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A JOURNAL OF CHRISTIAN ETHICS VOLUME 11, NUMBER 1 AGGREGATE ISSUE 53 WINTER 2005
“The voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord’” Isaiah 40:3; John 1:23

The year was 1963. The 175th year of our nation’s life. President John F. Kennedy was completing his first term in office.

Abroad our country was engaged in a “cold war” with the communist-bloc countries, including Cuba just ninety miles away. Thousands of American soldiers were massed along the 39th parallel that divided North and South Korea guarding an uneasy truce. The United States was escalating its involvement in the war in Vietnam with 25,000 advisors.

At home other battles were waging, many focusing upon basic civil rights for African-Americans. Racial segregation in the public schools was still common, as well as other forms of separation in public places—especially hotels and motels, restaurants, transportation, bathrooms, and even water fountains! Black Americans found voting very difficult in many parts of the country. In 1963 the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote his famous “Letter From a Birmingham Jail” after the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in that segregated city. Tensions between the races were escalating.

I was living on the field of my student pastorate in southwestern Oklahoma. The year was a unique one for our family, as my brother Don was setting records as an All-American quarterback for the Baylor Bears. He led the nation in passing and total yardage, and was runner-up behind Roger Staubach for the Heisman trophy.

I listened to every game with pride. One Saturday in November was designated R.A. day, a special afternoon at Baylor stadium when all the young boys in Baptist churches, along with their sponsors, could attend the game at discount prices and root for the Bears.

At FBC, Roosevelt (a farming community) we had about ten young boys in our R.A. group. Our basketball and baseball team won almost every game, mainly due to two of our group who happened to be black (not a problem in our small rural community).

On Friday afternoon we left for Waco, riding in a “wheat-harvest” bus one of the men used for his work crews. Inside were enough bunk beds for us all, and the seats were OK.

When we stopped for gas in Jacksboro we heard the first report: “The President has been shot in Dallas.” When his death was announced over the networks, I called Don. He was uncertain if the game Saturday would be cancelled, but since we were not too far away, he urged us to come ahead with our ten R.A. boys.

That evening, as we prepared to bed-down in our harvest bus, Don came by to tell us the game was cancelled. “Tomorrow, after we meet for breakfast at the Elite Café, I will take all of you for a tour of the campus, including visiting the bear pits where our mascots live.” The trip would not be a total loss, and the boys were enjoying the adventure.

Don called the manager of the café, whom he knew well, and told him of his brother’s visit and the group of R.A. boys and sponsors who were coming to eat. “Sure Don,” he said, “Bring them by and we will be sure they get a real Texas breakfast they won’t forget.” I knew we would be treated royally, for in the fall of 1963 my brother was the town hero, leading the Baylor football team (along with several other star players) to nationwide prominence.

As our group walked in the door, we were greeted and led to tables prepared for us. I noticed the waitress seemed startled—a bit nervous about our group. She disappeared, and soon the manager came out. As Don introduced us and the host welcomed us, I noticed his eyes kept moving across our group. He then walked back toward the waitress and mumbled, “Let’s serve Don’s group.” I began to sense something was wrong.

As we departed after the breakfast, the manager came up to me and said, “Your boys were the best-behaved group of young people we have ever had. But preacher, I need to tell you something else. All these years we have had a policy of not serving colored people. Your colored boys are the first ones we have ever served in this café.”

He continued, “Don is not only our hero, but a good friend. I promised to serve his brother’s group, and we did. And yesterday our President was assassinated.” The manager paused, then looked me in the eye and said, “I guess it’s time we changed that policy.”

As I walked toward the bus, I thanked God for several things—that the boys had followed our instructions to be at their best in the café, that we had decided to come on to Waco even knowing the game might be cancelled, and the sequence of events that led us to eat breakfast that somber November day in the Elite Café.

The café is still there, near old 35 on the Circle that winds to I.H. 35 today. It has been refurbished, updated, and the menu is more in keeping with its name. I recently had dinner there with my grandson (a Baylor student now). I never pass the place without thinking of that day.

The events of 1963 and the following years led to civil rights legislation and many social changes—the American dream of “justice and equality for all” was renewed. History books record seminal events in those years—Rosa Parks refusal to sit at the back of the bus, a civil-rights march across a bridge in Selma, the rally in Washington, D.C. highlighted by Martin Luther King’s sermon, “I Have A Dream,” and many more.

“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.” Maya Angelou

“One would have thought after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, that the need for credible news and opinion, reliable and verifiable, would have found an answer from those who could supply it, . . . You [the public] keep reminding me that the quality of journalism and the quality of democracy go hand in hand.” Bill Moyers during his sign-off from public television December 17, 2004.

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” H. L. Mencken.

“There is no crisis in Social Security—payments are funded through 2042, after which 80% funding will be available. The real crisis today is with the 45 million children who do not have health care.” Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass), on Meet the Press, 1/30/05.

“The federal government this fiscal year will spend about $368 billion more than it took in, $20 billion more than it projected last September. But additional war spending this year will push that spending to a record $427 billion for fiscal 2005, making it harder for President Bush to fulfill his pledge to cut the budget deficit in half by 2009.” Congressional Budget Office Report, 1/25/05.

“The rise of political Christianity—a coalition of white born-again Christians, conservative Catholics, conservative African Americans and conservative Hispanics—is concerned with more than gay marriages and abortion rights. Political Christianity seeks to breach the wall of separation between the church and state and wishes to make this country a Christian nation.” M A. Muqtedar Khan, in the National Catholic Reporter about the ultimate design of the Religious Right in the U.S.

“To think that way demeans the Christian movement. We are not anybody’s special interest group.” Charles W. Colson, born-again former aide to President Nixon warning evangelical conservatives not to list demands to the President or to other elected officials.

“In this plentiful land there are 36 million who are poor, 45 million who are without health insurance and 25.5 million who are hungry. ‘Read the book,’ urged [Jim] Wallis, One out of 16 verses of scripture is about poverty—one out of nine in the synoptic Gospels.’ [James] Forbes added, ‘nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.’” John M. Buchanan in The Christian Century.

“The current system is rigged to benefit the interest of those in office—not of those who put them there.” California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, in his State of the State speech calling for an independent panel of retired judges (not the State legislature) to apportion congressional seats, of which none of California’s 53 seats changed parties. Nationally only 13 of the 435 congressional districts saw a political flip, 4 of those from the gerrymandered Texas map.

“It is still possible that most Iraqis will come out of the war better off than they were before. . . . The question is whether the U.S. will be a better place after years of fearmongering, military abuse, erosion of civil liberties, and a constant stream of political propaganda that distorts America’s proudest legacies.” Ian Buruma, author of Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies.

“All institutions, every last single one of them, are evil; self-serving, self-preserving, self-loving; and very early in the life of any institution it will exist for its own self. . . . never trust them. Never bow the knee to them. They are all after your soul. Your ultimate, absolute, uncompromising allegiance. Your soul. ALL of them.” Novelist Will Campbell in an interview for Baptists Today.

“The only way lawyers can make a case for keeping ‘under God’ in the pledge is by emptying the phrase of theological meaning.” Rodney Clapp in The Christian Century.

“The constitutional amendment we are debating today strikes me as antithetical in every way to the core philosophy of Republicans. It usurps from the states a fundamental authority they have always possessed, and imposes a federal remedy for a problem that most states do not believe confronts them.” Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), on the proposed amendment to ban same-sex marriage, which he and six Republicans helped block.

“From affirmations of the ‘conservative resurgence,’ to demands for loyalty to the SBC’s creed, to professor-presidents, to rebukes of whatever the SBC condemns, the noose of conformity is tightening. The 2004 [state] meetings illustrate an important truth: SBC fundamentalists won’t rest until they control a convention in every state.” Marv Knox, Editor Baptist Standard.

“If the husband does not want his wife to work outside the home, she should not work outside the home.” Richard Land, SBC Ethics Commission, on Meet the Press.

“Iraq provides terrorists with a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills, . .” David Low, National Intelligence Officer for Transitional Threats noting Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for future terrorists.

