Just when we thought that the saga of Jeremiah Wright was largely behind us, here it is again front and center with an appearance by the widely reviled pastor at The National Press Club in Washington, D.C. The day after John McCain breaks his silence on the matter and says remarks by Barack Obama’s former pastor were “beyond belief,” lodging his presidential sympathy with the anger and upset of patriotic America, there is Wright, in the nation’s capital no less, for a speech and Q&A that did anything but appease those Americans who might have been hoping for a retraction or apology on his part.

And I can’t think of a better place to have seen this appearance, as I just did moments ago, than live on Fox News at 33,000 feet in the midst of an uncanny bout of turbulence.

Perhaps it takes a certain altitude to process the attitude.

For not only did Wright stand by those infamous bits of past sermons that played on sound bytes ad nauseum until he was public enemy number two after Osama bin Laden, the man actually enjoyed himself at the dais today in D.C. If the seething Jeremiah Wright in a pulpit was a problem for patriotic America, I can only imagine its reaction to the jocular one at a press conference, where his unapologetic replies to the inevitable questions from the press had the crowd laughing on more than one occasion.

Not that all the outcry is a laughing matter for Wright. He did do his best to remind the audience of certain biblical principles that underlie his more vehement remarks—notably, the notion that you reap what you sow. And when the “you” in question is the American government, well, there are those seeds—the Trail of Tears, the slave trade, and the bombing of Dresden, to name just a few—that don’t exactly bode for a pretty harvest.

In an election season as fraught as this one, we might consider the thought that if Jeremiah Wright is crazy for claiming that certain seeds America has sown bore their brutal fruit in the form of 9/11, then so is Abraham Lincoln for positing the equivalent in his time.

Or did Lincoln not say at his second inaugural address that the Civil War, whose one-day toll at Shiloh alone was nearly ten times that of 9/11, just might be the country’s self-induced form of divine recompense for the untold lives lost in the slave trade? Yes, he did.

Truth be told, I didn’t need to come into the clouds to gain my right mind on this matter down below. Even on the ground this winter when the story first broke, I was amazed that no one seemed to place the content of Wright’s message in the context of his namesake, that is, the prophet Jeremiah.

While certain commentators reluctantly informed us that Wright’s fiery style did have its heritage in the Old Testament, I kept waiting for someone to remind us of a verse like Jeremiah 13:9 that takes an exceedingly patriotic Israel to task:

“Even so will I spoil the pride of Judah, and the great pride of Jerusalem.”

That’s God speaking, or supposedly so in the mind of most Americans, and it leaves me baffled how the better part of our churchgoing public seem to think that we Gentiles are any less accountable in our time than His chosen people were in theirs.

The word patriot, after all, stems from the Latin pater for father, and there is only so much that we can serve two dads. (If that thought doesn’t give my right-wing brethren pause for thought, I don’t know what will.)

None of this is to say that Jeremiah Wright is a bona fide prophet, nor is it to lend unqualified support to anything and everything that comes out of his mouth. Clearly the man is a hazard to the message. But as the original Jeremiah once pronounced, if there is a balm in Gilead then we have no excuse for letting the health of our poor people go unrestored. And if we have no excuse, whence all this pride and righteousness?

Perhaps in the logic of Lincoln, to the extent that we’ve squandered the balm we have, there will, and should be, a gadfly in Gilead as well. May it keep at us, long past the point that this turbulence subsides.