Occasional Portraits from a Parson’s Porch

Mr. Henry

November 18, 2023

Henry Lindsey was a man of few words.

Tall and slender, with a slight stoop and a measured step, “Mr. Henry” was gentle of manner and charmingly reticent, not given to effusive speech.  Which was just as well, because his widowed sister Marie did most of the talking anyway.  

From 1978 to 1986, I was their pastor at Ebenezer Baptist Church in rural Jefferson County, Florida, just south of the town of Monticello, a half hour’s drive east of Tallahassee.  The congregation of fewer than  50 souls met for worship in a white clapboard sanctuary not more than 30 by 50 feet, with lovingly shined wide plank heart-pine flooring and neatly ordered pews adorned with hand-hewn crosses carved atop the end posts. Erected in 1828 and resting barely two feet above the sandy north Florida soil on brick pillars, it perched snugly under the sheltering branches of a massive live oak tree. With the exception of one other country church a few miles north near Lake Miccosukee, Ebenezer was the oldest Baptist church in Florida’s Big Bend area, where the state’s panhandle curves southward into the Gulf.

Sometimes after the Sunday morning service, Marie would invite her young pastor to join her and “Brother,” as she always addressed Henry, to their modest frame home in town (in sight of the Jefferson County courthouse) for Sunday dinner (not to be confused with the evening meal, supper, and absolutely never referred to as Sunday lunch, which would have just been tacky).

Henry and Marie (he always pronounced her name “May-ree”) were in their mid-70s in those days, and her go-to midday Sunday meal was Chicken Chow Mein, a curiously non-Southern choice for such an otherwise formidable, deeply traditional Southern matron.  After the meal, we would adjourn to the front parlor for dessert and conversation, and it is those sessions I cherish now as inhabiting sacred space, poignantly beyond the mundane ordering of the day to day.  On the church grounds, Henry was a pleasant but largely non-verbal presence, ever the mannerly gentleman greeting church members young and old with his self-effacing, shy smile and a polite nod of the head, rarely offering more of a window into himself than that. But during those Sunday afternoon parlor conversations, a fuller personality emerged.

There, Henry sometimes spoke - always with a tender reverence - of his short-lived marriage all those years ago in his early twenties.  There he ventured to explain how he had voluntarily enlisted in the army right after Pearl Harbor, a man in his late thirties neither required nor expected to risk war’s horrors so far removed from the safe, familiar confines of his Southern world.  “I was older than all the other boys, Preachuh,” he offered, “so I guess maybe I figured I might could offer them some little help from a bit further down the road.”

Without fail, I felt at ease in Henry’s presence. 

Once, well into my time as his pastor, one of Henry’s fellow parishioners confided in an off-handed way that for some reason, Mr. Henry never had gotten around to officially joining the church.  The comment served to endear him even more deeply in my estimation, as perhaps reflective of his modesty, his honest preference for personal privacy, his refreshing lack of any need for anybody to make a fuss over him.  Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if Henry Lindsey, at heart, felt a certain loneliness issuing from that reticence, as though his self-imposed detachment effectively rendered him in-but-not-of that little band of believers.  

Ever so slowly, Henry’s gentle defenses seemed to soften, his curiosity over a Galilean carpenter’s plaintive call to simply “come and see” gradually supplanting his confirmed caution toward all matters churchly. Nurtured from birth by Southern culture’s malignant religion of the lost cause, Henry’s soldierly loyalty to the integrity of his own conscience had prevailed.  He had withstood evangelicalism’s heavy-handed urging toward childhood baptism, its siren song summons to be washed in the blood, the sooner the better, so as to avoid hell’s fiery torments.

Then, one Sunday morning at the conclusion of an otherwise unremarkable worship service, Henry Lindsey quietly slipped out from his accustomed back pew aisle seat, walked the few paces down the carpeted aisle to stand before me at the altar, and met my gaze with dignity and resolve as he spoke these words: “I’m ready to be baptized.” 

Not until that moment had it occurred to me that, for Mr. Henry, the issue was not church membership but surrender to the Spirit’s entreaty.  Nothing, not young love’s heartbreak nor warfare’s crucible nor his confirmed distancing from the cultural captivity of Southern piety, was at last impervious to his  Lord’s disarming, pursuing love.  The time was now.

Across the first century of Ebenezer’s existence, baptisms had been limited to warm weather immersion in the little creek just down the dirt road from the church, but by World War II the stream had silted over, and the congregation began to rely upon neighboring churches with indoor baptismal pools.  Not long after I became their pastor, they agreed to honor the early Christian tradition of placing the baptistry in the floor beneath the pulpit, thus enacting the word (baptizing) at the very spot where the word was proclaimed (preached).  From then on, we held our baptismal services in the evening, by candlelight.  The wooden flooring covering the pool was lifted, and candidates for baptism approached the pool through the warm glow of candles reflecting off the heart pine floors and pews.  The children of the congregation were invited to come sit on the floor at the edge of the baptistry, making this beautiful rite of consecration more personal and approachable.  It is a transcendent image, among the most cherished memories of my pastoral life.     

Henry’s baptism was especially moving, the dignity of the man and the moment imbuing a hushed reverence all around.  As I placed my arm around his shoulders and raised the other hand toward heaven, Henry clasped his hands together at heart level as I repeated the timeless words echoed across the ages by unnumbered ministers, cherished words I had so often heard my own pastor father speak in all those country churches he served: “In obedience to the command of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, and upon his profession of faith in Jesus as Lord, I baptize this my brother Henry Lindsey in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  Amen.”

I gently lowered Mr. Henry into the waters, then lifted him to stand, surrounded by the love issuing from every person witnessing that moment.  What happened next took me by surprise.  In words forever etched into my being, Henry Lindsey spoke through tears as he broke the silence with this soft, unprompted exclamation of innocent homecoming:

“My church, now.  This is my church now.”

Yes, Mr. Henry.  Indeed, yes.

A Long, Long Time Coming

September 19, 2023

Any day now, Betty and I won’t be living at the Carrboro address we’ve known for over 30 years.

When we moved into our mid-century brick ranch in 1991, after a year in an upscale Chapel Hill neighborhood where we never really felt at home, Andrew was not yet four, Aaron was a year and a half, and it would be another year before their sister Ellie made her grand entrance.

Other than not being in a particularly friendly neighborhood, that first house was fine. The driveway, however, was as steep as a ski slope and I figured our two active little guys were destined to one day take the tricycle trip from hell, ending up somewhere in Chatham County. Not that Chatham County would have been a terrible place to land, mind you.

We knew selling a home barely a year after purchasing it defied conventional real estate investment wisdom, but it sold quickly and we got our asking price, so we chalked it up to lessons learned and happily settled into the dwelling that has safely sheltered our family across three decades.

In 1964, the year before our house was built, Motown crooner Sam Cooke had offered this soulful reflection on racial injustice and the struggle for civil rights in the American South:

“It’s been a long, long time coming, but I know a change is gonna come…”

Some folks in the movement had criticized Cooke for not using his influence earlier to mobilize opposition to the entrenched racial divide in the South, with its history of violence toward people of color. One of the most outspoken voices for change was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the gifted young preacher who four years prior to the release of “A Change Is Gonna Come” had spoken in Chapel Hill. On Sunday evening, May 10, 1960 he arrived at University Baptist Church (UBC) where he addressed a group of UNC students and UBC members, warning them of difficult days ahead in the civil rights struggle and urging “We must labor together as brothers, or we will perish together as fools.”

Dr. King did not realize as he spoke just how close he had come to being denied the opportunity.