“According to the National Priorities Project, the Iraq war so far has cost over $145 billion. At that rate, Martin E. Marty calculates that the war has cost his own small town (Riverside, ILL, population 8895) over $6 million [and] ‘for the cost of the war so far, we could have insured 86,047,783 children nationwide for a year. That would translate to 3225 tots in Riverside (if we had that many children here)’.” Christian Century, 11/30/04.

“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The story did not begin with me. And long after I am gone, the story will journey on into the ages. But the caravan did come by here. And I climbed aboard.

The Gospel was the hope of Negroes in the segregated South when I was growing up in the 1950s and 1960s in Mississippi. Negroes looked forward to the day when that “Gospel Train” would spring their sweet escape from a racist “hell on earth” and land them in the celestial bliss of a peaceful, just, eternal heaven. Some of us Whites dreamed too.

I reckon all who climb aboard God’s Freedom Train understand that the train departs from Egypt always and journeys long through the wilderness before arriving in the Promised Land. Six years after my birth in 1949, the United States Supreme Court handed down an historic decision in the Brown v. Board of Education case on Monday May 17, 1954, ruling that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. In response to the Supreme Court’s decision, Thomas P. Brady (Circuit Court Judge of the 14th District of Mississippi) published a book entitled Black Monday, in which he wrote, “The Negro purposes to breed up his inferior intellect and whiten his skin and ‘blow out the light’ in the White man’s brain and muddy his skin.” Continuing his tirade the racist Judge hissed,

You can dress a chimpanzee, housebreak him, and teach him to use a knife and fork, but it will take countless generations of evolutionary development, if ever, before you can convince him that a caterpillar or a cockroach is not a delicacy. Likewise the social, economic, and religious preferences of the Negro remain close to the caterpillar and the cockroach.

In 1963, Judge Brady was awarded a seat on the bench of the Mississippi Supreme Court.

Within two months of the Brown v. Board of Education decision the White Citizen’s Council (which came to be known as “the white collar Klan,” or “the reading and writing Klan”) was formed on July 11, 1954, in Indianola, Mississippi. Two years later the Mississippi Legislature established The Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission to maintain segregation. How vividly I recall the “Freedom Rides” undertaken by Negro and White activists in 1961, who dared to travel on Trailways and Greyhound buses from Washington D.C. to New Orleans, Louisiana for the sole purpose of testing federal integration laws in bus stations throughout the South. I was eleven years old when the “Freedom Riders” or “Friction Riders” as they were called in the Jackson, Mississippi press, were severely beaten in Jackson and in my hometown of McComb, Mississippi.

The first direct action for integration in Mississippi by Mississippians occurred in my hometown on August 26, 1961, when two local young Negro men, Elmer Hayes and Hollis Watkins, sat-in at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. For their trouble they were harassed, arrested, and jailed for 30 days. Four days later, another sit-in took place at the bus station in McComb. Two Negro high school students, Brenda Travis and Isaac Lewis, were jailed for 28 days. Soon thereafter, on October 4, 120 Negro high school students, including Brenda Travis, marched through the streets of McComb to the steps of City Hall. The teen-age Miss Travis was sent away to Reform School for one year.

On September 30, 1962, riots broke out at the University of Mississippi when James Meredith became the first Negro student to enroll at the school. Two persons were killed in the melee and 60 U.S. Marshals were injured. Less than one year later, on June 11, 1963, NAACP Field Secretary in Mississippi, Medgar Evers, was murdered in the driveway of his home in Jackson, shot in the back with a high-powered rifle fired by Byron de la Beckwith of the White Citizen’s Council. The long, hot summer of 1964 lay just around the corner.

The Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964 was a well-coordinated civil rights campaign, which brought to the State hundreds of college student volunteers and other civil rights activists from the North and California to work for racial equality. More than 200 volunteers came to Mississippi on June 20 to establish Freedom Voter Registration, Freedom Schools, and Freedom Medical and Legal Clinics. By June 21 three of the civil rights workers had disappeared. The bodies of James Chaney, Michael Schwerner, and Andrew Goodman were found August 4 outside Philadelphia, Mississippi.

Civil rights workers and Mississippi Negroes suffered horribly in the long, hot summer of 1964. Included in the litany of evils suffered by the innocent were 1,000 arrests, 80 beatings, 35 shootings, 35 church bombings, 30 home bombings, and 6 murders. The list may not even be complete since it includes only crimes that were reported!

My hometown of McComb, located in Pike County in Southwest Mississippi, became known internationally in 1964 as “The Dynamite Capitol of the World” for its 20 acts of violence and 16 bombings of churches and homes in defiance of civil rights advances. Is it any wonder Martin Luther King, Jr. described to United States Attorney General Robert Kennedy the evil in McComb as a “Reign of Terror?”

Shame covered the city like dirty smog. Our churches fell silent; our preachers developed laryngitis. The body of Christ looked nothing at all like Jesus. No tables of racism were overturned in the temple. No ministerial anger cried out against bigotry, hatred, or murder. Along with the Finance Committee, Fellowship Committee, and Youth Committee my home church formed a “Ni--er” Committee, composed of the biggest and meanest men in the church, who met each Sunday on the steps of the church with one job and only one job: while the pastor stood in the pulpit preaching about a God who loved everyone, a certain race of people must NEVER, EVER get through that door! Where had all the prophets gone?

In the early 1960s fewer than 2% of Mississippi’s Negro population were registered to vote. Some counties did not have a single registered Negro voter! Yet White supremacy and segregation, twin Southern traditions proudly inherited by each new generation through paternal bloodlines and ingested through mother’s milk, were being threatened. “Ohhh, dat Gospel train’s a comin’; I hear dat whistle blowin’.”

The moment a Southerner surrenders his life to Christ for a lifetime of Christian ministry a crisis strikes. In the area of race relations shall he follow a course of continuation or compensation? Shall he follow Christ or culture? Will there be a transfer of allegiance? Whom shall one now seek to please, earthly father or heavenly Father? Shall the minister follow society or Scripture? Which will it be: family or faith? The choice is hard. Religion would be much easier if ethics were not involved.

Kay and I concluded there was no choice after all. Either Christ was Lord or He wasn’t. Robert Frost’s poem, The Road Not Taken, expresses our own dilemma and decision:

“The Road Taken” led us to minister in the ghettos of New Orleans in the 1970s while I was in seminary. Soon we had joined an African-American Church in the inner city as its only two white members. In time Kay was asked to serve as Sunday School Superintendent and I was invited to serve as Associate Pastor. Our families tried hard to understand our calling to minister in this setting, and I believe they were successful in doing so. Their love and support blessed us.

When my ordination was scheduled in Kay’s home church in the Mississippi Delta, the church fellowship and our families seemed pleased. When we revealed, however, that we wanted our Pastor, the Reverend Andrew W. Gilmore of Christian Love Missionary Baptist Church in New Orleans to preach my ordination sermon, celebration turned into chaos. A negro preach in the pulpit of an all-white Mississippi Delta church? In the very town in which the White Citizen’s Council was formed? And wouldn’t other Negroes want to make the trip from New Orleans as well?

Although my ordination in Roundaway Baptist Church in Sunflower County, Mississippi created no small crisis, we remain very proud of the way in which the Deacons and the church membership responded to the collision of segregation and Scripture. When Kay’s father, a deacon in the church, delivered a passionate appeal to the church on behalf of right, the church followed the leadership of the Holy Spirit beautifully. The ordination service provided a glimpse of God’s True Church where all believers are one in Christ Jesus.

We could not have known what awaited us in our first pastorate on the Mississippi-Louisiana State Line. Rather than reveal the name of the church I prefer the pseudonym “Southern Baptist Church.” Moreover all names are fictitious except in cases where a person lines up on the side of right. I am proud to make known the identities of the faithful.

“Are you going to Homecoming this weekend?” I asked Doug Taylor one Tuesday afternoon in October of 1979, as we walked across the campus of the New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary. Doug and I had graduated from Mississippi College, he in 1978 and I in 1975. “I’d love to, but I don’t have a car,” he lamented. “Hey, that’s no problem,” I said. “Kay and I are going and you are more than welcome to ride with us.”

