Preaching is an inherently risky business. Every time you step into the pulpit, you take the chance of being misheard, misunderstood, or unintentionally offensive. You do not know - you can never fully know - what is on the hearts or minds of your hearers.

The basic task of preaching is often misunderstood. It is not to pronounce the Will Of God without interpretation. If that were the case, we would simply read the scripture and be done with it. Instead, the preacher seeks to enter into a creative engagement of three interlocking but moving targets. We are responsible to our understanding of God's work in the world, the textual record of others' encounters with God, and the worshipping community.

Notice the emphasis in that last category: the worshipping community. Though the larger world is never disconnected from the church, the preacher's primary responsibility is to those souls lining her pews. The situation is complicated when outsiders listen in on the word proclaimed in its particular context. Wright, like many pastors of large churches, has been able to broadcast his services on local television, which of course increases the risk and the responsibility.

But the primary focus is the members of the church community. This is why preachers spend so little time defending their religious assumptions or translating their message into universal language: it's not meant for the wider world. It's meant for people who have already bought into the assumptions and (usually, but not always) know the jargon.

It is also why I do cut conservative pastors some slack. I don't always like what conservatives within my own denomination have to say, let alone what many Southern Baptists preach. But by and large, my colleagues understand what it is that their communities need to hear, and they give to them responsibly. The exception to this deference is in cases exactly like those of John Hagee or Rod Parsley. I think the Prosperity Gospel is a con game, and the message of judgment that often accompanies it nothing but a distraction. Perhaps I'm missing something, but there's no way I can see that preaching as being responsible to the community that hears it, and it is certainly not responsible to the scriptures it mangles to come to its conclusions.

Rev. Wright is I'm sure sharply aware that poverty and repression are daily realities for many of those seated in Trinity's sanctuary. The anger of his sermons is not his own invention, but grows from the unhappiness and frustration his parishioners feel. He must be responsible to those feelings even if he doesn't endorse them, even as he tries to move his community beyond them. It isn't his responsibility to comfort the privileged overhearers of his message, nor is it to speak "respectfully" of the outside world. His job is to articulate the good news for his congregation, which often means articulating a message of hope, liberation, and justice, even if that upsets the outside world.

His best ally in that mission is scripture itself. The Bible is chock-full of unacceptable feelings. There's violence and hatred and anger and bloodthirstiness, and yes, sometimes people want to get it on too. The Psalms in particular are shot through with rage, vengeance, and despair - which then give way to assurance, forbearance, and praise for God's mysterious ways.

Naive or misguided interpreters of scripture often misunderstand its sensibilities. The Bible does not look away from the unacceptable or the evil. It looks them squarely in the eye. Then it records a particular perspective (or often perspectives) about them and names a counter-perspective.

This week, for example, Christians will commemorate the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The mystery of this celebration, presented over and over again without sapping it of its power, is not in the "supernatural" or "magical" raising of Christ from the dead. It is that Christ had to suffer abandonment and death in order to accomplish some cosmic plan that we only barely understand.

Any preacher who steps into the pulpit Easter Sunday and attempts to explain why the resurrection didn't really happen is faithless and a fool. Faithless not to God, but to the writers of the New Testament, who certainly believed it happened. And a fool because it misses the point: Christ overcame death not by avoiding it, but by experiencing it. It is precisely the God who suffers who can liberate those of us on earth who also suffer.

But the point is that Christians understand the good news to be mediated through the foundational narratives of scripture. A preacher worth her salt understands that that means responding to the imperfect perspectives of ordinary people and attempting to draw out of them some insight for our own situation. As Devilstower pointed out the other day, truly Biblical perspectives don't often come packaged in what we would consider polite language: a king wipes out his enemies, leaving "not one that pisseth against a wall"; Isaiah sarcastically claims his "bowels move in sympathy" with Israel's enemies; Jesus instructs his followers to spread the shit around a tree and let it grow for a year before they cut it down.

It takes a careful preacher to avoid getting stuck in the language of these perspectives, and an even more careful one to avoid the trap of the perspectives themselves. A static faith is no faith at all, for as it turns out, the greatest moving target of them all is God. For us in the UCC and for many believers, "God is still speaking" is more than a slogan. It is a way of life.

But of course God does more than speak. God acts on the human heart to open the possibility of resistance to the dominant "scripts" that control our lives: consumerism, technology, therapeutic interventions, militarism. God is everywhere at work to overturn those things that oppress God's people. As in Exodus, so today: God has heard our cries, and remembered us.

That, at least, is the proclamation of any responsible preacher. I might add that God opposes the conformity that attempts to maintain an easy sameness across the social spectrum without recognized the very different needs of groups and individuals within it.

It is here that the rubber truly meets the road. For what Rev. Wright has discerned in response to God, scripture, and his church is that the desire of African-Americans to exercise power to meet the needs of their community is more than simply acceptable. It is blessed by the God of liberation.

Some people, including members of the United Church of Christ, have scoffed at Wright for speaking to his community first and foremost without "speaking truth to power." The truth is that he has established (or at least re-presented in a compelling way) a counter-narrative within the black community that God wants them to be free from Pharoah's lashes. That is intolerable to the powers and principalities of our nation. It rejects the easy oneness of the post-racial narrative and perhaps more important, the fiction that all Americans are happy with their social and economic lots. Unlike the preaching of John Hagee or Rod Parsley, Wright's preaching challenges its hearers to think about the arrangements of money and power that sustain our social order and decide if they are what God has invited us to create for ourselves.

In short, Wright eschews the feel-good comforts of religion and poses difficult questions about whether things in America are just and equitable.

This, of course, makes Sean and Tucker and Anderson and all the other fatuous f*cks who control our popular discourse pop a gasket. They are invested almost like no others in propping up the ways things are. It's how they make a living in the world of the corporate media.

Put differently, they are invested in the dominant scripts. Their religion is shallow, imperial, authoritarian and privatist: it blesses the use of military muscle to sustain America's position in the world, patriotic shopping, positive thinking, and the safe, snuggly comforts of a sermon that leave you feeling good the whole week long.

In other words, it looks a lot like Hagee and Parsley's preaching. That explains some things.

It is also, as near as I can ever come to discerning such things, Satanic to the core. Not because it sets itself against God and God's desires for our world as I understand them, for reasonable people can disagree about such things, but because it fails to take the struggle of God seriously. It is precisely the work of a preacher to bring that struggle home to the faithful, to make it come alive in their hearing. That is, as I say, a difficult and risky job, one reason preachers are traditionally given wide latitude in their pulpits.

In a week when Christians remember the struggle, death, and continuing presence of the God who wants us to be free and whole, our media and political elites would do well to let the preacher do his thing in peace. Otherwise, they may find themselves one day with problems far greater than angry phone calls, letters and e-mails from the supporters of one of the people seated in his pews.