Thirty years later I became pastor of UBC, and shortly after moving to Carrboro learned the ugly truth that had remained cloaked since that night, confronting the bitter irony that the street where our family had recently relocated was named after the chief conspirator in a racist plot to silence Dr. King.

After Dr. King had been invited to speak at UBC, a disgruntled faction within the deacons sent word to the ecumenical ministry group hosting his visit to Chapel Hill, stipulating he would not be allowed to speak in the sanctuary, restricting his visit to the fellowship hall below. The intention was as insidious as a Montgomery, Alabama bus driver ordering Rosa Parks to give up her seat and move to the back of the bus. The conspiracy was spearheaded by a segregationist judge, who five years later would serve as the attorney of record for a developer building a new Carrboro neighborhood. The developer, perhaps unaware of the judge’s churchly subterfuge half a decade earlier, rewarded his attorney by naming one of the newly created streets in his honor.

When I heard the background story, I was struck by the painful irony of living on a street named after someone who personified everything I detested about the unholy marriage of Old South politics and religion. Chagrined by the bitter pill of an odious but irreversible choice made decades earlier, I resolved not to let our street name tarnish the affection for a neighborhood we had so quickly come to love. Besides, I didn’t want to come across as that guy, newly arrived and righteously intent upon abruptly replacing a street name none of my neighbors had heretofore any reason to question. I adopted a grim carry-on-and-get-over-it mindset, determined not to be haunted by the villainy of a white supremacist’s ghost. At some level, sadly, that lingering specter refused to yield ground in my conscience.

As the layered years accumulated, I made sure the congregation - most of whom had neither heard of the tawdry episode nor ever known its chief miscreant – confronted the truth of its past, mindful of a favorite restatement of Jesus’ wisdom: “The truth will make you free, but first it will make you miserable.” Inexorably, as scripture puts it, “in the fullness of time” this sturdy band of believers – as they so consistently did during my time among them – felt moved to do the right thing, consecrating the old fellowship hall in honor of Dr. King and changing its name to The Community Room, a space devoted to gatherings of Alcoholics Anonymous, Chinese and Burmese refugee worship groups, English as a second language, Vacation Bible School, and myriad other ministries bridging cultural and racial divides. A bronze plaque bearing Dr. King’s likeness now graces that space, recounting the date of his visit and including his urgent call to labor or perish.

During a lovely evening service in November 2014, in the very room where King had spoken all those years before, we invited our distinguished Black sister congregation, First Baptist Church, to join us for the Community Room’s formal dedication. In an interview printed by the campus newspaper following the dedication, I lamented in recounting the old anti-King conspiracy that God surely had a heck of a sense of humor all those years ago, leading the new UBC pastor to reside on a street bearing the name of such a mean-spirited, scheming church member, now long since deceased and thus safely beyond any earthly reckoning for his seditious piety. When that quote was cited in a 2018 article revisiting Chapel Hill’s mixed record in civil rights struggles, one of my neighbors, dismayed by the article’s revelation, shared it with other residents of our little one-block lane, who promptly mounted a campaign soliciting suggestions for a new street name. After tallying the results and collecting signatures of all the homeowners, they petitioned the town of Carrboro to officially re-name our street. This week, we received confirmation from town officials that our request had been granted, and that by late September our street will be renamed Lavender Street.

I like to think Sam Cooke and MLK, Jr. are exchanging celestial high fives right about now, King reminding Cooke about how “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” and Cooke responding with a wry smile how that’s a righteous word but “change is gonna come” rolls so much more smoothly off the tongue.

Smooth as justice rolling down like a mighty river.

Mitch and Betty

Lavender Street, Carrboro

So Far, So…

March 6, 2022

Note:  I wrote this article several weeks before the deranged and soulless Russian president unleashed pitiless hell upon Ukraine’s courageous populace. I have considered holding it back a bit longer out of respect for the unspeakable suffering they are enduring as you read these words. But the fact remains that truth is the first casualty of war, and my original intent here was to speak truth to power, no matter in what national flag that power may wrap itself. Totalitarianism is evil regardless of the terrorist regime imposing it, whether its weapons are Russian missiles or Proud Boy zip ties. I therefore dedicate this writing to the people of Ukraine, with fervent prayers that, as the gospel song has it, the God “who never lost a battle” will stand by them in the hour of trial, and that America’s elected leadership will show the world what it really means to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. As I write, I feel the comforting presence of my father, Claude Simpson, whose birthday is today, March 6.  He was the truest embodiment of strength and courage I ever knew, and he always felt a keen, abiding solidarity with the underdog.

“So far, so …”

(If you filled in the blank with “good,” you and I are not on the same page.)

But before I proceed, a belated thank-you to my senior-year high school English teacher for introducing me to William Shakespeare’s iconic tragedy Macbeth, with its witchy hags circling around a boiling cauldron, conjuring toil and trouble.  (Probably where Covid originated, now that I think of it.)  Talk about your Tony Award-worthy scripts, infused with lustful murder, malignant ambition and political intrigue which by comparison make our own congressional cesspool look like a Sunday School picnic.  Could ol’ Will write, or what?

Actually, maybe not, if his detractors’ accusations were legit.  An “upstart crow,” they labeled him, insisting much of his work was plagiarized.  Whew, tough crowd.  

I choose to believe Shakespeare wrote the things he claimed, but regardless of whomever we have to thank for the masterful account of Macbeth’s descent into madness, it boasts unrivaled quotes about all our yesterdays lighting fools the way to dusty death, life creeping in its petty pace from day to day ‘til the last syllable of recorded time, life as a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  All that, plus the exhortation “Out, damned spot,” which, pet lovers’ protests aside, is not a profane directive to the family dog.  In other words, Shakespeare’s dark musings mirror exactly how I felt after Carolina lost the 2016 NCAA basketball championship to Villanova on a last-second Hail Mary shot as time expired.  Just let me die, Lord… 

Sorry, I drifted away there for a second.

But recently, all these decades later, there’s another emergent Macbeth quote from the ghosts of my adolescent psyche: Macbeth’s soliloquy as he contemplates further murderous villainy, words curiously insinuating themselves, unprompted, into my consciousness, as the assault upon Constitutional democracy looms like an unholy specter across the lively experiment our deist founders naively dubbed “United States.”  Macbeth’s brooding confession seems unsettlingly apt for our present quagmire: “I am in blood stepped in so far, that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.” (Macbeth III.4.136-8)

America, conventional wisdom has it, is grievously, irretrievably polarized.  Pick any subject, from politics to religion to mask mandates to whether Tom Brady should retire from pro football. Everybody seems to be yelling at everybody else, and don’t even think about an extended-family holiday gathering.  “Pernicious Polarization,” a recent headline dubbed it, documenting our national obituary with enough supporting data to squelch even the cheeriest optimist’s hopes.  Apparently, we are all doomed.  

Goodness.

Not that I disagree with the verdict.  Frankly, mounting evidence suggests we have likely passed the tipping point of surviving as a republic, at least in the familiar form we have traditionally cherished.  Consensus, from both sides, seems to be we are not merely unable, but fiercely unwilling, to grant the other side a hearing.  Or an opinion.  Or even the breath to express it.

My side good, your side evil.  Burn in hell, heretic.

On our merry way to societal conflagration, then, may we at least summon the integrity to avoid facile, myopic explanations which ignore history’s complex fabric.  (Here you may replace the original lyrics to “Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places” with “Placing the Blame on Too-Obvious Culprits.”)

