THE WORD “SERMON,” like “lecture,” is an ambiguous one: both a genre of speech and a shorthand for our worst ways of speaking to one another. Outside of a religious context (and to be honest, sometimes even inside one), who wants to be preached at?
Those connotations of arrogance and superiority likely come from authentic experience. But they also miss something important about the sermon as a genre: its foundation in humility, in the practices of reading, reflecting on, and speaking on someone else’s text.
In his 1990 farewell sermon as pastor of Concord Baptist Church in New York, Gardner C. Taylor, one of the great preachers of the civil rights era, asked for forgiveness “if I ever tried to make the Word of God mean what I wanted it to mean.” Sermons (in Christian tradition, as well as in my Jewish tradition) are public acts of commentary. And, as Taylor reminds us, serious commentary is a morally consequential act, because it requires putting one’s own priorities and intentions second to those of the text, an act which is always, at least a little, selfless. At the heart of a sermon is the tension between what the text seems to say and what the preacher wants to say with the text.
When I read or listen to a sermon — even one as politically memorable as Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon at the national prayer service following President Donald Trump’s inauguration in January 2025 — I try to keep that basic question in mind: What text is she preaching on?
In the case of Bishop Budde’s sermon, there are two answers. The most straightforward is that Budde preached on the parable of the wise man who built his house on rock and the foolish man who built on sand (Matthew 7:24-29). That resonant image — a decaying foundation and collapsing house — underlay her own message about political unity. “Without unity,” she said, “we are building our nation’s house on sand.”
And yet, a bit more quietly, Budde also preached a sermon on the text of Trump’s inaugural address. Think of “unity,” the single most repeated word in Budde’s remarks. It is not in the passage from Matthew, but it is right at the specious heart of Trump’s speech: “My proudest legacy will be that of a peacemaker and unifier. That’s what I want to be: a peacemaker and a unifier.”
Budde’s definition of political unity appeared, as if in direct answer, the next day: A true unifier respects the dignity of every person, speaks honestly, and practices humility. No doubt, most are primed to read those words through the lens of partisan conflict and to see them as a criticism of Trump. But they are also a commentary on Trump because they accept Trump’s own words as their premise. They ask, what would it mean to treat those words, peace and unity, with the moral seriousness they deserve?
That is also the lens through which we ought to look at her sermon’s most striking and viral passage, in which Budde pleaded with the president on behalf of the migrant and LGBTQ+ people he has targeted for persecution. She said, “As you told the nation yesterday, you have felt the providential hand of a loving God. In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.” Here is an even clearer link back to Trump’s own words, back to his claim that a failed assassination attempt against him was a sign of God’s protection: “I felt then and believe even more so now that my life was saved for a reason. I was saved by God to make America great again.”
Much of the coverage of Budde’s sermon (and fascists’ predictably violent backlash) missed that her powerful words on mercy were framed as a direct commentary on Trump, one that takes his claim with piercing seriousness and asks: What if it were true? What would it mean to behave as if you were part of God’s purpose? Bishop Budde’s courage in asking that question is a political model for the rest of us. But what cannot be a model is that practice of living inside Trump’s premises — of presuming alongside him, in this case, that Donald Trump and Mariann Budde share a faith in any meaningful sense, or that they have a shared idea of God, in whose name the latter can plead with the former for mercy.
I understand that Bishop Budde has a religious duty to presume those things and to allow a small opening for grace in even the most self-serving invocation of God. But I’m not sure the rest of us have a duty like that. I am sure that in our role as democratic citizens, it is our place to demand rather than plead — and to make sense of our leaders’ words as truthfully as possible, rather than as generously as possible.
“I was saved by God to make America great again.” How can we hear that as anything other than a slander on God?
Rob Goodman, author of Words on Fire: Eloquence and Its Conditions, is a political scientist at Toronto Metropolitan University, where he addresses topics such as populism, rhetoric, and the history of political thought.
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