other Mary” went to Jesus’ tomb
and were met by an angel who rolled away the stone before the cave to reveal that
Christ had risen from the dead.
“I’m going to talk about the stones that need to be rolled away from the tombs of
lives, that are holding us in places of death and away from God,” Ms. Lind said. “One
of the main stones in our churches, synagogues, mosques, communities, countries,
world is the pervasive stone of racism. What Obama has done is moved the stone a
little bit.
“I will ask our congregation to look at the stones in our lives,” she said.
Some ministers said their congregants were focused not on white racism, but on Mr.
Wright’s remarks. The Rev. Dean Snyder, pastor of Foundry United Methodist church,
53408648.doc
Page 3 of 3

which was the Clintons’ home church during President Bill Clinton’s tenure, said some
of his congregants were aghast at Mr. Wright’s remarks.
During staff meetings this week at his church, Mr. Snyder said he noticed the rising
awareness among some African-Americans of white Americans, he said, “who don’t
understand the history of black people in this country and the role of the black
church as a prophetic voice, and that in church you can say things that you couldn’t
in larger society.”
The Rev. Kent Millard of St. Luke’s United Methodist Church in Indianapolis said he
felt Mr. Obama had explained the reality of the relationship between a pastor and his
congregants.
“Senator Richard Lugar, the ranking Republican on the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, is member of our congregation, and I would hope he would never be held
accountable for everything I have said in the last 15 years,” said Dr. Millard, who is
white. “Why is there any assumption that a person in church is expected to agree
with everything a pastor says?”
Some black ministers said that their sermons might address how the reputation of a
man many of them revere was reduced to sound bites. They pointed out that
sermons in black churches covered a long and circuitous path from crisis to
resolution, and it was unfair to judge the entire message on one or two sentences.
“I may not use his exact language,” said the Rev. Kenneth L. Samuel, pastor of
Victory Church in Stone Mountain, Ga., “but I can tell you that the basic thrust of
much of my preaching resonates with Dr. Wright. I don’t think I’m necessarily trying
to preach people into anger, but I am trying to help people become conscious,
become aware, to realize our power to make change in society.”
Mr. Samuel said his Easter sermon would be titled “Dangerous Proclamations,” and
would focus on the Apostle Paul, “who was also under attack for his faith in Jesus, and
for preaching the Resurrection.”
The Rev. Floyd Flake, senior pastor of Greater Allen African Methodist Episcopal
Cathedral of New York in Queens, said, “The black preacher’s role is to present a
prophetic word that represents a challenge, but also to give a priestly response that
enables people to resolve the problem.” (Mr. Flake, a former member of Congress,
has publicly endorsed Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.)
On Easter, one of the nation’s foremost preachers, the Rev. James A. Forbes, senior
minister emeritus at the Riverside Church in New York, said he would take Mr.
Wright’s place preaching the 6 p.m. service at Trinity in Chicago. Dr. Forbes plans to
preach about how the nation is in a “night season,” a dark, destabilizing time, given
the war, the economy and the vitriol over race and gender in the political primary.
“It is nighttime in America,” Dr. Forbes said, “and I want to bring a word of
encouragement.”
Reporting was contributed by Rebecca Cathcart, Catrin Einhorn, Brenda Goodman
and Christopher Maag