Consider with me a partial list of topics currently contending for “Reasons We’re Just One Big Ol’ Snowball Headed for Hell:”

1. Covid

2. Systemic racism, fueled by a resurgent white supremacy movement

3. Gun violence run amok

4. The 2016 presidential election (in which a delusional former TV reality show host successfully manipulated simmering societal bigotry to take up residency in the White House)

5. The abortion issue

6. The protracted Iraq/Afghanistan war

7. The 2020 presidential election (after which the candidate receiving the fewest votes refused to acknowledge the election outcome, furiously fomented a lie about the results, tried to subvert the democratic process and orderly transfer of power, and capped off his tantrum by inciting a violent mob to storm the Capitol, assassinate his own Vice President and return himself to power)

8. The Civil War’s lingering shadow

I could go on, but you get the picture.  Our demise as the ostensible “land of the free and home of the brave,” our unraveling as history’s last, best hope for democracy, must surely be traceable to one or more of these causes, we’re told.

Trouble is, that list does not go back far enough. It fails to explain the overwhelming reality of human suffering (or as pastor/gadfly Carlyle Marney put it, decrying the timid denizens of academia’s “education factories,” it does not plumb the darkness of the great dark room).  In short, it’s too simple, too shallow and far too recent a synopsis of what led us to this precipice.  The roots of our discontent lie deeper, in the more primal soil of our national psyche, including:

1. The guilty burden of slavery, forcing kidnapped, enslaved African people into brutal servitude to undergird colonial America’s economic engine.  But that wasn’t our earliest transgression.

2. The systematic displacement of Indigenous peoples from the North American continent by white Europeans, importing contagious diseases that decimated entire native populations, taking by force the lands those peoples’ ancestors had stewarded for millennia and herding them onto reservations (a blueprint for sublimation which was to later serve as the template for concentration camps in Europe). 

3. The abrupt declaration by Roman Emperor Constantine in 312 A.D. that henceforth the Empire would be known as the Holy Roman Empire, based upon his pre-battle vision of Roman Legion soldiers’ shields emblazoned with the Greek letters Chi Rho (the first two letters in the Greek spelling of Christ), accompanied by a voice from heaven instructing him to “conquer by this sign.” Presto!  The church had magically expanded from its humble origins (believers huddling furtively in secret house-church assemblies hostile to the Empire, gatherings where the church’s influence extended only as far as the home’s modest threshold) into a state sanctioned power reaching to the furthest borders of the Empire.  Seen initially as a great moment in the church’s struggle for survival, it was in fact the ultimate seduction of the church by the powers that be, prompting protestant reformer Martin Luther’s wry observation centuries later: “When church and state go to bed together, one of them always plays the whore.”   

4. The toxic strands of antisemitic Christianity rooted in the church’s earliest writings (including the Gospel of John, in which Jesus’ trusted disciple Judas Iscariot is reduced to a cowardly, one-dimensional caricature of all Jews, a betrayer ultimately responsible for Jesus’ gruesome crucifixion at the hands of the Roman state).   Over the ensuing 2,000 years, that slanderous stereotype would take root and fester throughout Christendom, inevitably emerging in the “practical reality” of Nazi Germany’s monstrous Final Solution, the systematic murder of 6,000,000 Jews, a holocaust thoroughly preventable had authentic followers of Jesus summoned the courage to oppose it, in Germany and elsewhere.  Instead, fear-driven fundamentalist Christians were complicit in history’s greatest evil.  Their small-minded white supremacist progeny, fueling and financing contemporary America’s ascendant religious bigotry, are feverishly stoking those same flames today, from sea to shining sea.  The church’s singular failure to recognize and embrace Jesus’ consummate Jewishness lies at the heart of its spiritual schizophrenia.

Viewed through these historical lenses, the noble experiment of American empire seems far less pristine and eternal, far more tragically flawed, fearfully fragile and ultimately susceptible to that timeless Hebrew wisdom: “Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” (Proverbs 16:18)

Still, a stubborn flicker of hope rises from my knowing that God is never out of the equation. Scripture pulls no punches: “Don’t kid yourself, God is not mocked.” (Galatians 6:7)  No national saga is capable of embodying the full incarnation of God’s grace, including our own post-Enlightenment soiree into Constitutional democracy brought forth on these shores and articulated in our founding documents.  I want to believe we will survive the ancient evils imbibed in our mothers’ milk, but we are frightfully far along our self-imposed illusion of American exceptionalism, stepped in so deeply that turning back now seems more improbable than lurching over into a maelstrom of our own creation.

Spirit of God, descend upon our hearts. Show us your way forward, comforting us in the assurance that your will has never depended upon any earthly kingdom, not even ours.

Amen.

Hardware Store Agnostic

February 5, 2022

Picked up any radical theological texts at your local hardware store lately?  Yeah, me too, just the other day when I stopped by Carrboro’s Fitch Lumber Company during a round of double-masked, socially-distanced errands.  

Fitch Lumber Company has been respected by generations of contractors, builders and weekend carpenters alike. I like it there.  Several of their folks even know me by name, which means a lot to a retired parson who’s not likely to be recognized in public any more, even as a regular on the cereal aisle at the grocery store. Fitch employees know their stuff, and they’re patient with customers like me, who look to them for answers to questions we’re too ignorant to articulate.  The exchange usually goes something like this: “Hey, Marshall, you know when you’re hanging a door, and you need one of those thingamajigs that attaches the hinge to the whatchamacallit?  Do ya’ll carry those?”   “Sure, Mitch, I think you’ll find it on aisle 4, right next to the locks.”  And then, out of courtesy or the very real possibility of my still not being able to find it, this offer: “Here, I’ll just walk you over that way and we’ll see what we can find.” 

On this particular occasion as I approached the store’s entrance, I noticed they had installed one of those nifty Little Free Library boxes, a two-shelf wooden cabinet with a glass door where any passerby can donate or select, at no charge, any book they choose.

What caught my eye that day, snuggled in amongst the how-to manuals and romance novels, was Leslie Weatherhead’s THE CHRISTIAN AGNOSTIC. 

As I lifted the work from its shelf, I silently mused “What the heck are you doing here, Leslie?”

Judging from its tattered book jacket and scattered inter-linear notes, this hard-bound volume (published in 1965 by Abingdon Press) had once been carefully consulted.  But by whom, and in what context?  Not that it mattered, really, it’s just that I didn’t expect to find Weatherhead’s classic work in that particular place, owing perhaps to my own set of biases about who’s interested in studying 20th Century English Christian theologian in the liberal Protestant tradition.  Hard to imagine ol’ Leslie hanging out at his local village hardware shop, chatting away on which is better, oil-based or latex paint.

He was, after all, the esteemed minister of London’s City Temple for nearly a quarter century beginning in 1936.  THE CHRISTIAN AGNOSTIC was among his most well-known and controversial works, owing perhaps largely to confusion among lots of folks over the terms “agnostic” and “atheist.”  The Greek word for knowledge is gnosis, but when the prefix “a” is added, it means not to know. A religious agnostic is someone who admits not knowing everything about God, whereas an atheist is a person who denies the existence of God.  

“The essentials of the Christian faith are very few,” Weatherhead insisted, noting that “Christianity is a way of life, not a theological system, and the Christian agnostic is one who seeks to meet the challenges, hardships and sorrows of life in the light of that spirit, but who cannot honestly accept certain theological ideas about which some branches of the church dogmatize.”  Churches, he observed, were “more concerned about defending old traditions than following the moving light of new insights, more concerned about defending historic language than discovering truth.”  Put another way, from my own experience of mainline churches, first as a pastor’s child and then as a minister to congregations for 47 years, the churchly equivalent of “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic” is its incessant quibbling over Robert’s Rules of Order and the wording of the church bylaws and constitution.  I keep picturing a bewildered Jesus, witnessing in dismay a typical church conference melee from a corner of the room, thinking to himself, “Seriously…?”   Reminds me of the droll verdict issued by New England cleric Phillips Brooks, commenting on the mindless foibles of the parish he served: “What this church needs is a few more people who know Jesus at closer than second hand.”