“For real?” he asked. “Absolutely!” I said. And so the drama began innocently enough.

Kay and I planned to drive from New Orleans to Clinton, Mississippi, Friday afternoon, attend homecoming festivities at the college Saturday, then motor Saturday night to the church field where I served as Pastor. Sunday we would worship morning and evening, then return to New Orleans late Sunday night. We never even thought about the obvious. Then it hit me! “Hun,” I said, “I never once thought about this, but Doug is black and Southern Baptist Church is white. We’ve got a problem.”

“I never thought about it either,” she said, “what are we going to do?” “Well, maybe this is what God wants, even though we didn’t think about what we were doing,” I mused. “Let’s talk to Doug, explain the situation, pray about it for a couple of days, and see what we think we should do,” I suggested.

“Doug, I’ve got to explain something to you,” I began. With that I told him that a black person had never, ever been in the church, not even to cook or clean, and that the church sat in the heart of Klan territory, but that the invitation was still on the table. We agreed to pray. Thursday evening the three of us met in our home to finalize our plans according to God’s guidance through prayer. One by one we reported that our sense was “All Systems Go!” We had not intentionally plotted to integrate Southern Baptist Church. Despite our naivete, or maybe because of it, we felt providentially chosen by God for this historical act. If it is possible for fear and peace to coexist, those two polar neighbors seemed to find a home in our hearts.

Sunday morning arrived. Doug, Kay, and I, along with Eric Holleyman, our Associate Pastor for Music and Youth, prayed together at the parsonage then drove to the church. Word traveled fast. As soon as Sunday worship concluded, Sammy Wilson ran up to me and exploded, “Ed Earl wants to see you right now! He said to tell you to get your *^%#! over to his house the minute church is out!”

Ed Earl was a church member who attended church every leap year. I suspected he was a Klansman, but I had no way of knowing. In order to present the false impression that I was not frightened, I ate Sunday lunch first rather than rush right over. Eric insisted on going with me. When we arrived at Ed Earl’s, Jimmie Lou met us at the door and ushered us into the room where Ed Earl sat waiting. Jimmie Lou excused herself, closing the door behind her. Ed Earl said nothing for the longest. Then he began.

“Got a little visit this mornin’,” he said. “The boys came by, tearin’ into my driveway in their pick-up trucks, slingin’ gravel everywhere, blowin’ their horns, slammin’ on brakes, throwin’ rocks, and hollerin’—‘Ed Earl, git out here quick!’ Well, I went outside and said, ‘What’re you boys up to?’ They said, ‘Git in the truck, Ed Earl!’ I said, ‘Where you boys goin’?’ They said, ‘Git in the *%^#! Ed Earl! We’re goin’ to git us a nigger ’n a preacher!’

Then they told me it was you! I was so mad I could *%^#! But I told ‘em, ‘I’m gonna have to ask you boys to turn around and go back home.’ ‘What!’ they said. ‘You heard me boys. Lemme handle this one; I owe that preacher one; he’s taken up a lot o’ time with my boy, huntin’, playin’ ball. But I tell you what I’m gonna do. If it ever happens again, you won’t be pickin’ me up. I’ll be pickin’ you up! Now go on home. I’ll take care of this one.”

Ed Earl paused as he spoke—eyes watering, face beet red—then he looked me square in the eye, voice quivering, and threatened, “If it ever happens again . . . .”

Ed Earl never finished his sentence. He didn’t have to. I understood. My life was being threatened. “Ed Earl,” I managed meekly, “what are you asking me to do? To stand in that pulpit and preach about a God who loves everybody, but put a sign in front of the church saying ‘No Negroes Allowed?’ I can’t do that, Ed Earl. You’ve gotta decide what you’ve gotta do; I’ve gotta do what God tells me to do.” Ed Earl stared daggers through me. I felt I was peering into the face of death.

“It better not happen again!” he warned. “Does tonight count?” I asked. “Because I can’t tell a man who wants to worship God that he can’t come in the church. I’m not going to do that, Ed Earl.”

That evening before Doug, Kay, Eric, and I went to church we prayed, placing ourselves and the witness of that day in God’s hands. The evening crowd nearly filled the sanctuary, which was unusual. Standing before the congregation I reminded the worshipers that we had the right to choose the color of carpet for the church, but not the color of skin of worshipers. God had already decided that.

The less I said that night and the more God said the better things would go, I felt. Two biblical texts stuck in my mind: Joshua 24:15, which reads, “Choose you this day whom you will serve . . . , but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord,” and 1 John 4:20 which warns, “If some one says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar.”

Standing floor level in front of the Lord’s Supper Table, upon which rested a suitcase-size Pulpit Bible, I turned, took the massive Bible, held it before the people, and charged, “Let us choose this day whom we will serve, Christ or culture. But let us be truthful. Let us have a Bible that we will live by. If you choose culture over Christ this day then I want you to come tear out this page that says we are to love one another, wad it up, and throw it away. If you choose to please your earthly father instead of your heavenly Father then come rip out this page that reads, ‘If some one says, I love God, and hates his brother, he is a liar.’ Let’s tear out and throw away all these pages we don’t want in our Bible. Let’s not be hypocrites. Let’s make a Bible we will live by.”

The sanctuary fell silent. “On the other hand,” I continued, “if this day you choose Christ over culture, I want you to come up here, take this pulpit Bible from me, and seal your commitment by reading from this Book before God and this assembly. Choose you this day!”

With the charge complete, I sealed my own commitment to the Lordship of Jesus Christ by reading from 1 John 4:7-8: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and every one who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.” Eric Holleyman walked forward, took the Bible from me, faced the congregation and began reading where I had stopped: “By this the love of God was manifested in us . . . .” He read until Kay marched down the aisle, received the huge Book from Eric, and read, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.” Doug Taylor followed Kay. What a sight to behold it was! A black man holding the pulpit Bible of Southern Baptist Church in 1979! “And this commandment we have from Him, that the one who loves God should love his brother also,” this child of God read.

Revival broke out! ‘Miss’ Elsie Smith, one of our oldest widows, waddled forward and whispered in my ear, “Hun, I can’t read; would you read for me?” Together we held the Bible as I read for her. Others came. Soon almost everyone had publicly declared their intentions to live according to God’s will rather than man’s ways.

Leon Johnson was the exception. Leon sat frozen on the back pew, a mask of hatred glued to his face. He rushed out into the night.

After everyone had left for the night, Kay, Doug, Eric, and I turned out the lights, locked up the church, and headed out the door. Before walking out into the black southern night, not knowing what or who might be awaiting us, we prayed.

Relief! Crickets, not Klan, greeted us as we opened the door. We drove to the parsonage to change into casual clothes for the drive back to New Orleans. As we prepared to leave the parsonage, fear gripped us. Who would be waiting outside in the dark? We prayed together, then opened the door. Nothing! Praise the Lord, no one was there! Driving down the deserted country roads which carried us toward I-55 miles away, our pulse quickened each time headlights hit our rear view mirror. Not until we drove into the bright lights of New Orleans did we feel safe.

When Eric, Kay, and I returned to the church field the next weekend we were shocked! Southern Baptist Church was a ghost town! The Klan had reached the members during the week. Almost no one dared attend church! Kenny Joe Cobb, the leading tither in the church, said he’d never give another nickel as long as I was pastor of the church. Elmer Newton, the oldest deacon in the church swore he’d never darken the door of the church as long as I was there. Despite our best efforts to shepherd the flock, visit the church families, preach the Word, love the unlovely, visit the sick, the widows, and those confined to nursing homes, and pray, pray, pray, nothing worked. Our days at Southern Baptist Church were numbered.

After doing everything we could to re-build the fellowship, unsuccessfully, I resigned as Pastor of Southern Baptist Church. Six months of painful struggle came to an end. Kay and I simply felt that if the church were ever going to have a chance to heal and grow again, we needed to go. The loving thing for us to do was to leave.

I am told the first question the Pastor Search Committee asked each new pastoral candidate was, “What do you think of niggers in the church?”

Note: This article is based on the author’s forthcoming book, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice and was revised from a lecture at Messiah College, Grantham, PA.

