'Preaching With Sacred Fire' Is An Anthology that Exemplifies the African-American Sermonic Tradition

'Terrorism begets terrorism," declared the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in a post-9/11 sermon denouncing American foreign and domestic policy that, once the address became widely known in 2008, nearly torpedoed the presidential campaign of his best-known congregant, Barack Obama.

Other African-American ministers took different approaches to the Sept. 11 attacks. Peter Gomes, of the Harvard University Divinity School, dwelt on the return to faith spurred by national tragedies, while the entrepreneurial preacher T.D. Jakes issued a patriotic call to arms: "What we need is a cold, calculated, God-given strategy."

This variety of perspectives exemplifies the African-American sermonic tradition and is well represented in the capacious anthology "Preaching With Sacred Fire," edited by Martha Simmons and Frank A. Thomas. Ranging primarily across Christian denominations-- Islam plays a small role in the book, and Judaism none at all--the editors place conventional homiletic and uplift preaching alongside the most strident black nationalism. Not every sermon is a gem, but a great many display the virtuosity for which black ministers, men and women alike, are well known.

Rooted in Africa, the highly expressive oral tradition of black culture in America was forged during slavery, when black ministers preaching with "sacred fire," an idea common to many, were often proponents of emancipation. The latter-day liberation theology espoused by Jeremiah Wright and others--in his notorious sermon, Mr. Wright quoted Malcolm X's comment about President Kennedy's assassination, that "the chickens are coming home to roost"--thus follows in the tradition of resistance that flourished in slave quarters and antislavery pulpits.

Even when freedom's call during the 19th century was cloaked in allegory or biblical exegesis, the revolutionary message was not hard to detect. When John Chavis, a free-born Presbyterian from North Carolina, argued in an 1833 sermon that Christ offered atonement not to white people alone but to "the whole human family," church leaders deemed the sermon too dangerous for publication.

The work of abolitionists produced not only powerful sermons but also a tradition of black holidays that led ultimately to Martin Luther King Day. Marking the abolition of the foreign slave trade in 1808, the African Episcopal minister Absalom Jones asked for Jan. 1 to be set aside as a time for giving thanks that "it has pleased God to appear in behalf of [the] oppressed." Celebrating the 1827 abolition of slavery in New York, Nathaniel Paul, pastor of the First African Baptist Society of Albany, N.Y., joined other blacks in moving Independence Day festivities to July 5 as an act of protest.