You think?

Is it any wonder so many folks find the local church to be cynically dismissive of their own personal hurts, infected by a callous disregard of global suffering, lurching clumsily onward as the earth groans under our rapacious colonialist model of scarcity?  Our creeds and fabricated internecine denominational blood-lettings offer periodic and recurring proof to a skeptical world that the church is deliberately clueless as to what really matters, stubbornly defending theological turf from the safe cloister of a self-contained circle facing inward.  Leslie Weatherhead, mindful of precisely that institutional impotence, pleaded for the church of his day to regain its bearings, come to its senses, return to its first love:  a tender, responsive relationship with the Creator God who shaped us all in God’s image, and who intended that we should treat all the children of the world with attendant reverence.

With touching candor, he declared “I have had moments which do not make any sense unless God exists, the most significant and deeply joyous moments I have ever known.  Such experience brings not the ends of doubt and questioning but the discovery of a Friend.  I have known God.  I am certain of God and that God is love.”

What more can he say than to us he has said?

Who knew I would rediscover, in the midst of mundane chores shrouded beneath pandemic’s stifling heaviness, a reminder of what I labored nearly a half century to convey to weary pilgrims I encountered along the pathway of my own theological baby-steps: the essential core of what it means to follow Jesus.  Time and again, in numberless hushed confidentialities uttered by tortured souls who somehow stumbled their way to my study, I agonized to bridge their utter despair and guilty rejection of themselves, urgently invoking Holy Spirit’s descent into that room and those conversations,  in order that God’s unsearchable love could touch, heal and redeem their shattered souls by this singular truth: It’s okay not to know, it’s okay to shake your fist at God, it’s okay to deny everything you’ve considered sacred, it’s okay – indeed, imperative - to condemn the church’s dull mediocrity, as long as you can cling to the blessed assurance that God loves you no matter what, and nothing can separate you from that love.

Leslie Weatherhead, like all the rest of us, spoke out of his particular societal context, to an increasingly irrelevant English church mired in cultural captivity (which pretty much describes the church at any point in its 2,000-year misadventure).  Today, fewer scholars cite his work, fewer eager young seminarians clamor after him as novice theological groupies.  Other names, other gurus have supplanted him on academic theology’s fickle stage.  Much of his opinion seems dated, even chauvinistic, which is precisely how a great deal of our own tidy philosophies will likely one day be rendered by those who come after us.

But I’m grateful for the brave little flicker of truth he offers still, particularly as it points to a hope we might otherwise overlook as the pandemic slogs into its third year of compounded misery.  The church, that brave, faithful, deeply flawed remnant of Jesus followers, is being given a wondrous opportunity to reboot, to cast aside its tribal trappings and fear-laced misappropriations of the carpenter from Nazareth.  I am heartened by what I see emerging from all corners of the globe, not least among the beloved community I served for 30 years at the corner of Franklin and Columbia Streets in Chapel Hill, who have recently called a bright young shepherd to guide them, hear them, love them along their way as they discover newer, ever more authentic opportunities to lend courage and hope to a hurting world.  Frankly, the world does not much care what we think we know for sure about God, but it desperately needs to see us act upon what has been revealed in Jesus about God’s unquenchable love for all creation.

And, come to think of it, what better place for a carpenter’s hovering Spirit to linger than a hardware store? 

Alabama Epiphany

January 20, 2022

Deep in southern Alabama swamp country, atop a rise where the ancient Tombigbee River carved out a long, curving loop on its languid flow to the Gulf, lies a spot dear to my heart. 

Old Lock One, a sad and crumbling relic of its former bustling self, was de-commissioned by the Army Corps of Engineers sixty years ago when a by-pass cut was dug just upstream and a larger, more modern lock and dam rose in its place a few miles north near Coffeeville, forever rendering this exaggerated meander in the Tombigbee’s stream bed a dwindled, static stretch of water, dubbed by local folks “the dead river.”

But I remember a time in the early 1950’s when these grounds were very much alive, and to the eyes of a transplanted Tar Heel three-year-old a wondrous place of mystery, a thriving community tied to the relentless rhythms of the ageless Tombigbee.   No matter the years or the physical distance separating me from those days and those faces, from then until now my dreams have regularly ushered me back with a fond fidelity to the people and sounds Lock One permanently etched into my psyche.  As long as my spirit can occasionally return to those familiar touchstones, I am as the old hymn assures “safe and secure from all alarms.”

Our family had moved to Salipta (a small scattering of a few dozen homes dotting either side of state highway 69’s two-lane blacktop, boasting two general stores and a post office, twelve miles north of Jackson) in 1953 when my father became pastor of River Hill Baptist Church during my parents’ seminary days in New Orleans.  As its name suggests, the church was located on a timbered ridge a short distance from the Tombigbee, but Lock One was some miles downstream, accessible only by a sandy, winding swamp road through the dense tangle of low-country tulip poplars, live oaks and alligators flanking the river.  On one of our first visits to the lock, I had watched in terrified delight from the back seat of our 1949 Plymouth as two wild boars waged mortal combat near a salt lick a few feet away.  From that moment, I was captured by the dark intrigue of this remote Southern outpost, a place apart and unto itself.

A couple of miles in, the tree-canopied lane opened to a wide, level plateau overlooking the river.  Spaced out neatly beneath a double row of towering pecan trees were the six neat, substantial wood-siding homes of lock employees, along with a two-story cement structure overlooking the lock itself, the watchman/guard tower.  Each home was solidly perched on 12-foot brick pillars, safely above the high water level of the Tombigbee’s yearly floods.  In those pre-air condition days, fans suspended from the homes’ ten-foot ceilings kept the spacious, tall-windowed rooms comfortable, nestled in the pecan grove’s shade, even during Alabama summer heat.  The soothing whirring of those ceiling fans, accompanied by the uninterrupted distant sound of water cascading over the dam’s spillway, were sure guarantors of sleep for this drowsy preschooler snuggled up on a quilt-padded pallet, on those rare and cherished overnight stays when my parents had to be away for church conferences.  My older sisters and I considered it a pure treat any time we were invited to stay at the home of lockmaster Leland Brannan and his wife Miss Flossie, faithful members of our congregation.  Even now, I relish the memory of hearing, deep in the night, the distant, dreamlike sound of a tugboat’s horn as it rounded the far bend in the river, alerting the tower’s overnight watchman of its approach to the lock, followed by the hurried, muffled footfall of Mr. Leland making his way through the darkened hallway and out the door toward the lock’s chamber walls, where he and others hand-cranked enormous turnstiles to open the lock’s massive gates, allowing heavy-laden barges passage up or down the river.

Life, of course, gets in the way, delaying even sacred pilgrimages to favorite shrines, and after only a couple of return visits with my parents in the early 60’s, Salipta and the Lock One of my childhood gently receded into reverie’s safe shadows for extended years.  Then, California-bound for a church job in the late 70’s, I made my way back.  Back to Salipta, back down the Old Lock One road, back to a world that was no more.  The sight of deserted home sites at the lock, crumbling cement in the abandoned, gateless lock chamber, water no longer flowing over what remained of the demolished dam, trees growing from the former coffer-dams and sidewalks, and worst of all the shattering silence of the place ... It was all more than I could absorb. The adults of my childhood world, whom I had somehow (in deliberate suspension of logic) thought would live forever and never age, were all gone.  The laughter, the homemade ice cream socials, the sweet fresh watermelon grown in nicely-tended kitchen gardens, the hugs of people no longer living, all the saints I somehow thought would never die, now just a distant memory. 