It has been a difficult year for the Christian witness in the United States. In fact, it’s hard for me to imagine a period in my lifetime when the integrity of the Christian faith has not more compromised or threatened—and I grew up Baptist in the Jim Crow South! The widespread misuse by religious and political elites of the language of faith and the “philosophy of Jesus Christ” is absolutely heartbreaking; no doubt the integrity and mystery of the faith has been cheapened in our zeal to be Christian patriots. Perhaps we should heed Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s sobering advice in his letters and papers from prison that at such times a period of holy silence is in order.

Over the past, I have been trying to complete a book about the civil rights movement and the American search for “beloved community.” Throughout this year of writing and solitude, my thoughts have returned time and again to Martin Luther King Jr.’s sermon at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967, delivered one year to the date of his assassination in Memphis. King’s sermon is haunting in its fierce urgency and righteous anger. With the nation unhinged by riots and uprisings and by the rising specter of Vietnam, with the dream fast becoming a nightmare, King’s sermon came as a lament for the soul of a nation, and I think as tellingly, as a lament for the Christian church, reeling like a drunken man between political expediency and self-serving ambition.

“It is midnight in our world today,” King said, “We are experiencing a darkness so deep . . . that we can hardly see which way to turn.”[i]

When Dr. King gave voice to a glimmer of hope, it was not hope in military power or political might. “Our only hope today,” he said, “lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. . . . Let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter-but-beautiful struggle for a new world.”[ii] This is the “calling” of the children of “the living God.”

It strikes me as a very good time for us take to another look at the path of Dr. King’s calling to public discipleship, to consider his understanding of that “new world,” a new world that has transformed the old order in the great event of the Cross and Resurrection of Jesus Christ; an event which happened decisively in the past, but must be claimed anew in every age as the vision that animates God’s people. Let us take a journey to a place and time that many students may regard as ancient history, but which in the intensity of our historical moment is alive with import and meaning. A journey to Dr. King’s kitchen.

Students are often surprised to learn that when Dr. King arrived in Montgomery in the fall of 1954, two years before this speech on “the beloved community” (not to mention the practices of non-violence which he thought considered an inseparable part of this vision)—these were the last things on his mind. Civil rights activism was not part of his agenda. King came to Montgomery because it offered a great salary, a comfortable parsonage and a highly educated congregation. Dexter Avenue Baptist Church had no interest in racial crusading either. Church members had long prided themselves on their access to white elites and their own relative social privilege; certainly they shared a common hope of a future without Jim Crow, but they were not going to ignite the fires of dissent.

In fact, Dr. King actually had to be talked into accepting the leadership of the Montgomery Improvement Association when the organization was formed the day after Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat in the front of the bus. King accepted only after being reassured, or perhaps cajoled into thinking, that the boycott would be over in a day. In his first list of demands as president, King made clear that the protest was not about challenging segregation. Did you get that? Not about challenging segregation. The NAACP refused to endorse King’s list.

King was no fan of nonviolence either. Glenn Smiley, a white staff member visiting Montgomery with the Fellowship of Reconciliation claimed to have discovered “an arsenal” in the parsonage.[iii] “When I was in graduate school,” King said, “I thought the only way we could solve our problem . . . was an armed revolt.”[iv]

By the end of the second month of the bus boycott, King had fallen into despair about his leadership and the direction of the protest, which was in a state of disarray. On a gloomy day in late January, 1956, certain that he was a complete failure, King offered his resignation as the president of the MIA. The resignation was not accepted, but his doubts about his own abilities as a pastor and organizer remained real and unabated.

The next week, King returned late one night to his parsonage after a long day of organizing and planning session. He had also just endured his first arrest and wanted nothing but to climb into bed and surrender to a good night’s rest. But then the phone rang, and on the other end of the line rushed a torrent of obscene words, and then a death threat: “Listen, nigger, we’ve taken all we want from you; before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.”[v] King hung up without comment, as had become his custom, but hopes of much-needed rest were gone. Threatening phone calls had become a daily routine throughout the weeks of the protest. In recent days, though, the phone calls had started to take a toll, increasing in number to thirty or forty each day and becoming much more menacing.[vi]

Unwelcome thoughts prey on the mind in the late hours, and King felt himself overcome with fear. “I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. I had heard these things before, but for some reason that night it got to me.”[vii] Stirred into wakefulness, King made a pot of coffee and sat down at his kitchen table. He felt his emotional balance—maintained throughout the preceding weeks of the boycott with a kind of willful unreflectiveness—slide abruptly out of balance. “I was ready to give up. I felt myself faltering,” he said.[viii] It was as though the violent undercurrents of the protest rushed in upon him with heightened force, and he surveyed the turbulent waters for a way of escape, searching for an exit point between courage and convenience—“a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward”—and he found none.[ix]

King thought of his little girl Yoki sleeping in her crib, of her “little gentle smile,” and of Coretta, who had sacrificed her music career, according to the milieu of the Baptist pastor’s wife, to follow her husband south.

Alone now in the midnight kitchen, with the silences of the Alabama night masking the great tumult in his soul, King grasped, for the first time, the utter and complete seriousness of his situation, and with it the inescapable fact that his family could be snatched away from him at any minute, or more likely he from them.[x] King felt his soul “melted because of trouble,” as the Psalmists said, “at wit’s end.” “I couldn’t take it any longer,” King said. “I was weak.”

Sitting at his table sipping the coffee, however, his thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a notion that at once intensified his desperation and clarified his options. “Something said to me, ‘You can’t call on Daddy now, you can’t call on Mama. You’ve got to call on that something in that person that your Daddy used to tell you about, that power that can make a way out of no way.’”[xi]

With his head now buried in his hands, King bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I still think I’m right. I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m weak now, I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. Now, I am afraid. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”

With his prayer enveloping the midnight room and house, King heard a voice: “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you. Even until the end of the world.”[xii]

King testifies, “I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.” And as the voice of Jesus washed over the vile words of the caller, King reached a spiritual shore beyond anxiety and despair. “I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before,” he said. “Almost at once my fears began to go, . . . My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.”[xiii]

In a seminary class years earlier, King had written an autobiographical essay on his own religious formation. The paper is distinguished not only by its intellectual posturing—the sort you might expect of a brilliant and ambitious young graduate student—but also by its complete lack of moral and spiritual intensity. King described his “early environment” as “very congenial,” one in which he was always able to think of God as a benevolent being presiding over a friendly and happy universe.[xiv] He said he’d never had anything like a crisis moment; his upbringing in the faith had been comfortable and wholesome.

In his Montgomery kitchen in January 1956, King experienced his crisis moment, and it burned away pretensions even as it fortified courage for the difficult times ahead. Faced with the possibility of death, he could not turn to his Daddy for consolation (besides his Daddy wanted him out of Montgomery). Faced with the gathering force of white resistance, liberal platitudes failed him. Notions of essential human goodness and perfectibility—these seemed empty now.

Dr. King may have been schooled at Morehouse College, Crozer Theological Seminary and Boston University; but in Montgomery, King was called, and the calling propelled him into the crisis that would define his life and legacy. In his Montgomery kitchen, he decided to follow Jesus into “the new world of God” and go the distance on peace.

Three nights after the kitchen vision on January 30, 1956, King stood at the pulpit of First Baptist Church, addressing a standing-room only audience, when word reached him that the parsonage had been bombed.

By the time he arrived home, a large crowd had already begun forming in the street and front yard. Memories of the size of the crowd vary greatly; some say hundreds, others thousands. King felt the undercurrents of rage that had run strong for years in the black community swelling into the immediate threat of violence. Many in the crowd were armed and ready to fire. King felt the shifting of sentiment away from peaceful negotiation to militant conflict.

Inside the house, with the front window shattered and a hole blasted into the porch, King was relieved to find Coretta and Yoki safe and in good spirits. The Mayor of Montgomery, along with police commissioner Sellers, the fire chief, and newspaper reporters, assembled in the dining room and proceeded to make official declarations of regret. Meanwhile, the crowd outside, still collecting newcomers from all corners of the block, continued to press forward against the police barricade. King realized he had to address the people, and he walked onto the porch and called for order. His words, reminders to his fellow travelers of their basic spiritual obligations, formed an arch from the First Baptist Church meeting to the gathering of the church militant, now milling about the house at 309 South Jackson Street. The words extended the Gospel from the sanctuary to the parsonage and wrapped the whole expanse of the violent Montgomery night in a sheltering story of peace.

