“Where’s God?” I overheard the toddler ask his brother.
“Shut up,” the older boy replied.
“Both of you settle down right now,” the mother said.
Trinity’s associate pastor, a middle-aged woman with graying hair and a no-nonsense demeanor, read the bulletin and
led sleepy voices through a few traditional hymns. Then the choir filed down the aisle dressed in white robes and kente-
cloth shawls, clapping and singing as they fanned out behind the altar, an organ following the quickening drums:
I’m so glad, Jesus lifted me!
I’m so glad, Jesus lifted me!
I’m so glad, Jesus lifted me!
Singing Glory, Ha-le-lu-yah!
Jesus lifted me!
As the congregation joined in, the deacons, then Reverend Wright, appeared beneath the large cross that hung from
the rafters. The reverend remained silent while devotions were read, scanning the faces in front of him, watching the
collection basket pass from hand to hand. When the collection was over, he stepped up to the pulpit and read the names
of those who had passed away that week, those who were ailing, each name causing a flutter somewhere in the crowd,
the murmur of recognition.
“Let us join hands,” the reverend said, “as we kneel and pray at the foot of an old rugged cross-”
“Yes...”
“Lord, we come first to thank you for what you’ve already done for us.... We come to thank you most of all for Jesus.
Lord, we come from different walks of life. Some considered high, and some low...but all on equal ground at the foot
of this cross. Lord, thank you! For Jesus, Lord...our burden bearer and heavy load sharer, we thank you....”
The title of Reverend Wright’s sermon that morning was “The Audacity of Hope.” He began with a passage from the
Book of Samuel-the story of Hannah, who, barren and taunted by her rivals, had wept and shaken in prayer before her
God. The story reminded him, he said, of a sermon a fellow pastor had preached at a conference some years before, in
which the pastor described going to a museum and being confronted by a painting titled Hope.
“The painting depicts a harpist,” Reverend Wright explained, “a woman who at first glance appears to be sitting atop a
great mountain. Until you take a closer look and see that the woman is bruised and bloodied, dressed in tattered rags,
the harp reduced to a single frayed string. Your eye is then drawn down to the scene below, down to the valley below,
where everywhere are the ravages of famine, the drumbeat of war, a world groaning under strife and deprivation.
“It is this world, a world where cruise ships throw away more food in a day than most residents of Port-au-Prince see
in a year, where white folks’ greed runs a world in need, apartheid in one hemisphere, apathy in another
hemisphere...That’s the world! On which hope sits!”
And so it went, a meditation on a fallen world. While the boys next to me doodled on their church bulletin, Reverend
Wright spoke of Sharpsville and Hiroshima, the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State
House. As the sermon unfolded, though, the stories of strife became more prosaic, the pain more immediate. The