By Kathleen Kern

Around the age of 8, I began making up stories in my head when I was bored. I rarely got past the first two minutes of any sermon before exiting to fantasyland.

I do remember one sermon, however, because I was sitting next to my father and saw him get upset.

The pastor was talking about bullies in his childhood who would twist the arms of weaker boys and make them cry “uncle.” He then said the United States needed to do that to Vietnam. At that point my father told my siblings and me to stay put and left the sanctuary.

The post-sermon hymn was “Onward Christian Soldiers.” My mother and several other choir members did not stand to sing it. After that we attended the Presbyterian church in town for a while.

I bring this up because of the furor created by Barack Obama’s refusal to disavow his association with Jeremiah Wright after sound bytes of him preaching “God damn America” replayed endlessly in the media.

I write these words the morning after I watched 60 Minutes interview a German man of Turkish descent, Murat Kurnaz, whom the U.S. military kidnapped, tortured and incarcerated for five years, despite German and U.S. intelligence reports written shortly after his detention saying that he had no connection to a terrorist infrastructure.

How, I wonder, would he have viewed Wright’s “God damn America” sermon?

How would the first Christians have felt about a sermon condemning Rome? We know from certain psalms and prophetic writings that the Israelites and Judeans were pretty happy when Assyria and Babylon fell.

The scriptural focus of Wright’s sermon, Luke 19:37-44, speaks of Jesus saying that Jerusalem had condemned itself because it did not recognize “the things that make for peace.”

Essentially, Wright built on these words, saying that America had also brought condemnation on itself for promoting slavery, slaughter of the First Nations and warmongering.

But aside from the content of Wright’s sermon, most of which rings true for me (and would ring true for many American Christians if they read the entire text, I suspect), I am puzzled why Obama is receiving pressure to leave Trinity United Church of Christ, which most Chicagoans agree is a great force for good in its neighborhood.

When did pastors, rather than congregations, become the church? When did a few sentences become the sole indication of who a pastor is?

My family returned to College First Church of God because it belonged to a denomination in which several generations of my relatives had heavily invested. Eventually, I found my true church home among the Mennonites.

I’ve liked some pastors better than others, but I’ve never considered them to be “the church.” And I’ve never thought a pastor’s sermons are the sum total of who a pastor is.

William Sloane Coffin told a story of a politically conservative friend who attended a church with a liberal pastor. When Coffin asked why, his friend said: “This pastor held my wife’s hand in the last 24 hours of my wife’s life and then he held my hand in the 24 hours that followed her death. I’d come to hear him preach if he just read the Yellow Pages.”