“Now let’s not become panicky,” King told the crowd from the damaged porch after offering reassurances that Coretta and Yoki were unharmed. “If you have weapons, take them home; if you do not have them, please do not seek to get them. We cannot solve this problem through retaliatory violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence. Remember the words of Jesus: ‘He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword.’ Remember that is what God said.”[xv]

A “respectful hush” settled over the crowd, as church leader Jo Ann Robinson recalled. Even the police grew still and listened to King’s words.[xvi]

“We must love our white brothers,” King continued, “no matter what they do to us. We must make them know that we love them. Jesus still cries out in words that echo across the centuries: ‘Love your enemies; bless them that curse you; pray for them that despitefully use you.’ This is what we must live by. We must meet hate with love.”

“Remember, if I am stopped, this movement will not stop, because God is with the movement. Go home with this glowing faith and this radiant assurance. Go home and sleep calm. Go home and don’t worry. Be calm as I and my family are . . . and remember that if anything happens to me, there will be others to take my place.”

Throughout the Jackson Street crowd, a scattering of “Amens” and “God bless you” and “We are with you all the way, Reverend,” created a new momentum, as the threatening Jackson Street crowd became a worshipping congregation. King looked out over the audience and saw tears rolling down the faces of many people. Some hummed church songs.

King knew all too well that this gathering could have turned into the “darkest night in Montgomery’s history,” with hundreds—some said thousands—of angry and long-frustrated African Americans surrounding the middle-aged mayor and his three sidekicks. But “something happened” to avert the disaster, King said. “The spirit of God was in our hearts, and a night that seemed destined to end in unleashed chaos came to a close in a majestic group demonstration of nonviolence.”[xvii] In fact, church happened, and the reluctant man who had been called to “stand up” for God’s righteousness, justice, and truth, saw the evidence of their rarely tested power. King emerged from the Montgomery bombing with a single-minded theme, the transformative power of love.

In the final jubilant days of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, in December, 1956, with the United States Supreme Court decision of November guaranteeing the African-American protesters a victory over the segregated city laws, King spoke at a week-long Institute on Nonviolence and Social Change at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery. Reflecting on the tumultuous year that had passed, King tried to put the extraordinary experience in theological perspective. “It seems that God has decided to use Montgomery as the proving ground for the struggle,” he said, and “our church is becoming militant, stressing a social gospel as well as a gospel of personal salvation.” [xviii] Then he spoke with greater theological attention to the lessons learned: “We have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization. There is still a voice crying out in terms that echo across the generations, saying: ‘Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, pray for them that despitefully use you, that you may be the children of your Father which is in Heaven.’”

Although King believed a boycott was necessary in Montgomery to bring an end to discriminatory laws, the church people in the movement must ever be mindful that a boycott and its essential legal achievements do not represent the goal of their struggle. But, as King said in words that burn themselves into our minds and hearts with fierce urgency: “The end is reconciliation, the end is redemption, the end is the creation of the beloved community.”[xix]

What a beautiful notion he gave voice to in this address: the beloved community. One of King’s young associates, John Lewis, described it as “nothing less than the Christian concept of the kingdom of God on earth.” Lewis said the first time he heard Dr. King speak of the beloved community it evoked in his mind a lush and embracing vision of redemptive community and gave voice to all that he was working for as a young civil rights activist, devoted as he was to the task of applying the teachings of Jesus directly to social existence in the South. For a while even, the pursuit of beloved community gave to the civil rights movement a unifying spiritual vision.

However, in that rage-drenched 1967 sermon at Riverside Church, the hour has grown late, and the dream has given way to disillusionment. King’s questions strike with arresting power on his hearers, both then and today What if the people of God have already crossed the line from confessing Jesus as Lord and yielded their hearts to great violence? What if those who call themselves Christians have already turned their back on the “Jesus who walked the streets of Jerusalem” and bowed down to gun? Then there must be a time of repentance, a time of rededication, and a time when the followers of Jesus speak out clearly and boldly about the call and its decisive costs.

So, how do we today share a cup of coffee in Dr. King’s kitchen? Silence may tempt us, and certainly holy silence has its place, but now is not the time to be silent as the Cross is turned into an emblem of national ambition, and the wonder-working power of the Lamb—the precious blood of the Lamb—becomes just another way of talking about the personal benefits of consumer culture. In this moment we are called upon as Christians to reclaim our citizenship in a “world-wide fellowship,” beyond tribe, race, class, and nation, in the kingdom of God, the beloved community, disciples of the one who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them.

It is my hope that a young generation of Christian men and women will take inspiration from Dr. King’s life and his commitment to public discipleship. With King we need to reclaim the truth of the power of the Cross and Resurrection in contrast to those who insist that the paradigm of violence is the way to peace. Like Martin Luther King, Jr., dare to dream. Dare to change the world. Dare to live boldly for Christ.

Note: This sermon was delivered on May 31, 2003, as the Commencement Address at The Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond, Virginia.

Several years ago a tramp comedian named Bilbo was a genius at pantomime. His audiences loved him. He always finished his act with a pair of oversized yellow shoes with big toes sticking out under the stage curtain. All the audience could see from behind the closed curtain was Bilbo’s big yellow shoes, with a spotlight shining on them. As long as the spotlight was on the shoes, the audience continued to applaud.

When Bilbo thought the audience had applauded long enough, he would step on stage in his stocking feet and take a bow. The audience realized that they had been fooled by him, and they loved it. Unfortunately, Bilbo’s life had a sad ending. He was booked at the Hammerstin’s Theater on 42nd Street and Broadway. It was the palace theater of its time. Bilbo opened on Monday and was never better. He had a heart condition but no one knew it. At the end of the performance, he stepped out of his shoes, as he had at every performance, but this time had a heart attack. The audience was wildly applauding his shoes but Bilbo never came back for his last bow. The star performer was dead.

Although most clergy would not like to admit it, there is a star factor in ministry. Like Bilbo many ministers end up being performers in a spotlight before their congregations. Like the star comedian, some kill themselves in pushing too hard and in seeking applause. Unfortunately, too many ministers seek to be a “star” instead of following the high calling which brought them into ministry in the first place.

Many ministers are unwilling to acknowledge their own humanity. They have fallen into this “star” trap by yielding to a “God-complex.” All of us suffer from the basic sin of pride that Reinhold Niebuhr calls our “God Almightiness . . . the effort to usurp the place of God.”[xx] Some ministers seem to have taken second or third helpings of such a dish.

Congregations often put the minister on a pedestal and expect him or her to walk on water. Ministers themselves often assume that they are not supposed to be sick, express emotions, or have time for their family, or for themselves. This attitude often leads to burn out and to what I would call the “ministerial shooting star” syndrome.

At the annual church night at Hampton Baptist Church in Hampton, Virginia, where I am serving as Interim Pastor, I was asked to put on a superman shirt with a big S in the center under my shirt and coat and enter the congregation through a phone booth that had been placed on the stage. At the particular moment, as I was introduced as the Interim Pastor, I burst through the phone booth pulling my coat and shirt back to reveal the superman S in the middle of my chest and I yelled to the people, “I have come to save Hampton Baptist Church.” The congregation broke out both in laughter and applause. This, of course, was all done in good fun, but unfortunately many churches really do expect their minister to be a superman or superwoman to save them from all of their problems, struggles, difficulties, and to answer all of their church problems.

But no minister can solve all of the church problems or challenges that are before them. No minister can be everywhere at once. Believe it or not, you cannot really walk on water. Every minister needs to have a reality check. We need to make the distinction between our role and reality. Our identity and our identification are not the same. We are ministers by calling and profession, but our identity is male or female, married or single, husband or wife, mother or father. We are not fully what others say we are or think we are. Our robes, stoles, and clerical garb do not fully define who we are internally. These trappings indicate who we are as ministers, but they do not remove from us our humanity, our emotions, feelings, instincts, and drives. The question looms within us, “Who is this I/me/he/she/you/they?” We are pulled in many directions. We are more than we think we are and yet less than we think we are.