I wanted to turn away, escape to the familiar confines of my trusty Dodge Challenger, and get out of there.  I so wanted none of this to be true.  I silently cursed my naiveté, having indulged myself in this nostalgic side trip, despite my Salipta friends warning, “Mitch, it’s not like it used to be.”  But I didn’t flee. I kept walking, somehow drawn to the flat expanse of concrete skirting the lock wall, its surface now threaded with fissures from which well-established young saplings protruded.  The place was deserted, save for a solitary figure that loomed, statue-like, as though an apparition out of the fractured cement itself, a black woman of imposing presence, sullenly intent upon the business at hand, which was fishing.  Probably the last thing she needed was some fresh-faced, bearded young white guy poking around making high-minded inquiries.  I offered a tentative greeting, to which she responded pleasantly enough, and after some initial small talk and clear evidence of my genuine interest in how they were biting and what she was using for bait, she seemed to relax a little, probably not least of all because I clearly was “not from around here.”   As is often true when given even the slightest opening, the talk soon turned to the eternal verities:  God, suffering, loss, that sort of thing.  I was about to make a gracious retreat, intent upon leaving well enough alone, and with repeated apologies for interrupting her solitude, when she offered up a personal observation I’ve carried with me ever since, though I’ve  honored it more often by intent than by execution: “You know, the thing is … “ she began, her bottom lip freshly primed with snuff, “…the thing is, people go walking down the road, looking up at your house, thinking they know all about what’s going on with you.”  She paused.  I waited.  “But the thing is, they’re on the outside thinking, and you’re on the inside knowing.”

Preach.

Later that afternoon, I returned to Salipta for dinner at the home of Miss Noma Hoven, the venerable  postmistress who knew every soul in that part of Clarke County and had achieved sainthood status in my eyes all those years earlier because of the Kraft caramels always available in the little cut-glass bowl on her coffee table.  When I mentioned by name the woman I had encountered at the lock, Miss Noma paused for a brief moment before explaining that, unbeknownst to most folks in the community at the time, the woman had for years endured horrible physical abuse at the hands of her drunken husband, right up to the day she stabbed him in self-defense and dumped his body into a stump hole.  Arrested and charged with his murder, she was later acquitted on appeal and released after a short time in prison when the truth of her plight was revealed.  

When you least expect it, God is there, most usually catching us unaware, as when Jesus moved among us the first time.  Richard Avery and Donald Marsh, theologian/musicians whose artistry touched my life for the good, put it this way: “You’ll be surprised what events God uses, what people God chooses, to show us the Way.”

God, forgive all the times I’ve judged others harshly, so blinded by entitlement and seduced by privilege I was heedless of other people’s hurt, disinclined to question my own assumptions. Teach me the way of your mystery and grace, and make me miserable until I act upon that unveiling.  Amen.

Hell

 August 23, 2021

Hell yeah.

Now that I have your attention, may I just say I’ve always thought hell was vastly over-rated, especially as bandied about in that peculiar brand of Southern cultural religion practiced by red-faced, angry pulpiteers oddly obsessed with the notion.  Did they really believe all that fearful vitriol they sputtered about a fiery underworld of unquenchable flames and eternal punishment, or were they just projecting their own guilty terror over secret sins they had committed with the church organist?

I’m forever thankful my preacher father never wasted a lot of time on the subject, instead urging upon the folks in the pew a more relational faith, a personal walk with the Galilean carpenter who loved them and called them by name to follow him.

Anyway, back to hell.  So to speak.

Not until divinity school did I learn the lurid origins of hell in the lexicon of our Hebrew-Christian continuum.  Ostensibly, during the dark early history of the Promised Land’s occupation, the ghoulish, unspeakable rituals of child sacrifice were practiced in the Valley of Hinnom, adjacent to what would later become the city of Jerusalem.  It was a place considered by later inhabitants of the region to be eternally damned, forever haunted by the disembodied spirits of slaughtered innocents.  As the centuries passed, the valley’s name morphed into a shortened form, Gehenna, or what we’ve come to know as hell.  It required only a short leap of the imagination for Jerusalem’s municipal garbage dump, where waste-consuming flames were stoked without ceasing, to become synonymous with hell.  Tradition suggests that Golgotha, celebrated in our beloved old gospel hymns as “a hill far away,” may have occupied that very spot, the site chosen for a certain “old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame.”

Whew.

Say what you will, believe what you may about the prospect of eternal damnation, you’ve got to admit the garbage dump’s locale, with its unceasing, smoldering fires and putrid stench, fit the legendary atrocities ascribed to it.  Could there be a more heinous, unholy evil than the sacrifice of children? Or a more apt, deserved sentence handed down than searing, unremitting misery without end, being skewered alive over charcoals stoked by the pitchfork-yielding Devil himself?  No wonder the powers of the Roman state thought it a nifty spot for the occasional crucifixion. 

These days, of course (in our oh-so-civilized western world where hell is rendered a quaint remnant of unlettered, superstitious, taboo-laced religiosity) child sacrifice is no longer practiced.  No one, not even the vilest political opportunist, would ever risk his own soul at the altar of sacrificing society’s children, offering them up to the possibility of a gasping, suffocating death.  Not even the cruelest villain would insist on sending unvaccinated, innocent children into harm’s way as fodder for a deadly virus.  What unspeakable opportunist would threaten, with the full force of state law, to punish any school system or administrator caught defying a ban on masks in the public schools?  You’d have to go a mighty long way, maybe all the way to the governor’s office of Florida or Texas, to sink to that unspeakable level of disgusting, politically expedient cowardice.

But if you could locate and convict such spineless sycophants of such craven horror, to what soulless region could they possibly be consigned that would be appropriate to their malice?  Hell?  Yeah.

Alma Mater

July 22, 2021

You’ve got to hand it to those wacky Romans, they sure knew how to turn a phrase.  

Long before “alma mater” referred to a person’s school or its official fight song, denizens of the Eternal City coined the term to refer to one of several goddesses.   The literal translation of Alma Mater is “bounteous mother.”  Yep, the same crowd who gave us chariot races, gladiators, and leisurely Sunday afternoons at the Coliseum cheering for the lions as they munched on hapless first-century followers of Jesus, those are the very folks we Carolina alums have to thank for the term we tearily invoke when, after about three beers, we sway together singing “Hark the Sound.”

We also sing it, win or lose, at the conclusion of football and basketball games and any other opportunity occasion demands.  You know, weddings, funerals, that sort of thing.  Who knew we secretly thought of our beloved university in Chapel Hill as a bounteous mother?  

Actually, deep down inside, I think maybe that’s precisely how I felt about the place all along.  You see, it was as a 1968 freshman in the Southern Part of Heaven that I felt embraced, nuzzled, comforted, cherished, warmed, and loved unconditionally by history’s great thinkers and their courageous, audacious twin legacies of intellectual curiosity and academic freedom.  From Socrates to Shakespeare to Frederick Douglas to Flannery O’Connor, the often unsettling promptings of their sage voices urgently whispered that the unexamined life really is, after all, not worth living.  Throughout my life, even when I embarrassed myself or failed to live up to my own standards, I somehow felt that my alma mater would still claim me, no matter what.  You know, sort of like your mama does.

Please don’t mis-hear me.  These are not merely the plaintive, self-indulgent musings of an aging Tar Heel pining for the fjords.  Well, maybe a little bit, but I hope they rise to the more worthy level of genuine lament chronicled by balladeer Joni Mitchell: “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone …?” 

