Comment: What Trump and most people missed in bishop’s sermon

By David Mills / Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Donald Trump did not like what he heard. The “Radical Left hard line Trump hater,” as the new president described the Episcopal bishop of Washington, D.C., on Truth Social, “brought her church into the World of politics in a very ungracious way.” She was “nasty in tone, and not compelling or smart.”

Mariann Budde, preaching the sermon during the traditional post-inauguration service at her church’s national cathedral, had ended her 14 minute sermon with a request.

President Trump just told the nation he’d felt “the providential hand of a loving God,” she said, with him and J.D. Vance sitting in the front row to her right. “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”

Budde mentioned “gay, lesbian and transgender children,” those “who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals,” and “those that are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands.” She pointed out that “Our God teaches us to be merciful to the stranger, for we were all strangers in this land.”

She concluded the sermon: “May God grant us the strength and courage to honor the dignity of every human being, to speak the truth to one another in love, to walk humbly with each other and our God, for the good of all people in this nation and the world.”

Of course, Trump and the national press played up the request and ignored the rest of the sermon, in which she described in some detail the unity necessary for Americans to live and work together across our very deep differences, and how to do that.

Here is part of what she said. I’d commend watching the whole sermon, for what she said and (it was a sermon, not an essay) for the effect of her saying it.

She was not asking Americans to agree, she began, but for “the kind of unity that fosters agreement across diversity and division, a unity that serves the common good.” She called that kind of unity “the threshold requirement” for “people to live in freedom and together in a free society.”

After warning of “the culture of contempt that has become normalized in this country,” she explained what she believed unity’s three foundations. The first is “Honoring the inherent dignity of every human being.”

In public discourse,” this “means refusing to mock, or discount, or demonize those with whom we differ, choosing instead to respectfully debate our differences, and whenever possible to seek common ground, and if common ground is not possible, dignity demands that we remain true to our convictions without contempt for those who hold convictions of their own.”

The second was honesty and the third humility, which required an equal respect for other people.

The president, stewing during the sermon, had gotten what he asked for. He had taken advantage of religion in his inauguration, with prayers from selected religious leaders, beginning with the Cardinal Archbishop of New York, whose prayer was blessedly generic.

Not so with the others who followed, led by Franklin Graham, whose prayer was grossly partisan, and the closing prayers from a rabbi, a Black pastor and a Catholic priest, the last two not so much praying to God for the new president and the nation as telling God that he had done good in electing Donald Trump.

The problem for the president is that when you ask for God’s care, as he did in getting ministers to pray for him, you ask for God’s rebuke and correction. And when you ask religious speakers to speak to you, they may tell you truths you do not want to hear.

Not every Christian liked the sermon either, looking at social media. It was one with which a Christian should have no substantial disagreement. It was Christianity 101.

Some Christians came predictably unglued by her request for mercy for gay, lesbian and trans people. But even those who agree full-heartedly with Trump’s executive order “Defending women from gender ideology extremism” should recognize how transgender people and their families feel and treat them with mercy.

They should show the kind of mercy they would wish done to them; that in Christian teaching has been done to them an almost infinite number of times by God himself. Jesus’ parable of the ungrateful debtor, told in Matthew’s gospel, applies here. They may “speak the truth in love,” as they put it, if they feel they must, but only if they actually mean by the word “love,” love.

It is very hard to do what the bishop asked. Try, for example, as I have, to write sympathetically and respectfully of people who for reasons that seem good to them voted for Donald Trump, something the bishop’s teaching requires, and many people who would have been nodding with agreement to the sermon will start mocking, discounting and demonizing those people, and anyone who respects them. They would become, essentially, Donald Trump.

Serious religion of the sort the bishop articulated and exemplified requires us not to be the people we hate. It requires us to do better than Donald Trump. For most of us, that’s harder than it seems, but it’s the only way to resist the world he wants to create.