(RNS) — Remember the 10th commandment?
“Thou shalt not covet”?
This past week, many preachers violated that commandment.
They were coveting the sermon Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde delivered at the National Cathedral during a service the day after President Donald Trump’s inauguration, in which she pleaded with Trump to show mercy to the most vulnerable among us.
(Speaking Jewish right now: If I had been blessed with the opportunity to address the president, I would not have used the word “mercy.” I would have asked him to show compassion and to do justice. But that’s me).
Many of my colleagues and friends have been debating: Was the bishop appropriate? Was her sermon in good taste? Did she publicly shame and humiliate the president?
I have been struggling with all that as well, and now I think she was totally spot on. And not only because I agreed with her.
Sure, she made President Trump a little uncomfortable.
Deal with it, Mr. President. That’s often what sermons are about. As my colleague and friend Rabbi Rick Jacobs notes: “The job of a religious leader is not to tell those in the pews — whether the usual parishioners or their country’s leaders — what they want to hear. Rather, the job requires clergy to speak the truth of their tradition as they understand it.”
President Donald Trump, from front row left, first lady Melania Trump, Vice President JD Vance and his wife, Usha Vance; and from back row left, Eric Trump and his wife, Lara Trump, and their children Carolina and Luke, and Tiffany Trump attend a prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral, Jan. 21, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)
Or, put differently, sometimes it is the goal of a sermon to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. To “shake and stir” them.
You want to feel all good and comfortable? Go to a spa.
A house of worship is not a spa. The role of clergy is not masseuse or masseur.
Not only that, Bishop Budde did something preachers rarely have the chance to do.
She aimed that sermon accurately.
I know myself, and my colleagues. When we preach sermons about social justice, we often use lofty phrases like “justice, justice you shall pursue,” tikkun olam (repairing the world) and “made in God’s image” — all good, though they are in danger of becoming cliches.
Here is the problem. Those people in our pews? They usually lack the power and the influence to create real, systemic change.
But when you have the opportunity to stand before the president of the United States in the National Cathedral, you are actually addressing the only person who needs to hear them, heed them and act on them.
Let’s talk theology for a moment. I don’t want to go all sixth grade on you, but President Trump “started it.” He believes the attempts on his life failed because God spared his life, so he can fulfill God’s mission.
Well, OK, then. He had the audacity to link his fate to the divine will. That is his right. And therefore, the bishop had every sermonic right to gently inform him of what God, in fact, requires of him, and all of us.
Her words might have been Christian, but her “lineage” is Jewish.
Here you go, a brief history of Jews speaking truth to power:
- Rabbis in the South in the 1950s and 1960s, who preached in favor of integration. They often paid big prices. Extremists targeted their synagogues for attack. Many of us know about The Temple bombing in Atlanta in 1958. We often forget that The Temple was not alone; in 1957-1958, there were five bombings and three attempted bombings of synagogues, because of the anti-racist preaching of their rabbis. A decade later, in 1967, the KKK bombed both the synagogue and home of Rabbi Perry Nussbaum in Jackson, Mississippi.
- Rabbis in Germany in the 1930s — most notably, Rabbi Leo Baeck and Rabbi Joachim Prinz — who preached against the Nazi regime, and comforted their people — at great danger to themselves.
- The Prophet Elijah castigating King Ahab and Queen Jezebel when they stole the vineyard of Naboth (I Kings 21).
- The Prophet Nathan criticizing King David for having sent Uriah the Hittite to die in battle so that David could have his wife (II Samuel 12).
- The Prophet Moses pleading with Pharaoh and demanding that he free the Israelites from slavery.
But there is an even better comparison:
In 1985, President Ronald Reagan intended to visit the military cemetery in Bitburg, Germany, and implicitly honor members of the SS who were buried there.
Enter Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor, author and activist.
Wiesel implored him to change his plans. He did so “with respect and admiration” (his words). These are his words:
The issue here is not politics, but good and evil. And we must never confuse them. For I have seen the SS at work. And I have seen their victims. They were my friends. They were my parents. Mr. President, there was a degree of suffering in the concentration camps that defies imagination. …
I am convinced, as you have told us earlier when we spoke, that you were not aware of the presence of SS graves in the Bitburg cemetery. Of course you didn’t know. But now we all are aware.
May I, Mr. President, if it’s possible at all, implore you to do something else, to find a way, to find another way, another site? That place, Mr. President, is not your place. Your place is with the victims of the SS.
Wiesel did not scold President Reagan. He was saying something quite different: “You, Mr. President, are better than this. You can do better than this.”
(P.S. President Reagan visited Bitburg anyway. But, at the very least, he did not insult and revile Elie Wiesel. In fact, they had a very good relationship.)
That is often the most effective way of doing this sermonic business. Not by castigating, but by showing a different way, and by demonstrating to the listeners that they are better, that they can do better. (Here is my own “memo” to aspiring political preachers).
And what did President Trump do, in response to the bishop’s words?
He played his own biblical role — the ruler who chooses not to hear or heed. He was King Ahab, who sees Elijah and says, “Is that you, you troubler of Israel?” (I Kings 18: 17).
President Trump, to put it mildly, did not like the sermon. He called it “nasty in tone.” He found the service to be “boring” and “uninspiring.”
No surprise here. Despite the fact that he has hawked “God Bless the USA” Bibles, President Trump is the least religious person to occupy the Oval Office in our historical memory.
That, of course, is his right; there is no religious test for the presidency, and rightly so.
But there is an American civil religion. It is not necessarily a religion of symbols and texts, but it is an appeal to something higher, something transcendent, to something that goes above and beyond us, to something that is more than our own individual egos and national hubris. Think: Abraham Lincoln.
Bishop Budde was trying to tap into that spark within President Trump’s character. Yes, her words were primarily Christian, but she was channeling Wiesel, modern rabbis in America, rabbis in Germany, biblical prophets — and, of course, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Bishop Budde might find this interesting. The late French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas taught that our moral and societal responsibilities begin at the precise moment that we encounter the face of the Other. When we see their faces, we realize we live in covenant with them.
That is precisely what she was calling upon President Trump to do.
Like I said: The bishop was preaching Christianity, but her accent contained just a little bit of a Hebrew lilt.