Nor should you mistake my grieving as a misplaced idolizing of the academy, with its increasingly tame post-World War II business-based model of administrative leadership, a structure labeled derisively by the brilliant and brooding Baptist scholar/preacher Carlyle Marney during his days as pastor in Charlotte as “education factories.”  During 30 years as pastor at the corner of Franklin and Columbia Streets in downtown Chapel Hill, I never worshiped the false god of alumni boosterism, insisting on my inaugural sermon from that pulpit in 1990 “the church has more to say to the university than the university has to say to the church.”  The European model of university education, a product of post-Enlightenment rationalism with all its white male entitlement privileges and assumptions, blended with the equally tenuous premise of higher education undergirded by the fickle power of the state, makes for a toxic brew.

I had seen at first hand the ravages of religious fundamentalism within American churches already compromised by civil religion’s idolatry, and was all too familiar with hostile takeovers of denominational structures by fundamentalist operatives playing upon fear-premised ignorance.  Duke Divinity School professor Stuart Henry had warned us of fundamentalism’s looming resurgence in the early 1970s, wryly observing one day in mid-lecture, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s one thing to be ignorant; it’s another to be aggressively ignorant.”

During the past decade, I have watched incredulously the inexorable, calculated co-opting of Carolina’s Trustees and Board of Governors by puppets of political fundamentalists in the North Carolina legislature, particularly the Senate’s cowardly, Southern-drawling power brokers.  Most recently, their claims of non-involvement in UNC affairs notwithstanding, they have orchestrated the latest embarrassing, crippling indignity against a university once regarded as a leader in academic excellence in the South.  Perhaps we were never the pristine “Shining Light on the Hill” our hubris allowed us to claim, but we surely were better than the Jim Crow style denigration of the School of Journalism by a wealthy ultra-conservative UNC journalism alum donor who undercut Nikole Hannah-Jones’ rightful and well-deserved tenure guarantee based on his opposition to her speaking uncomfortable truths about America’s malignant infatuation with slavery.  Fundamentalism, whether religious or political or intellectual, is often grounded in a deep sense of inferiority, marked not so much by what it believes as by how it believes it, an over-against-ness, us versus them mentality.  Here we go again.  

I agree, sadly, with Hannah-Jones’ decision, though I mourn for the Carolina students robbed of her influence and imprint upon their lives.  A Carolina alum, she had looked forward to bringing her considerable scholarly credentials back home to the faculty of her beloved alma mater, but her shabby treatment revealed to her the deep systemic dysfunction imbedded at Carolina, wounds she should not be expected to heal or gloss over.  She was the unwitting victim of dual saboteurs: mean-spirited trustee overreach and timid, tentative administration endorsement.  Fundamentalists are always more skilled gladiators than progressives.  It remains to be seen whether Carolina will summon the moral force of character necessary to transcend its current Babylonian captivity, shed the tarnish of its racist heritage and finally claim the high ground of robust academic intellectual integrity it has long boasted for itself, or will instead shamefully settle for a continued pitiable decline into politically-enforced intellectual mediocrity.

When it mattered most, Nikole Hannah-Jones’ alma mater proved less a bounteous mother than an abusive father.  

The Rabbi, the Troubadour and the Prophet

June 28, 2021

Too many of my friends are dying.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.  When you’re in your seventies, the odds of enduring the sad obits of folks dear to you naturally increase, but here lately a trio of unbidden tidings crashed in upon me like hammer blows, shaking my resolve.  Across the arc of my life, these distinct and often unsettling voices have echoed through my days.  I recall them here in the order of their deaths.

Richard Rubenstein was director of Florida State University’s Center for the Study of Southern Culture and Religion during my PhD work in the Humanities Doctoral Program there.  Formerly the rabbi to Jewish students at the University of Pittsburgh, this Harvard-educated scholar had gained international acclaim for his research into Jewish history, in particular the historical underpinnings of the Holocaust.  A formidable presence who did not suffer fools gladly, Dr. Rubenstein cut an intimidating figure among grad students and faculty alike at FSU.  It was he who helped me confront the horrors of Germany’s systematic “practical rationality,” with its hideous descent into state-sanctioned genocide, forcing me to grapple with this dark truth:  Every culture is capable of the most heinous atrocities in the name of racial purity and ethnic cleansing.  In all my subsequent years as a pastor, I never ceased to insist from the pulpit that those who declare their nation incapable of such evil are either fools or liars.  When white supremacist insurgents stormed the Capitol on January 6 in blind devotion to the narcissistic madman then occupying the Oval Office, I was sickened and disgusted, but not surprised.  Richard Rubenstein had warned me of just such malevolent insurrectionist anarchy forty years earlier.

There was also, of course, a more tender, grandfatherly side to the man, as when he and his wife made the 8-hour roundtrip from Tallahassee to Pensacola in May, 1982, to celebrate with Betty and me on our wedding day.  On an earlier occasion, they had attended Mother’s Day worship at Ebenezer Baptist Church, the little rural congregation I served as pastor during my grad school days.  At my request, he read (in Hebrew, no less) the Old Testament lectionary text for the day.  I am sure it was the only time those dear country folks, who proclaimed a quintessential Galilean Jew as their Lord, ever heard Hebrew spoken in a worship service.  Rubenstein did so with power and grace. After the service, as we all gathered under the huge old live oak tree that sheltered the tiny wood-framed church-house, Rubenstein took my hand, held my gaze and paid me perhaps the grandest compliment my preaching  ever received:  “Thank you, Mitch.  Your sermon was both intellectually honest and doctrinally sound.”  Lordy.

Tommy Edwards, a Siler City boy through and through, gained national/international acclaim as a bluegrass musician.  Founder of “The Bluegrass Experience,” this North Carolina troubadour garnered numberless awards for his guitar picking skills, including “World’s Best Bluegrass Guitarist.” Master of a particularly challenging strumming technique known as down-stroking, Tommy beguiled and delighted audiences with his winsome, self-effacing dry humor and keen insight into the human condition, all our raging inconsistencies notwithstanding.  Tommy and his wife Cindy were also antiques afficionados, anchoring several different stores in Pittsboro through the years and helping establish that Chatham County hamlet as an antiques mecca.  

But my initial perception of Tommy was through the eyes of my big sister Joan, whom Tommy befriended and welcomed into his Junior High eighth grade classroom when our family moved to Siler City midway the school year in 1958.  Remember how awful Junior High could be, with its adolescent insecurities and awkward physiological indignities?  Add to that the small-town cliques and pitiless pecking order so well entrenched by the middle of the school year, and you have some idea of the dread Joan felt as the new kid in town.  But Tommy cut through all that, and his acceptance served as a signal to others.  Joan never forgot his compassionate hospitality.

Fast forward to my more recent years’ acquaintance with Tommy, through my dear bluegrass mandolin-playing friend Charles Pettee.  Often, in my mother’s declining years, I would drop by Tommy’s store on my way through Pittsboro to visit her in Siler City.  He was always kind to ask how Joan was doing and how things were in Chapel Hill and send regards to Charles, but after exchanging pleasantries we would inevitably segue into the meatier, substantial subject of things-that-matter.  Tommy was discerning and sharp-witted, especially where philosophical/theological musings were concerned.  His ability to read an audience was grounded in his awareness that each of us is, in Kris Kristofferson’s words, “a walking contradiction, partly truth and partly fiction, taking every wrong direction on his lonesome way back home.”  His rapier wit was always kind in its application, but never naïve.  I valued his keen insight and gentle manner, and considered those brief snippets of converse a mixture of mutual confession and blessing.  I was so moved when  Cindy told me how, upon learning of his cancer diagnosis, Tommy included me among those he hoped might offer eulogies at his memorial service. It was my great honor to do so.

And then there was Sam Hill.

