Project Trinity.(Trinity United Church of Christ's Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.)(Brief biography)

"I have never seen so many white people here in my life!" It was Good Friday on the South Side of Chicago, at Trinity United Church of Christ, which has been Senator Barack Obama's church for about twenty years and the most notorious congregation in America for about three and a half weeks. The preacher was in the pulpit, recalling a scene outside the church earlier in the week. He gestured at the reporters who had come to take notes. "I hope you're tithing," he said.

As millions of people with no particular interest in African-American religious institutions now know, Trinity is home to the Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. Since March 13th, when "Good Morning America" broadcast clips of Wright at his most incendiary, he has been an unlikely political celebrity, half of an American odd couple: the fiery, noisy, sixties-influenced spiritual adviser to a Presidential candidate who is supposed to be cool, quiet, and new. Wright's greatest hits found a home on the Internet and on cable news. There are those seven words he uttered, days after September 11th: "America's chickens? Are coming home! To roost." And there's the way he rewrote a classic Irving Berlin lyric: "Not 'God bless America.' 'God damn America!' " But by the time the scandal broke Wright was already gone. He had announced his retirement at the age of sixty-six, preaching his last sermon at Trinity on February 10th, and he kept out of sight while the controversy deepened.

On Good Friday, the church held its annual "Seven Last Words of Christ" service, featuring seven sermons from as many guest preachers. Trinity calls itself "unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian," but the preacher who was marvelling at all those white people was himself white: Father Michael Pfleger, the leader of the Faith Community of St. Sabina, also on Chicago's South Side, which proclaims itself to be an "African-American Catholic church." For one of the historic African-American churches, such a proclamation would be gratuitous, but Pfleger's church, like Wright's, belongs to a denomination in which African-Americans are a small minority. The insistence on race is, in part, an assertion of self-determination, a declaration that no church is culturally neutral.

Seven preachers, seven sermons: that's either a celebration or an endurance test. Inevitably, it's a competition. The first at the pulpit, the Reverend Dr. Eugene L. Gibson, Jr., from Olivet Fellowship Baptist Church, in Memphis, set the bar high. His sermon came from Luke 23:34, which records the first words of Christ during the crucifixion: "Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do." It's one of the best-known lines in the New Testament, an eloquent expression of grace in extremis. But Gibson added his own rejoinder: "Yes, they do!" And, in case anyone missed the heresy, he spelled it out: "I. Dis-a-gree. With Jesus."

The momentum was building. Gibson talked about tormentors who knew exactly what they were doing, making implicit reference to Wright's detractors and explicit reference to the petty naysayers of everyday life. Only near the end did he draw back, admitting that--as usual--Jesus was right and he was wrong. "It's not what they were doing," he said. "It's who they were doing the what to." They knew exactly what a crucifixion was; they just didn't know who Jesus was. Even so, his caustic reproach hung in the air all afternoon: "Yes, they do!"

The Reverend Dr. E. Dewey Smith, from the Greater Travelers Rest Baptist Church, in Decatur, Georgia, based his sermon on Jesus' dying words, as recorded in John 19:30: "He said, 'It is finished.' " Smith urged the congregation to be strong and smart in the face of the onslaught, and his sermon built to an exuberant, sung finale: worshippers cried out, rejoicing in their own fortitude. Pfleger, taking up the question that is Jesus' last utterance during the crucifixion in the Gospel of Mark ("My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"), inveighed against BET, "prosperity-pimping preachers," and rappers. He also delivered one of the day's most impassioned calls to arms: "I'll be damned if I'm gonna sit back while you tear down Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright. How dare you!" During each sermon, the non-preaching preachers lounged on pews next to the pulpit, joined by the Reverend Otis Moss III, a thirty-seven-year-old Yale Divinity School graduate who will succeed Wright as Trinity's senior pastor. Moss and others sometimes swarmed the pulpit when they heard a particularly heated cadence, pantomiming gestures of restraint that came to seem indistinguishable from encouragement.

You could hear Wright's influence in every sermon. His life and work can't be accurately extrapolated from a few video clips, and, at the church now, "sound bite" is uttered like a curse word. But ...