Ministry is not for a selected few star performers, but is a community of faith serving the One who is the Bright and Morning Star—Christ, the Light of the world. You and I are called, Paul says, “to help equip others in ministry to build up the body of Christ.” As we share all of our gifts, whatever they are, we seek to minister in the name of Christ. Every single Christian in a congregation is a priest. Each has a ministry. All have gifts and there is a great diversity. No one expects the dean of a medical school or law school or seminary to do all of the work. He or she uses one’s own gifts and helps train and equip others to minister effectively. That is one of our leading roles as well, to equip all persons to serve Christ more effectively.

The Church of the Savior in Washington, D.C., affirms in their membership statement that the Church of Christ is the ship on which “there are no passengers, all are crew members.” Every Christian needs to be engaged in ministry. If we are members of the Church of Christ, a member of any congregation, then we seek to find what our gift is and commit that gift in service for Christ. Karl Barth, the noted German theologian, wrote a number of years ago that within the church there are many different functions, but the preacher does not stand any higher than the elders, nor the bell ringers any lower than the professor of theology. Because there is no member of the church who is not the whole thing in his or her own place. There are differences of functions but each offers his or her gifts to Christ.[xxi] And you offer your gifts, and as a minister you seek to equip others to utilize theirs.

There are many essential functions that need to be carried on within the church: worship, training, Bible study, equipping church members for ministry, comforting, celebrating, and others. But we need to be aware that we have been called to minister outside the walls of the church and not to remain merely within the church walls.

Bill Jones, that noted New York preacher, tells about a time when he was a small boy and visited his grandfather’s farm. He had grown up in the city and so was unaware of all that one needed to do on a farm. His grandfather got him up early and they went out and fed the chickens, milked the cows, fed the other animals, and after spending a lengthy period of time doing this, they came back to a bountiful breakfast. As a small lad, whose eyes were beaming with enthusiasm and excitement, Bill Jones said to his grandfather, “Granddaddy, we have really worked hard, haven’t we?” His grandfather looked back at him and said, “Son, what we have been doing are just the chores, the real work is out in the fields. That begins now.”

Do not forget that Christ has called all of us to authentic evangelism. To share the good news of Christ with others in the world and to seek to minister to all of hurting humanity who are within the world around us. Many are looking for meaning, purpose, and hope. We need to share our faith through words and deeds unashamedly. Let the banner of your faith proudly wave in the winds of change and struggle that come all around you. Travel your journey of faith joyfully as you share your faith with Christ. Respect all religions and traditions. Acknowledge that every person has the right to religious faith or to deny it, but do not be ashamed of the Gospel that you proclaim. Proclaim it boldly with the assurance that the living Christ is with you.

As you continue to minister, always remember the importance of your family and friends. Have special times and ways of being present to them and with them. Don’t lose your family’s soul while ministering to others.

The One who is the Bright and Morning Star has called you and me to serve and not to be served. We are not performers, but servants. One of my favorite writers is Loren Eiseley, the anthropologist. I love one of his stories where he writes about walking along the beaches of Costabel. As he walked an hour before dawn, he could see flashlights gleaming in the distance along the shore. As he made his way around the altered edges of the cove, he saw a stooping figure moving along in the gloom or rain. On the sand he saw long-limbed star fish strewn everywhere as though the night sky had showered down. He noticed the figure of a man in front of him. He saw the man stoop down and fling an object beyond the breaking surf. Eiseley moved toward him to see what was happening.

In a pool of sand and silt he saw a starfish, its arms up stiffly. “It’s still alive,” Eiseley ventured. “Yes,” the man said. With a gentle movement he picked up the star, spun it over his head and flung it out into the sea. It sank into a burst of spume and the waters roared once more.

“It may live,” the man said, “if the off shore pull is strong enough.” “Do you collect,” Eiseley asked the man? “Only like this,” the man said softly gesturing, “and only for the living.” He stooped again, oblivious of Eiseley’s curiosity, and skipped another star neatly across the water. “The stars,” he said, “throw well. One can help them.” Eiseley said, “ I turned and as I neared the bend in the coast and saw him toss another star, skimming its skillfully far out over the revening tumultuous water for a moment in the changing light. The sower appeared magnified, as though casting larger stars upon some greater sea. He had, at any rate, the posture of a god. “He is a man,” I considered, sharply bringing my thought to rest. “The star-thrower is a man, and death is running more fleet than he along every beachhead, every sea beach in the world.”

Eiseley continues: “On a point of land, as though projecting into the domain beyond us, I found the star-thrower. In a sweet rain-swept warning, that great many hued rainbow still lurked and waved tentatively beyond him. Solemnly I sought and picked up a still-living star, spinning it far out into the waves. I spoke once briefly ‘I understand,’ I said. ‘Call me another thrower.’ Only then I allowed myself to think. He is not alone any longer. After us there can be others.”[xxii]

Eiseley’s account of the star-thrower reminds me that every minister is called to be a star-thrower. We are to reach out to help those who have been washed ashore in the currents of sin, depression, conflicts, hopelessness, and the endless other struggles of living. We reach out as a “wounded healer,” as Henry Nowuen has reminded us. We are to assist, to care, to listen, to support, to love, give attention, give a shoulder on which a person can cry, give encouragement, offer tolerance, render comfort, guidance or whatever the need may call for.

As star-throwers we seek to serve. Last night at your banquet, you were each given a towel. This towel symbolizes that you are a servant. You are called to minister. When a minister puts a stole around his or her neck, that stole is a symbol of the towel. That was the original significance of the stole. It is the recognition that we are all servants. As Jesus said, “the greatest of all is the servant of all.” He said, “He had come to minister and not to be ministered unto.” And you and I have come to model and serve the One who is the greatest servant of all.

As a star-thrower you are still en route educationally. I hate to break the news to you, but your education is not completed with your diploma today. You have a lifetime journey before you. No one ever arrives educationally. The pop theologian, Charles Schulz, in one of his comic strips depicts Lucy and Charlie Brown engaged in conversation about school. Lucy asks Charlie Brown, “Are you smarter this afternoon than you were this morning?” “Yes, Yes,” Charlie Brown replies, “I think I am a little smarter.” But are you a whole lot smarter?” she ask. “No,” he responds, “Just a little smarter.” “See?” Lucy exclaims. “See what?” Charlie Brown asks. Lucy then asserts, “There are serious flaws in our educational system!”

There are indeed many serious flaws in any educational endeavor. The biggest flaw of all, however, is to think that one has arrived educationally. It is a lifetime process. Paul says we are always reaching toward the maturity of faith and for deeper knowledge of Christ. The psalmist has reminded us that the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, but this awe and mysterious encounter and relationship is a lifetime journey in which we are seeking to grow. “To think and to think hard,” Hegel reminds us, “is a religious duty.” William James asserts, “I like tender hearts but I also like tough minds.” Down through history there have been great thinkers who have given their minds as well as their hearts in service to God and truth. Christians like Paul, Augustine, St. Teresa, Aquinas, Luther, Wesley and thousands of others have believed that to love God with all of one’s mind is not separate from what it means to be Christian. To be a believer is not divorced from being a “thinker.” To love God with one’s entire mind is indeed a sacred duty.

Our education is always in process. We are reaching toward “maturity” to measure ourselves by the stature of Jesus Christ, as Paul says in Ephesians 4:13. Continue to study, read, learn, observe. Sit, stand, walk, and run by the doorways of the past and present and listen to the voices that are whispering to you their continuous wisdom. Our minds, spirit, and soul are dead when we cease to hunger for more knowledge and insight about life and its meaning.

Remember that we are on a quest; we are voyagers, adventurers, seekers, and dreamers—like Joseph, and the Magi—seeking to follow the Star wherever it may lead. Walk near the edge of heresy as you seek truth. Be open, flexible, and unafraid of truth wherever it leads. Creeds, Affirmations of Faith, or Statements of Belief are only individual or group renderings where persons have attested to their faith in any given moment or age. Drink from their wells of inspiration but do not see these statements as binding, final, or inerrant. We follow a living Lord who goes before us to open new pathways, new insight, new truths, the One who gives a new birth and a new heaven. He is the Lord of the living not the dead, the future not the past.

