I humbly submit that Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright is wrong. Not about Mr. Obama, or the media, or the November election. He may indeed be wrong about such matters, but that's not my matter of concern here. As a person who has spent a lot of time in the pews and pulpits of African American churches, the issue I raise is not about politics. It's about prophecy.
Rev. Wright has repeatedly claimed that his recent screeds are prophetic utterances; that he stands in a tradition of prophetic critique that extends from the prophets of the Bible and the African American preaching tradition that is the legacy of those prophets.
But his arrogation of that legacy begs the question, the question on the minds of (at least) many faithful African American Christians struggling to make sense of the nonsense that constitutes much of the controversy swirling around Rev. Wright and Mr. Obama: What, after all, is truly "prophetic"? How do we discern the difference between sincere prophetic utterance and self-promoting pontification?
Let's read the signs. First, prophets are generally media-shy, seldom calling press conferences to announce their prophetic vocation. The Gospel of Mark says that Jesus avoided the big cities altogether, preferring town hall meetings and impromptu mass gatherings that he himself did not convene. When it came to outing themselves, as it were, the biblical prophets were down-right dissimulating. Amos, that hillbilly from southern Palestine who famously declared, "Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness as an ever-flowing stream," said of himself, "I'm neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet." When a delegation of religious leaders from Jerusalem confronted John the Baptist with the question, "Are you the prophet?" he emphatically replied, "No." The biblical prophets tended to be straight shooters about everything but their own vocation.
Second, the hard words that they pronounced to their own people were at least as hard on them. For them, prophetic pronouncement was not a media op. Jeremiah (the biblical Jeremiah, that is), has been called "the Weeping Prophet" because all the while he was telling his country that it was going to hell he was very, very unhappy about it. The Book of Lamentations, traditionally attributed to him, is an extended blues riff on God's destruction of Jerusalem. It's clearly the work of someone who was clinically depressed. The prophets did their duty to speak truth to power. But whereas the threats of their rhetoric were from God, the tears were their own.
Finally, prophets knew that their vocation was, by its very nature, an unpopular one. They were rejected and reviled when they weren't ignored. Jeremiah wrote a book of warnings that he sent special delivery to the king of Judah who, outraged, tore it apart and threw it into the fire page by page. God warned the prophet Ezekiel, at the very beginning of his career, that he was being divinely commissioned to speak to a people who would not listen to him. The congregation of Jesus' inaugural sermon in Nazareth was so incensed with his prophetic critique that they tried to throw him off a cliff. He escaped, and quickly left town. Sometimes the prophets even welcomed disagreement that wasn't so disagreeable as a sincere form of engagement. The Spirit spoke through the prophet Isaiah pleading with the opponents of his message, "Come, let us reason together." Prophets were neither surprised nor offended when people rejected their hard words. They expected to be rejected, and their expectation, like their words, seldom went unfulfilled.
The prophets of old didn't announce their prophetic prerogatives at press conferences and press clubs. They fled the limelight, even as they plied their divinely ordained trade in the public square. Indeed their message didn't include their own claims to prophetic status, about which they were sometimes self-effacing. The pain of their denunciations was pain they felt even as they inflicted it. Their only gain was the health and healing of their hearers. And they suffered rejection not as an affront, but as an occupational hazard.
This is what the prophets of the Bible did. So the question is, is this what Rev. Wright is doing? If not, then Rev. Wright is wrong to wrap his recent media attention in the mantle of the prophetic tradition. And if he, for whatever reason, has confused his own resentment as righteous indignation and his own urgency as opportunism, it behooves African American Christians -- and others -- not to make the same mistake.
--Allen Dwight Callahan is director of the Instituto Martin Luther King Jr. in Salvador, Brazil and the author, most recently, of THE TALKING BOOK: AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE BIBLE (Yale University Press).
