The New Yorker describes a Good Friday “Seven Last Words” service at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
You could hear Wright’s influence in every sermon. His life and work can’t be accurately extrapolated from a few video clips, and, at the church now, “sound bite” is uttered like a curse word. But there’s nothing on YouTube that seems likely to scandalize anyone who has spent time at Trinity. Even Obama does not claim to be surprised by what he called, in his “A More Perfect Union” speech, which he gave on March 18th, Wright’s “profoundly distorted view of this country.” (Despite such disavowals, there is no evident resentment toward Obama at the church; on Good Friday, every mention of his name and reference to his candidacy was greeted with applause.) Few of the preachers resisted the temptation to draw parallels between the man on the Cross and the man on the news, though most of them found ways to do so indirectly. The Reverend Dr. Rudolph W. McKissick, Jr., from Bethel Baptist Institutional Church, in Jacksonville, Florida, looked suggestively around the room as he described the last days of Jesus: “He does not retire in celebration, but he retires with a crucifixion.” Worshippers were free to think about any retiree they liked.
and…
Obama, in his speech, refused to dissociate himself from Wright (at this late date, to do so would have been futile anyway), but he sought to draw a distinction between his world view and his pastor’s. He said that Wright’s error was to talk about race in America “as if no progress has been made”; he contrasted Wright’s perspective with his own “audacity to hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.” This was itself an audacious move, because “the audacity to hope” was a coinage of Wright’s. Audacious hopefulness is sometimes said to be the thing that separates Obama from more conventional politicians, but it is also what separates him from the radicals who have given it up…. Hope is proof that Obama believes in the system, after all. And it is what helps him appeal to swing voters with fond memories of Bill Clinton, who never tired of reminding voters that he was born in a town called Hope.
Wright’s hope is a different thing. His 1991 “Audacity to Hope” sermon was based on 1 Samuel 1:1-18, which tells the story of a woman, Hannah, childless and bereft, who prays for a son. Wright isn’t interested in the happy ending, so he doesn’t mention 1 Samuel 1:20, in which Hannah finally gives birth. Instead, he dwells on her torment, comparing her to Martin Luther King, Jr., in his last years, when the civil-rights coalition seemed to be crumbling and his old allies were criticizing his increasingly comprehensive political program. “There was nothing on the horizon to say that he should keep on hoping, but he kept on hoping anyhow,” Wright said. For Wright, earthly adversity and the struggle against it are existential. If he thinks that things haven’t changed much in the past hundred years, it’s because he thinks that things haven’t changed much in the past two thousand years. You don’t hope because the odds look good. You hope because they don’t.
The New Yorker: Annals of Religion: Project Trinity