We are all in the process of becoming, being, and learning. The true believers will want to live with God at our elbows, directing us to the next step, phase, direction, insight, and the challenge to realize that learning is ever before us and beyond us. When we reach toward Christian maturity, we sense that whether our study is religion, math, science, literature, medicine, psychology, physics or any other endeavor, we have not arrived. Something or Someone is ever pulling us toward the not yet realized.

As a star-thrower, a servant of the Bright and Morning Star, you will have to continue to nurture your own spiritual life. Open yourself through personal meditation and prayer to the numinous Other—the mysterious presence of God. No one ever reaches spiritual maturity. We always need to be open and continuously growing. How can anyone dare say that he or she has reached “the stature of Jesus Christ” and measure up to Him?

There is an old story about a woman who got religion at every revival meeting. She would be challenged to repent and exclaim, “Fill me, Lord, fill me!” But after hearing this for about twelve years, an older member of the congregation called out, “Don’t do it, Lord,” she leaks!

But so do we all. No one is ever fully filled, spiritually. Remember to set aside a quiet place for reflection, Bible reading, and prayer. Read and meditate on the scriptures, the great devotional classics, and selected contemporary writings. Persons who have been meaningful to me have been Harry Emerson Fosdick, Leslie Weatherhead, C.S. Lewis, John Killinger, Elton Trueblood, Barbara Brown Taylor, and Joyce Rupp. Jot down your thoughts, prayers, ideas, questions or longings that are stimulated by your reading. In your praying, focus on God’s greatness, confess your sins, accept the forgiveness of God’s grace, and spend some time listening for God’s voice. You may do this in a quiet place at home or a walk in the park or the woods.

One of the persons who modeled the quest for intellectual and spiritual growth for me was John Baillie, the Scottish theologian and Principal of New College at the University of Edinburgh. In his study there were three objects that symbolized his faith and ministry. One was the desk on which he did his theological writing, the second was a chair where he did his reading, and the third was a cushion near a window and bookcase where he would kneel, meditate, and pray. This great theologian knew the importance of developing the inner life and never assumed that he did not need to spend quiet time in worship before God. Each of us has that same challenge.

Remember as a star-thrower, you must follow the Bright and Morning Star wherever it leads. Like Paul, “You do not want to be disobedient to your heavenly vision.” You came into ministry out of a sense of call, a vision, a pull, an urge, and a drive that could not be satisfied without making a commitment. You are here because of that vision. Down through the centuries men and women have felt pulled toward God. They have climbed mountaintops, crossed deserts, sailed vast seas, have marched down familiar avenues at home, have taken strange routes in foreign lands, have struggled inwardly and followed lighted paths and agonized gropingly down dark ones to understand and to know the love of God. Paul’s vision gave him a faith that endured. Each of us needs to have a vision that will enable us to endure.

Have you ever thought what the world would be without vision? Everything that has come into existence has come because somebody had a dream or a vision. Columbus had a dream of a new world, and he set sail. Galileo had a vision of a new scientific approach. Edison had a dream that sound could travel over a wire and that electricity could produce light. Ford had a vision of a horseless carriage. The Wright brothers dreamed that men and women could fly. Von Braun believed and dreamed that men and women could go to the moon and beyond.

What would religion be without vision? Abraham followed his vision of God and went looking for a city without foundations. Moses saw God in a burning bush. Jacob wrestled with God at Peniel. Ezekiel had a vision of God at Cheban. Isaiah had a vision of God high and lifted up in the temple. Esther had a vision of how to save the nation Israel. Ruth had a vision of how to save her family. Elijah experienced God in the sound of gentle stillness in a mountain cave. Paul had a life changing vision on the Damascus Road. Augustine had a vision of “the city of God.” Luther had a vision of a reformed church. Wesley had a vision of a church revived. Albert Schweitzer had a vision of reverence for all of life. Martin Luther King Jr. had a dream that all men and women could be brothers and sisters together. Mother Teresa had a vision of the church’s concern for the poor and the outcast of society.

What would the church be without a vision? Without vision the church would cease to exist. It has been said, “Without vision, the people perish.” Only when men and women dream dreams, see visions, formulate plans, follow stars and prophesy do we see real living. Christ has summoned us out complacency into adventure, from apathy to enthusiasm, from the settled to the pioneer, from safety to risk, from comfort to danger, from death to life. The singer in The Man of La Mancha has declared that we are “to be willing to march/into hell for a heavenly cause/. . . to reach the unreachable star.”[xxiii]

So live with expectancy, wonder, mystery, hope, faith, and love as you follow that vision and star. Continue to go back, at least in your mind, to that meeting place where you were first surprised by God’s presence.

A number of years ago in England a man stood reading a plaque on a church door. It read: “Here God laid his hands on William Booth.” The man stood there awhile looking at the plaque. Finally the custodian came over and said, “I’m sorry Mister, but it is time to close the church. You need to move on.” The man said, “Give me just another moment, please.”

“Okay,” the custodian said, “Just another moment.” The man read the plaque again. “Here God laid his hands on William Booth.” The custodian suddenly realized that the man reading the plaque was William Booth himself, the founder of the Salvation Army. Then he heard Mr. Booth praying, “Oh God, do it again. Do it again!”

In some place, quiet or noisy, God laid the divine hand upon your life, and you committed your life to God. That is not the only time that God will touch your life. You need to pray, “Oh God, do it again and again.”

Continue then on your journey of faith but come back and warm yourself again and again in the light of the Bright Morning Star so that you will know how to be a star-thrower.

The order to kill every pregnant Jewish woman had been issued that morning. So when a Nazi guard patrolling the Jewish ghetto in Kovno noticed a pregnant Jew walking past the local hospital, he shot her at point-blank range. She died on the spot.

Hoping to save the baby, some passersby rushed the dead woman into the hospital. An obstetrician determined that she had been in her last weeks of pregnancy, and said that if surgery were performed immediately, her baby might be rescued.

But could such surgery be squared with Jewish law, which is stringent in its concern for the dignity of the dead? If the baby didn’t make it, the mother’s body would have been mutilated for nothing.

The question was put to Rabbi Ephraim Oshry, a young rabbinical scholar. He didn’t hesitate. “When saving a life is involved, we are not concerned with the desecration of the dead,” he ruled. Besides, if the murdered mother could speak, wouldn’t she welcome the “desecration” of her body if it would assure her baby’s survival? He ordered the operation to proceed at once, and the baby was born alive.

Then came a horrifying postscript. “The cruel murderers . . . came into the hospital to write down the name of the murdered woman. . . . When they found the baby alive, their savage fury was unleashed. One of the Germans grabbed the infant and cracked its skull against the wall of the hospital room. Woe unto the eyes that saw this!”

This case from May 1942 was one of many that Rabbi Oshry was called upon to decide during the Nazi occupation of Kovno, Lithuania’s second-largest city. He recorded the heart-rending questions that were brought to him in brief notes on scraps of paper, then buried the scraps in tin cans. Someday, he hoped, those scraps might be found evidence that even in the midst of the Nazi inferno there were Jews who clung to their God and His law, refusing to abandon Him even as they must have wondered whether He had abandoned them.

More than 90 percent of Kovno’s 40,000 Jews were killed in the Holocaust either by the Germans or by their Lithuanian collaborators. Rabbi Oshry was one of those who survived. After the war he retrieved his notes and began writing them out as full-length rabbinical rulings, or responsa. These were ultimately published in five Hebrew volumes; in 1983 a book of excerpts in English, Responsa from the Holocaust, was published by Judaica Press.

I read Responsa from the Holocaust soon after it came out, and found it deeply moving. With the approach of Holocaust Remembrance Day, which occurs this year [2004]on April 19, I took it down from the bookshelf last week and again found it powerful and affecting. The questions laid before Rabbi Oshry can reduce you to tears, but what is really extraordinary, I saw now, was that anyone would care enough to ask such questions in the first place.

