Templeton and her friends were “out of the old rock.” The phrase comes from the Texas writer, J. Frank Dobie, who used to say that the settlers of Texas, the pioneers were the “old rock.” They were the ones with the tenacity and perseverance to settle this country and make a living, put down roots and raise families. Dobie said that then there were those who were “out of the old rock.” He meant those who embodied the same determination, faithfulness, and long-haul perseverance exhibited by those who had gone before them. These three elder women were not settlers but close. It was not simply a matter that up into the 1940s Dude still had a dirt floor in her house or that she and her husband drove a wagon, and not a car, up into the 1950s. “Out of the old rock” means that Dude, like her friends, had that faithful steadiness, that sheer dogged devotion—to God, to her church, to her family, indeed, in everything in her life.
Fidelity.
The church has long known that we need to be people of fidelity over a long time and we need to train our young people in this way. Theologian Walter Brueggemann said, “The people of God were the sort of culture who loved their young enough to tell them what they had heard from God. They loved their young enough to say, ‘you don’t have to make up the way as you go. You don’t have to reinvent the path to God on your own. We’ll tell you. We’ll show you the way.’”5 And we’ll point you to others who have been walking this way a long time and you can learn to walk with them.
Author Bill McKibben suggests that many of our generation have been good at many things, but tenacity or faithfulness is not one of them. Perhaps we are good at the novel and the innovative, and the good Lord knows I sought to be both when I was the young pastor in that rural church. But when we look at those who have gone before us, sometimes we can see that on most days, it’s enough to be living faithfully together, adding another increment of quotidian devotion to God and each other, everyday faithfulness, giving one another the benefit of the doubt, being patient, and never, ever giving up.
A sign on the Winchester Cathedral in England says as you enter the church, “You are entering a conversation that began long before you were born and will continue long after you’re dead.”
One Sunday morning I watched young parents Bill and Tammy pass their six-week-old daughter Kara along the row to that trio of elder women. All three were born toward the end of the nineteenth century and here they were sweet-talking to a baby who would likely live well into the twenty-first. This was a conversation of fidelity that had begun a long time ago and by the grace of God would continue on.
5. Turner and Malambri, eds., A Peculiar Prophet, Kindle loc. 899. The quote from Brueggemann appears in a William Willimon sermon, “Surrounded by a Great Cloud of Witnesses.”
Will Campbell, Reconciliation, and Us
Kyle Childress
From time to time we’ll have a visitor in church, a family or an individual, who just fits in; they like being here and we like having them. I can tell it by watching them sing the hymns or how they interact with people after the service or sometimes by the nodding of their heads during my sermon. A church member might comment to me later in the week, “I had a good conversation with our visitor on Sunday and they seemed to be ‘our kind of people.’ We’ll likely see them come back.”
St. Augustine considers the church a gathering of friends. In church you meet friends you never knew you had, so I’m glad when someone visits and immediately discovers our church as friends they never knew they had. In our culture friendship is usually based upon affinity, so our friends are those with whom we share common interests and perspectives. For our church that usually means that we vote liberal Democrat, believe in inclusivity and diversity, and have at least a master’s degree. Usually it means we care about some of the same things: environmental issues, backpacking or canoeing, and local foods. We usually drive a hybrid car and have high-achieving children, read books, listen to NPR, and enjoy a glass of wine with dinner. Biblically it means that we are comfortable with the basics of historical and social criticism. Theologically we’re mostly in the middle or left of middle in the great scheme of orthodoxy and we like our preachers to have well-prepared and thoughtful homilies on Sunday morning. If you can check most of these on your own list when visiting you’ll likely find a home with us.
But what if you’re not “one of our kind of people”? What if you come from a different economic background and your formal education ended after high school and you went to work? What if instead of NPR you listen to country and prefer Bud to Beaujolais, drive a big-ass truck instead of a Prius, know how to break down a Remington 870 shotgun in the dark sitting in a duck blind in a cold rain, and have fixed more than one radiator hose with nothing more than duct-tape, a Case pocket knife, and the flame of a Bic lighter? And what if your theology is pretty much the Book, the Blood, and the Blessed Hope? But at the same time, perhaps our church ended up caring for your mother as she died or your daughter has found a home among the youth of our congregation and you find yourself visiting. Is there a place for you? Will you have any friends? Is this a church for all people or just for people of the same affinity group?
We live in a society that is increasingly polarized with the culture wars; we have blue and red states. Churches seem to be reflecting the same polarization and are organized less around doctrinal convictions and denominational loyalties and are becoming more Fox News churches and MSNBC churches or Republican churches and Democrat churches, educated class congregations and blue-collar working class ones, with churches based upon differences of race adding to the various divides.
Clarence Jordan used to point out that among Jesus’ disciples in the Gospels were both Matthew the tax-collector and one called Simon the Zealot. We know nothing more about Simon except his identification, which means that he probably stood against and hated everything that Matthew the tax-collector stood and worked for. In the ancient Jewish world of Jesus’ day there were no positions and identities more polarized than these. Yet both were among Jesus’ twelve disciples. Clarence said that he figured that on more than one occasion Jesus had to sleep between the two around the campfire to keep one from sticking a knife between the ribs of the other. Yet this was the nature of discipleship with Jesus. Polar opposites called together to follow Jesus and having their differences transformed so that they both became more like the one they followed. This is what the Apostle Paul called the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:18). Here is the picture of the church based not upon affinity, but upon the reconciliation of Christ.
I’ve never known anyone more devoted to the ministry of reconciliation than Will Campbell. He started off as a young Southern Baptist from Mississippi committed to fighting the racism of his native South. Will learned the hard way to be ever careful about choosing up sides. God in Christ does not choose sides, but in dying makes us all whole. Our job is to join up with what Christ has accomplished: be reconciled!
Will worked hard at building reconciling friendships with the most unlikely of people. He was friends with black activists but also with white members of the Ku Klux Klan. This did not mean that Will had no critical words for the Klan; it meant that he spoke to them as a friend and reconciler.
In his book And Also With You Will tells the story of being in the deepest part of the Mississippi woods walking alongside Sam Bowers of the Ku Klux Klan and Kenneth Dean, long-time civil rights activist. Bowers is taking them to a secret gathering place of the Klan.
“Beside me was Bowers, a man alleged to have been responsible for multiple murders, bombings, and mayhem. On the other side of me was Ken Dean, a man who had risked his own life trying to save the lives of black citizens … It was the greatest test of my tentative understanding of unconditional grace as overshadowing, overcoming, conquering humanity’s inherent sinfulness I had ever known. The scandal of the gospel I had heard preachers and theologians talk about in generalities all my life assumed an even more outrageous posture. Is grace abounding here in this darkening arcane forest? Truly unconditional grace? Something as crazy as Golda Meir chasing Hitler around the pinnacles of heaven, and after a thousand years he stops and lets her pin a Star