As I settled into my couch last Tuesday evening, I opened Facebook to discover what the cultural zeitgeist might hurl at me on President Trump’s first full day in office. My feed, slowly and then definitely, became smothered with the closing remarks of Mariann Edgar Budde’s homily from earlier that day at a prayer service hosted by the Washington National Cathedral.
Budde’s comments were truthful, prophetic, and gentle. Like many, I was so taken with her words that I immediately started searching the internet for the full version of the homily to be sure I had given her comments the full benefit of their contextual expression.
That context was a 15-minute sermon on unity, bolstered by an appeal to the foundations of unity–the dignity of every human being, honesty and humility. These foundations both confirmed and empowered the potency of Budde’s conclusion.
I sat for several hours, considering why I was so moved by Budde’s appeal, and considered how the power of the worship moment itself helps explain the salient nature of her comments.
In my previous vocational life, I was a pastor. I once had a conversation about the task of preaching with another pastor friend, Austin, who said something that has stuck with me: “There are so few places left in our culture where a group of people will come together and listen to anything for more than 20 minutes.”
The worship space held Budde’s words uniquely in this way. I have probably heard a version of what she said articulated in some form thousands of times over the last eight years. However, very few, if any, of these expressions of the same sentiment were uninterrupted or quickly dismissed by President Trump before they could be spoken.
But the reality of the worship space alone can’t explain the full scope of Budde’s effectiveness. Intuition tells us there must have been something more. My guess is that many of the more biblically literate viewers who watched Budde’s sermon quickly thought of a particular moment from the story of King David, namely when he is confronted by the prophet Nathaniel.
David, fresh from sending Uriah to the front lines of war to be killed in an attempt to cover the traces of David’s sexual assault, is drawn into Nathaniel’s riveting tale of unjust sheep pilferage. When, in response, David expresses his outrage, Nathaniel flips the script–David is, by analogous conviction, the sheep stealer. David is shattered and repentant.
This story is the quintessential episode of speaking truth to power. Unfortunately, Budde’s moment of truth-confronting-power did not engender a similar response.
By Tuesday evening, President Trump had predictably and categorically dismissed Budde’s words and the entire worship moment in a Truth Social post. But the effectiveness of Budde’s message in reaching beyond the walls of Washington National Cathedral can’t be dismissed. It was the loudest sermon many of us have heard in years.
So how did a sentiment expressed in thousands of frustrated, sometimes pleading memes, social media posts, TikTok videos, and political op-eds find such full expression in this instance? I submit that the Right Reverend Budde’s effectiveness was located in her stewardship of pathos.
Since they were first introduced by Aristotle, every public speaker has had to reckon with the three modes of rhetorical appeal: logos, ethos and pathos. In our terms, these can be described as coherence, credibility, and emotional appeal.
Even as I reflected on this the day after Budde’s sermon, I had to suppress anger as I calculated the impact of executive orders already disrupting the lives of marginalized people. It’s hard not to quickly get furious.
In my estimation, though, Budde’s genius was her thorough trust in the ethics of the kingdom of God. Her abiding trust that a gentle and clear articulation that marginalized people need mercy was the most that could be said.
Pathos can take many forms. One of those forms is anger, which helps us recognize when boundaries have been crossed.
Anger can be productive in helping us move authentically through our emotions and express the severity of what’s been violated. But sometimes gentleness can speak more loudly than anger.
So, how do we know when to draw on gentleness and when to draw on anger? Pastor Nadia Bolz has offered a simple and effective rule for herself when disclosing experiences of pain: She speaks from her scars, not from her wounds.
I don’t know Mariann Edgar Budde, but I suspect that the integrity of her words, which we soaked in so cathartically, flowed from the maturity of scars, not open wounds.
This delineation is not an easy one, but as truth-tellers gear up for another four years of speaking in the tradition of the prophet Nathaniel, perhaps we’ve been offered a critical strategy for sustaining that task. Let us steward our own pathos by speaking from our scars and not our wounds.
Josh Carney was a pastor for 15 years before transitioning to the world of philanthropy. He’s now the chief of staff for the Waco Family Medicine Foundation, a foundation serving a Federally Qualified Health Center in Waco, TX. He and his wife Lindsay have four kids. Josh enjoys reading, writing, and ultimate frisbee.