In October 1941, “one of the respected members of the community” asked Rabbi Oshry if he could commit suicide. His wife and children had been seized by the Nazis, and he knew that their murder was imminent. He feared that the Nazis would force him to watch as his family was killed, and the prospect of witnessing their deaths was a horror he couldn’t bear to face. He begged for permission to take his own life and avoid seeing his loved ones die.

Later that month, the head of another household came to Rabbi Oshry “with tears of anguish on his face.” His children were starving to death and he was desperate to find food for them. His query was about a bit of property that had been left behind by the family in the next apartment. The entire family had been butchered a few days earlier, and there were no surviving relatives. Under Jewish law, could he take what remained of their belongings and sell them to raise cash for food?

Next to such questions, answers seem almost superfluous. (The rabbi did not permit the suicide; he allowed the neighbors’ property to be taken.) What is stunning is that men and women in the throes of such hideous suffering and brutality were still concerned about adhering to Jewish law. In the lowest depths of the Nazi hell, in a place of terror and savagery that most of us cannot fathom, here were human beings who refused to relinquish their faith who refused even to violate a religious precept without first asking if it was allowed.

Violence, humiliation, and hunger will reduce some people to animals willing to do anything to survive. The Jews who sought out Rabbi Oshry like Jews in so many other corners of Nazi Europe were not reduced but elevated, reinforced in their belief, determined against crushing odds to walk in the ways of their fathers.

Some Jews fought the Nazis with guns and sabotage, Rabbi Oshry would later say; others fought by persisting in Jewish life. In the end, Responsa from the Holocaust is a chronicle of courage and resistance and a profound inspiration to believers of every faith.

Note: This article first appeared in The Boston Globe and is published by permission of the author.

Note: The author is a veteran of the first Gulf War and the son-in-law of regular poetry contributor Al Staggs. The article reveals the anguish some in the military face when the reality of war becomes very personal.

What follows is an account of the moment that I became a conscientious objector. About eighteen months after this, I was honorably discharged as an objector. To this day, the logic of war baffles me, especially among those who claim they follow a man of peace. For me, it came down to what seems to me to be one of the easier commandments to follow: Thou shalt not kill (Exod. 20:13).

Thou shalt not kill. Strange how formal we've made something so fundamental. Perhaps it’s the formality that allows us to so easily disregard it. It's the same with war, I guess. For me the formality was eliminated on a very hot afternoon in February of 1993. The war ended two years ago.

Where I was it was hot even in February. Sitting in front of a large computer monitor. Dark. It was so dark. How can it be so hot and so dark? The trailer was hastily darkened by duct tape and cardboard. Our eyes must be sharp. “The better to see you with, my dear.”

Here are the photographs from before. Split screen. Here are the photographs from after. Click. Zoom. A building that was once whole now is a hole. Click. Zoom. The SAM site was partially destroyed. We'll have to go back for more mayhem. Note longitude. Note Latitude. Click. Zoom. That crater is surrounded by black flecks. Sweat drips from my nose on to the keyboard. Is the AC unit working at all? It's making enough noise. Click. Zoom. That crater is larger on my screen now. What are those things scattered. It's next to a refinery tower, I wonder if it's oil or something. Click. Zoom. The flecks seem to be faintly recognizable now, more shades of grey, not just black. Click. Zoom. Oh, dear God, what have I done? Click. Zoom.

Count Bodies. Need for reports. 1, 2, 3, 4, Click. Zoom. Dear God, when will the sun go down? I'm going to be here all night. 121, 122, 123, Click. STOP. These men aren't soldiers. These men are refinery workers. They'd say that these men were supporting critical infrastructure. But, I know different. Fathers were supporting families. Families who won't eat tonight. Families who will now be burying their providers as I count them. 153,154,155. Mothers, wives, children starving for a little cold rice. They sit in their living rooms, drink their beer and tell me I am killing enemies. They go out to their restaurants, order another bottle of wine that costs enough to feed one of these families for a month and tell me they are proud of me for protecting their freedom. Why now does the sweat on my cheeks pour harder. The sweat on my face drip, dripping on to the keyboard. Why now do these enemies look human. Why Now? Click. Zoom.

Thou shalt not. Oh . . . Sorry God. We must have misunderstood that one. Given its ambiguity and all. You know, You really should make those commandments a little easier to understand. AARGGH. The heat . . . I thought it was supposed to be February.

The evening is coming and the breeze is bringing the ocean with it. I am glad I'm not at sea. I need a little earth right now. The artificial bright lights glimmer like hope against the tragic beauty of a smoke infused sunset. Blackness drifts south from Kuwait like plague. Those fires have been burning for two years. I guess they stick around like the heat. Smoke. Heat. Sand. Unclean. That's what I'm afraid of becoming.

Man, I'm good at my job. I get promotions. Now is not the time to start having a moral crisis. Thou shalt NOT . . . I mean, God couldn't have meant under ANY circumstance. How would that work? Anyway, it's not like I pulled the release button for those bombs. I just analyzed the intelligence and helped develop the target package. Target package . . . what a cop out.

Target package. Guys trying to make a living. Critical infrastructure. Yeah . . . Critical for a decent life and a little self respect. Where is CNN now? Oh . . . Right.

I am 20 years old. I am too young for this. What do I tell my family? What do I tell my friends? What do I tell myself? What if my helicopter goes down? STOP!

The phone message said, “Hal, this is Elton Moy. I’ve been thinking about you. Call me at 505-462-XXXX.”

Area 505 is New Mexico—out of my territory. The name Elton Moy was vaguely familiar. Toward the end of the day it came to me.

There were four of us standing by an open grave in the cemetery in Kenedy, Texas. The year was 1995. I read the twenty-third Psalm and said a prayer. We buried 90-year-old Lennie Pierce. The four were Mr. and Mrs. Moy, their son Elton, and I. We buried the “Bag Lady” from San Antonio.

I returned Elton’s call. “I’ve moved,” he said. “I no longer live in San Antonio. I sold my restaurant and moved to Taos, New Mexico, where I manage the Taos Inn.”

I was excited. “Elton, I’ll be in Taos in two weeks for a four day writing conference. Let’s get together.”

Two weeks later at the Taos Inn I asked, “Elton, how did you come to know Lennie Pierce?”

“I stepped into the alley behind my restaurant in San Antonio to empty some trash. It was barely light enough to see. An old woman was going through one of my garbage cans. She did not see me and I remained very still and watched.

She would take leftover food from the garbage can and take a bite of it. If it passed the ‘taste test’ it went into her bag for later consumption. If it did not pass, she threw it on the ground.

Her clothes were rags on top of rags. Her outfit looked like Joseph’s ‘coat of many colors.’

As I looked at her sad condition I made a decision that started me on a journey, which eventually led me to you at that cemetery, and now here five years after that graveside gathering.

I said to the old woman, ‘Would you like to come in and have a bowl of hot soup with me?’ She was startled. She bent her entire body backwards so she could see me. I looked into riveting, beady eyes that were filled with distrust and hatred. No one had offered her anything in many years. She was estranged from her family and obviously had no funds. I figured her to be at least eighty years old.

Her first instinct was to escape, but the offer of hot soup was just too tempting. She came through the door and into the kitchen. After laying her bag on the floor she slowly lowered herself into a chair. She slurped up the soup. Not a word was exchanged. She left.

So began a ritual that would last for over five years and affect my life forever. Each morning when I opened the door she was waiting. ‘Would you join me for a bowl of soup?’

Gradually the hostile glare began to soften. On a morning six months later she uttered her first words, ‘My name is Lennie Pierce.’

Her story came slowly—bits and pieces. She was seventeen years old, living with her family in East Texas. ‘No, I can’t remember the name of the town,’ she said. ‘It’s been so long.’

‘They said I was acting funny and needed to see a doctor. They said they were taking me to a hospital for a few days so I could get help. It was in San Antonio.’

‘They said good-bye and left. I was put in a large room with twenty other women. There was a bed and three meals a day.’

‘I waited. No one came to get me—no one at one week, one month, many months. No letters came from my family.’

‘A year passed . . . then two. Eventually I realized they weren’t coming back. I spent my days exploring the g