The fulfillment of the scriptures

MANIFESTO

I keep following the Jeremiah Wright/Barack Obama saga with a great amount of interest. Needless to say, I'm pretty disappointed with Obama's "outrage" at the Rev. Dr. Wright's speech of Monday. What, after all, did the senior pastor of Trinity UCC say?

The prophetic theology of the black church is not only a theology of liberation; it is also a theology of transformation, which is also rooted in Isaiah 61, the text from which Jesus preached in his inaugural message, as recorded by Luke.

When you read the entire passage from either Isaiah 61 or Luke 4 and do not try to understand the passage or the content of the passage in the context of a sound bite, what you see is God's desire for a radical change in a social order that has gone sour.

God's desire is for positive, meaningful and permanent change. God does not want one people seeing themselves as superior to other people. God does not want the powerless masses, the poor, the widows, the marginalized, and those underserved by the powerful few to stay locked into sick systems which treat some in the society as being more equal than others in that same society.

God's desire is for positive change, transformation, real change, not cosmetic change, transformation, radical change or a change that makes a permanent difference, transformation. God's desire is for transformation, changed lives, changed minds, changed laws, changed social orders, and changed hearts in a changed world.

The Luke passage the Rev. Dr. Wright is referring to here is the incident where Jesus of Nazareth, after having been tempted in the wilderness, returns to his home church in Nazareth and states that his mission is

to preach the gospel to the poor ... to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised [and t]o preach the acceptable year of the Lord.

This is nothing less than societal upheaval, and the Rev. Dr. Wright is correct to identify it as such. Barack Obama, now kowtowing to the masses, is "appalled" at this sentiment, while I believe it's one of the few things that gives Christianity any viability at all.

In fact, it's this very passage that I've always thought should have been used when our pious president first identified Jesus as his favorite political philosopher during a 1999 debate a thousand years ago. Immediately all of the other stumblebums on the stage felt compelled to state that, yes, Jesus is just all right me, too.

What I hoped I'd hear in that debate was a reference to the very passage the Rev. Dr. Wright discussed in his speech on Monday: That, yes, if we're talking about the Jesus who wants to effect deliverance, etc., then I'm on board. It would have been interesting to see what Gentile George would've done with that for all of his "He changed my heart" crapola.

And, now, eight and a half years later, the nominal Christian candidates still won't accept the notion of Jesus as a radical, preferring the Sunday School "Jesus Loves Me" nonsense. Jeremiah Wright sees the truth; Barack Obama shows his true character by denying it.