I think it is not entirely true to say that many find Black church offensive. Yes but there is more.

It would be more accurate to say that many people find the Christian God offensive. What does it mean to have perfect hatred (Ps. 139) or to pray for God to break the teeth of your enemies (Ps. 3)?

Rev. Wright, in a sermon, asked for God to damn America. That offends many people. But I think a deeper violation is not racial or patriotic but our image of God. We are uncomfortable with a God of vengeance and like to imagine Christ as the anti-Deity to the Old Testament God.

The gospel of Rev. Wright is not angular, it is straight-on. The fact is, like Diana B. Bass says, the Christian church has become alienated from its roots to the point where it doesn't even recognise its own God.

The African American church in North America has, in the west, safeguarded a long tradition from before Christ of penning Psalms of Lament to God.

To lament is to express ones outrage at God for injustice. To lament is to damn evil and invoke divine outrage. These sermons don't imagine a God removed from suffering and oppression, they imagine a co-suffering God. The African American church, in their preaching tradition, have developed the most Biblical theodicy within the Christian church today.

Lament demands answers and justice. These Psalms were meant to be read in small groups. The primary purpose is restoration and rehabilitation of those experiencing evil and suffering. They provide language and structure in which pain, suffering, grief and despair can be ritualised and worshipers moved from one way of seeing their situation to a radically different way of seeing.

Laments are a means of reframing suffering in light of Christs hope and promise. This doesn't necessarily include physical deliverance (although it is anticipated) but rather it is a spiritual move which opens up possibilities that were not previously available.

Lament expresses rage, anger, hurt, disappointment and hope with a goal of reconciliation with God. It aims to transform the community and subvert the oppressive power. It does this by affirming that despite any lack of evidence, God is active in this world.

Lament asserts that the world is not about false hope in human progress but rather to create characters within us which can live with unanswered questions and unresolved injustice not by repression or denial but by active acceptance of the reality of evil and suffering and Gods love for us in the midst of this.

Community is central. Lament requires friendship that will sustain us moving from lament to joy- friends who open roofs and drop us down at Jesus feet (Lk. 5).

And finally it is protest and resistance. These sermons which we find violent are actually peaceful. They counter and resist evil ultimately defeating it through peaceful cries of lament. Lament moves us from anger to acceptance- it gives us a voice and reminds us that not only is God offended, he suffers alongside with us. That deliverance is not ours but Gods.

Frankly I think that not only do most Americans not understand the African American church, I don't think they understand the Old Testament God or have a proper understanding of Christian worship.

That Wrights sermons could be construed as hateful bother me not only because it shows a lack of awareness of African American Christianity, it shows an ignorance of Christianity and, ultimately, our God. Those services and those sermons would feel like home to the early church. They fit right in with the cries of the Psalmist and Christs silence on the Cross who was rejected humiliated and scorned and whose despaired call for God on the cross echoes the cries of Gods children before and after Him.

These sermons by Wright aren't hate speech, it's God speech. I would compose a post on this but I don't have time. I did however write up some notes which I typed up above from a God & Human Suffering class I took. The Psalms of Lament are very interesting for me. We read them lots of mornings in our chapel at school- bloody verses calling out for vengeance. Most Christians recoil at those verses and have no idea what they mean no more than they understand the sermons of Rev. Wright in Chicago.

This is not about Obama. This is bigger than Obama. This is about our God. Or, our hope stands on Christ alone, not Obama.

Not only is the God of those Psalms our God, He is also the God who damns America with us- who cries with us for justice and who transforms us individually and corporately. These sermons are not about earthly powers or politics, they are about our ultimate goal and salvation, Christ.