By the time I plopped down in Chapel Hill as a Carolina freshman in 1968, I’d pretty much had it with church.  Looking on in helpless preacher’s kid dismay, I had been well schooled by the harsh carousel of a Southern  religiosity honed to mean-spirited perfection in the rural and small-town churches my father had served, congregations of mostly well-meaning, kind plains-folk too often bullied and dominated by the peerage power brokerage of dysfunctional family cartels addicted to control and spewing King James English piety crafted to a sinister Machiavellian high art form.  Sam Hill, professor in the Department of Religion, taught me how to think sociologically about religion, thus granting me intellectual freedom from mere resentment and providing me analytical tools to tilt against the feudal strictures of churches in cultural captivity, or as the title of his 1966 book labeled them, “Southern Churches in Crisis.”  From that point forward, he became a trusted guide in my lifelong pursuit of what Saint Anselm dubbed “fides quaerens intellectum,” faith seeking understanding.  

The Old Testament notion of “prophet” is not a mere soothsayer telling the future, but a courageous sentinel telling the truth.  Sam Hill never hesitated to speak truth to the brooding monolithic power of Southern cultural religion, the religion of Confederate white supremacy’s lost cause.   His course on American Christianity was the prophetic spark pointing me toward faithful understanding.

But he wasn’t done with me yet, not by a long shot.  During the doldrums of my senior year spring semester, admitting I had no clear idea of which way to go with my questions after graduation, I stopped by his office looking for clues.  Patient and kind, he gently suggested “Mitch, why don’t you do what I did?  Spend a year at Westminster-Cheshunt College in Cambridge University, see where these theological nudges might be pointing you.”  I did, and that has made all the difference.  Every disciplining of my scholarly instincts, every honest attempt to (as Carlyle Marney put it) “plumb the darkness of the great, dark room,” has sprung from Sam Hill’s early encouragement.  

After Cambridge came Duke, where he also had studied.  Following divinity school, on my way to serving on a church staff in California, I swung by his home in Gainesville, where he had relocated to chair the Department of Religion at the University of Florida.  He blessed me on my way westward, and when the adventures of that brief soiree had run their course, it was to Sam Hill I turned once more, this time seeking counsel on which of several grad school possibilities sounded most promising to him.  “Why don’t you consider Florida State’s doctoral program in the humanities, which would give you the breadth of range you enjoy (here read “scatter-brained attention span,” which he was too kind to say), while at the same time allowing you to focus in on some subject of particular interest at dissertation time.  And by the way, because of the inter-disciplinary arrangement Florida State’s program has with our Religion Department here in Gainesville, I could serve as your major professor when the time comes, if you’d like.”  Say no more, Sam.

When all was said and done, including one particularly delightful afternoon spent with him on the front porch of his mountain cabin at Seven Devils feasting on boiled peanuts and washing them down with distinctly non-Baptist cold brews, the days were accomplished that I should bring forth a dissertation.  He chaired my dissertation defense session, then a few months later escorted me across the stage at FSU’s commencement ceremony and hooded me.   If I had never known Sam Hill, I would never have studied in England or sojourned in Tallahassee, and if that had not happened I would not have met Betty.  I will spend the rest of my life in gratitude for Sam Hill.

News of the passing of these three men I owe so much came within a few days of each other.  My deep regret is not having let them know just one more time, during the solitary silences of pandemic exile, how very much I loved them and how they enriched my long searching for peace and home.  If there is someone to whom you should say such things, do it now.

Looking Back at Christmas Eve

December 24, 2020

For the past three decades, right after Thanksgiving, we’d post a banner in the church garden facing Franklin Street:

“Christmas Eve Candlelight Communion Service – 6:00 p.m.”

Indeed. 

Thus began the countdown toward what was surely the craziest day of the year for our family.  When Andrew, Aaron and Ellie were very young, most of the day before Christmas was spent in our venerable family van, delivering UBC Christmas gift bags to elderly and homebound church members unable to join us in the sanctuary on Christmas Eve.  From the porches of private residences to upscale retirement centers to modest nursing homes, our merry band wound its way, at each stop tumbling out of the van, Betty hurriedly straightening each child’s outfit and giving a quick brush to the hair of three little heads, then on to the front door for the inevitable jostling over who got to knock or ring the doorbell.  (Betty was always such a sore loser:).  A few sweet moments of “Merry Christmas!” greetings followed, often extended by the kind insistence “Won’t you please just step in for a quick visit, to see my tree?” 

In those earliest years, it was not unusual to make 25 or more deliveries, requiring several days’ lead time to accomplish our appointed rounds, but Christmas Eve day always saw the preponderance of deliveries, often ending with the Simpson family magi sliding into the church parking lot with less than 30 minutes to spare before the lighting of the Christ candle in the Advent wreath.

I was always surprised by how quickly the Christmas Eve crowd converged upon the sanctuary.  Ten minutes before the appointed hour, the parking lot looked pretty empty, and my preacherly worries would kick in: “Lordy, there’s not going to be anybody here.”  And then, amazingly, from all directions they came, those wonderful UBC families, often with out-of-town kinfolk in tow, filling up an entire row in the center section of our grand old 1922-vintage sanctuary.

Frankly, much of the worship hour seemed like a blur, a jumble of timeless carols, stirring vocals and brass instrumentals embroidering selected readings from our Hebrew/Christian narrative, all of it powerful but slightly frantic, everyone aware of restless children in the pew beside them , the adults a bit distracted by the prospect of unfinished business back at the house:  presents yet to wrap and notes to Santa still unwritten, along with milk and cookies to be left for the right jolly old elf.

But then, the serving of communion.

The frenetic internal drumbeat somehow slowed, as one at a time the sheep of my fold stood before me to meet my gaze and receive those words, that blessing made possible by the sacrificial love of our Galilean Lord: “The body of Christ, broken for you; the blood of the new covenant, spilled for you.”

I knew those faces, knew more than their faces, knew stammered confessions of choking fears and confidential utterings of remorse, children lost too soon and aging parents whose tenuous grasp on memory was too quickly slipping away, broken promises and unbowed hopes, the miraculous stirrings of new life in swelling bellies, the rare privilege of sealing marriage vows at countless altars and offering brave assurances of strength at unnumbered gravesides.  Such is the sacred pastoral trust that passed like a caress between parson and parishioners as we shared the supper of our Lord.

How can you follow such moments of unspoken mystery?  By lifting our voices in the briefly darkened place of worship and singing “Silent Night, Holy Night” as candles’ glow slowly banished the darkness and invoked the “Son of God, love’s pure light,” that’s how.  Each year as the deacons and I slowly made our way up the aisles offering outstretched lighted candles to folks at the end of each pew waiting to receive that light, I yearned to somehow burnish the memory of those faces and our blended, imperfect voices into some secret, safe place in my memory, wishing I might never lose the comforting, unsettling sense of a Presence hovering among us in those closing moments of the service.  Now, all these COVID-tinged months after my final Christmas Eve service as pastor, I know God heard that hushed prayer and granted my entreaty.  All those secret memories are safely sealed in a recurring heavenly embrace.

The peace of Christ be with you, now and forever more.

An Apology Revisited

All Saints Sunday, November 1, 2020

In 47 years of pastoral ministry, I rarely preached from a written manuscript, relying instead on sermon notes which better suited my speaking style and freed me from being bound to words on a page. There were two exceptions:  the Sunday following the horrific 911 terrorist attacks, and the Sunday just prior to the 2016 presidential election which has proven potentially more fatal to American constitutional democracy than 911.  On this All Saints Sunday 2020,  I invite you to consider my remarks of 2016 and join me in praying God may yet deliver our nation from these four years of  spiritual and intellectual captivity.

