My latest article for the National Crankypants Monthly:

As imperfect as [Jeremiah Wright] may be, he has been like family to me… He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years. I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
–Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” March 18, 2008

By now many of us are probably sick of what I have been calling “Preachergate.” And yet Obama’s speech has now been viewed by millions via YouTube and continues to be dissected by pundits and bloggers. Whether you support Senator Obama or not, whether you appreciate his facilitating a deeper conversation on race or feel the speech was a desperate attempt to save his own political aspirations, the speech has a life of its own now. It provides an opportunity for our national conversation about race to move beyond soundbites and scapegoats into something more interesting and potentially transformative, though messy.

There is plenty to be said about our sometimes troubled and other times downright tortured history of race, what Condoleezza Rice recently called America’s “birth defect.” What has interested me in all this, however, is what Obama’s speech and the ensuing discussion reveal about the Christian Church.

Many people have blasted Obama for comparing the incendiary comments of Rev. Wright, made publicly before thousands of people and available on DVD, with a few comments uttered by his grandmother in private. As Joan Walsh, the editor of Salon.com put it, “I don’t think Obama’s elderly grandmother, who still lives in Hawaii and is reportedly too frail to travel, who was a product of her time and place and yet did her best to raise her half-black grandson, deserved to be compared to Wright, a public figure who’s built his career around a particularly divisive analysis of American racial politics.”

Setting aside whether Walsh’s assessment of Wright is accurate or not, I believe she, like many pundits, misses the point. Obama wasn’t drawing parallels between Wright’s comments and those of his grandmother. He was comparing the relationship he has with each of them.

Christians are bound to one another through our baptism. It is our fundamental identity and what makes us the body of Christ. So when Obama says he can’t turn his back on his pastor, it’s not because his statements weren’t all that offensive. Indeed they were, to a great many people. Rather, Obama is saying he can’t—or more to the point, he won’t—turn his back on him, because Wright is his brother in Christ, as much his family as his grandmother. It appears to me that Obama is modeling what Christian unity looks like, but it saddens me that in our age of church-hopping, in which congregations are viewed as spiritual service providers rather than places to live into our identity as the beloved community, we lose sight of that.

In the congregation I serve, military folks worship side by side with conscientious objectors and people who have demonstrated against the Iraq war. We have in our midst geologists and behavioral scientists, and we have people for whom intelligent design is too liberal a position on the origins of the universe! A former speechwriter for Donald Rumsfeld worships side by side with an environmental activist, and so on. I am sure you can tell similar stories about your congregation.

One of our more cantankerous church members regularly takes Senior Pastor or me to task for positions we have taken on various issues of the day. Truth be told, I’m not sure he’s fully on board with the idea of women in ministry at all. Yet he has remained faithfully in the church for going on two decades. When I recently asked why, he said, “Because when my mother died the week after our son got married, [Senior Pastor] shepherded us through that. She was Christ for me.”

Yes, we can shop for churches. We can hold a pastor’s idiosyncracies and wild misstatements against him or her, searching until we find the congregation that never offends, that fits us to a T, that meets all of our needs. We do live in that kind of world. It’s a world of political pundits, cable news channels and blogs that serve as echo chambers of our own making, reinforcing our own point of view. But in the midst of such a world, a church that finds its unity in Jesus Christ, and not in doctrinal lock-step, is its own prophetic witness. It’s a witness the world desperately needs.