This post originally appeared on Good Faith Media on 1/24/25. This the full version before it was edited.
Stewarding Pathos: Mariann Edgard Budde’s Rhetoric Lesson
As I settled into my couch on Tuesday evening (1/21/25) 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, but then definitely, became smothered with the closing remarks of Mariann Edgard Budde’s homily that was given earlier that day at a prayer service hosted by the Washington National Cathedral.
Budde’s comments were truthful, prophetic, and gentle all at the same time. In fact, I was so taken with what she said, that I immediately started digging on the internet to find the full version of the homily so that I could be sure I had given her comments the full benefit of their contextual expression. That context, a 15 minute sermon on unity, bolstered by an appeal to its foundations 1. the dignity of every human being 2. honesty and 3. humility, not only confirmed the potency of Budde’s conclusion, they empowered it.
I sat for several hours considering why I was so moved by Budde’s appeal. One reality that might explain an aspect of its salient nature of her comments is the contextual power of the worship moment itself. In my previous vocational life I was a pastor and on one occasion of processing the task of preaching with my pastor friend Austin he noted something that 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, but in very few, if any, were we afforded the luxury of being 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. Our intuition tells us there was something more.
My guess is that many of the Biblically literate who watched Budde’s sermon quickly thought of a particular moment from the story of King David, namely the one where he is confronted by the prophet Nathaniel. David fresh of off the choice to have Uriah sent to the front lines of war to be killed in attempt to cover the traces of his sexual assault, is drawn into a Nathaniel’s riveting tale of unjust sheep pilferage. When David expresses his outrage in response, Nathaniel does the big reveal, David is, by analogous conviction, the sheep stealer. David is shattered and repentant. It is the quintessential episode of speaking the 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 her message in reaching beyond the walls of Washington National Cathedral can’t be dismissed. This was the loudest sermon many of us have heard in years.
So how was it that a sentiment that has been expressed in thousands of frustrated, sometimes pleading memes, social media posts, TikTok videos, political op eds, etc. found such full force of 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, pathos. By these Aristotle meant something like coherence, credibility, and emotional appeal respectively. Even as I sit and write on Wednesday I have had to suppress anger as I calculate the impact of executive orders already disrupting the lives of marginalized peoples. It’s hard not to get to fury quickly. In my estimation though, Budde’s genius was her throughgoing trust in ethics of the kingdom of God. Her abiding trust that a gentle and clear articulation that marginalized peoples need mercy was the very most that could be said.
Pathos as expression can take many forms, anger included among them. Anger helps us recognize when boundaries have been crossed. Anger can be productive in helping us move authentically through our emotions, and anger can help us express the severity of what’s been violated. But sometimes gentleness can speak more loudly than anger. So how does one detect when to draw on gentleness and when to draw on anger. In a video produced by The Work of the People, Pastor Nadia Bolz offers a simple and effective rule for herself in disclosing pain. She speaks from her scars, but not from her wounds. I don’t know Mariann Edgard Budde, but I suspect that the integrity of her words that we all soaked in so desperately eaked 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.
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