Dr. Mitchell Simpson, Pastor Emeritus

University Baptist Church

Chapel Hill, North Carolina  

All Saints Sunday, November 6, 2016

"From the Mouths of Slaves"

From my earliest childhood memories, I felt God tugging on my heart, laying claim on my life.  That claim slowly grew into a calling to preach the Gospel:  to offer a word of hope from Jesus, my Lord, to a hurting world where too many of God’s children are still stalked by the great Beasts of poverty, fear, oppression and despair.  Since my twenties, I’ve known I had no choice but to preach that gospel, tell that good news, speak truth to power, no matter the costs to me personally.

 The word “pastor” means shepherd.  For 26 years, within the considerable limits of my own deeply flawed being, I have tried to be your watchful, attentive shepherd: at hospital bedsides, in the hour of suffering and death, entering the mysterious waters of baptism with you, in joyful celebrations of covenant marriage, in sacred moments of parent/child dedication, kneeling to wash your feet, sharing the overwhelming sense of Jesus’ presence when I confer the sign of the cross on your foreheads, rejoicing with Dr. Manley and FBC when we sang “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms” and announced “God is good all the time, and all the time God is good!”, from Religious Liberty Sundays to Christmas Eve carols and communion when we all lifted our candles out on the church steps to proclaim God’s joy to the world, on chilly Easter sunrises as we gathered at the foot of an empty cross to announce in hushed whispers of delight and wonder:  “Jesus is risen; He is risen indeed!”  I have tried to be your caring shepherd, and I have always respected the separation of church and state, careful never to use this pulpit to foist any sectarian political agenda.  Indeed, among the highest compliments I have received was when one of you said, “When it comes to politics, Mitch Simpson is an equal opportunity offender:  Sooner or later, he offends both the Democrats and the Republicans!” 

I will not waver from that Baptist distinctive of Church/State separation.  The wall between the Church and the State is a good wall, in no way denying that our faith must always inform our political decisions.  But there is another kind of wall that is evil, the wall that sows fear and hatred among God’s children, the kind of wall that cost Jesus his life.

Now, today, on this All Saints’ Day when we remember the faithful, common people who shaped our lives in Jesus’ name, who spoke truth to power heedless of the rage the Gospel always unleashes from bullies and tyrants, today I have no choice as your pastor but to keep lifting up the name of Jesus.  Not to do so would mean I owed a profound apology to all those soldiers of the cross who have made plain for me the bidding of Jesus my Lord, He who is the way, the truth, the light.  Not to do so would mean I immediately sullied my calling to be found faithful to the Way of the Cross.  Not to do so would mean I’d have no choice but to resign as your pastor right now, today, and never again claim the risen Savior is Lord of my life.  And so, on this final Sunday before we select the next leader of the free world, I am compelled to name, in your presence, some of those dearest to me to whom my apologies would flow should I shirk my calling.

 My mother, Ruth Hill Simpson, who 67 years ago yesterday risked her own life to give me mine.  I can still hear my mother entreating me: “Dare to be a Daniel, son.”  No, she wasn’t suggesting I change my name. She was urging to live the same brave faith that prompted prophet Daniel to dare defy the King, the courage that led him into and then safely out of a lion’s den.  Mother knew not all devouring lions are of the four-legged variety.  She taught me early and often to respect women, and by her example she made it easy for me to respect motherhood.  I knew never to be rough with a girl, never to take advantage, always hearing her admonition during my high school years when I would head out for a date: “Mitchell, you just remember that young lady is someone’s daughter, and you treat her the way you’d want a man to treat your sisters!”  She never said “Don’t call women pigs or fat, don’t sexually assault them!”  She didn’t have to.  I saw the way my father cherished her, and I have tried to copy him.

My father, Claude Simpson, a Baptist pastor who dared to cross entrenched racial lines in southern Alabama in the years prior to the 1954 Supreme Court decision desegregating schools, who dared, as a former smoker himself, to take on the powers of Big Tobacco in rural Piedmont North Carolina in 1956, even though some of the meanest power brokers in our congregation raised and sold tobacco.

Another person I would have to apologize to is Betty, my wife, my rock, who has given me strength to go on as a pastor in the rough times when I dared to take on bullies and wealthy power-brokers who wanted to disrupt the beloved community of faith for the sake of their own egos, often at the cost of her own well-being, when it would have been easier to say “That’s it, I didn’t bargain for this when I said ‘I do.’"

Our children, who have grown up hearing my warning that “the crowd is false,” and, “incompetence rules supreme,” and, “the United States is just as vulnerable to fear-driven hatred and holocaust as Germany was under national socialism.”

The ladies of the Chapel Hill Baptist Church sewing circle.  The Civil War was raging, and the Confederate army was running out of materials to make bullets to shoot into people so that they didn’t have to set their slaves free.  The Confederate leaders sent out a plea to churches across the south, almost all of which had a big bell in those days. They send word to churches, including this church saying, “Would you be so kind as to contribute your big beautiful brass bell for us to melt down into bullets?” And the men of the church did that. But they did so with the small, tiny, little flaw in judgment that they did not tell the women. And the women found out about it and created a sewing circle in the church. They began to create and sell sewn items. Eventually they made enough money to buy that bell back, before it could be melted, before its call to worship the God of History could be silenced, before the freedoms of the Baptist Church could be muffled on this corner, they bought it back. Next time you hear that bell ring, you just know that if you wimp out now, if you’re bullied by people who try to intimidate you in this election, then you owe those ladies an apology.

Someone else to whom I would owe an apology: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.  Though I never met him personally, we’ve dedicated the room where he spoke in this church in 1960 to him.  It’s now where Narcotics Anonymous, Alcoholics Anonymous, the English as a Second Language class, the Chinese Church, the Chin Congregation, all meet each week.  We have a plaque in that room, bearing his name and the words Dr. King spoke the night he spoke to this congregation, “We must labor together as brothers and sisters or we will perish together as fools.”

Someone else to whom I would have to apologize today: Every member of First Baptist Church, all of whom bore the insult of the billionaire bully’s taunt “What the hell do you have to lose?”  What do they have to lose under his reign?  Only their dignity and their hard-won right to vote and be respected as being created equal, with certain inalienable rights.

That’s all.

Every person whose sexual identity makes them vulnerable to hateful fear-mongers who have never understood that “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world.”

Every free and faithful Baptist ever run out of town or imprisoned by small-minded zealots who insisted the Word of God had to be squeezed through the knot-hole of their limited experience and compromised intelligence.

The entire Chinese congregation who are worshiping right now in the Community Room of this church.

The Church at North Carolina, who would not have been invited or welcomed by any two-bit tyrant to share worship space in our church facilities or any of his hotels.

The Chin members of our congregation, who would never have been allowed to enter this country in the first place, though they have shown more courage in their little finger than the wealthy business man presidential candidate has ever imagined.

All our citizens, including children, slaughtered by gun violence, whose precious memory is pilloried by a sociopath bragging how he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and his poll ratings would continue to rise.

All the disabled Americans who struggle for dignity and kind treatment every day, who watch with broken hearts as an evil man mocks everyone like them.

Make no mistake, little flock, the choice before us is not between political parties but between fear and hope, anger and acceptance. 

For any of you who have not yet voted in the presidential election, carry with you when you enter that booth Jesus’ loving entreaty:  “Do not be afraid.”

On his way to the cross, Jesus was admonished by the military and religious bullies of his day to silence his followers, lest their cries of “Hosanna!” should rally support for him and defiance of Rome’s cruel, violent empire.  Do you remember Jesus’ reply?  “If these should remain silent, the very stones would cry out against you!” 

For me to remain silent on the dangers this clearly deranged man poses to my beloved country and all God’s children, for whom Jesus died on a cross, would invite the very earth, ravaged today by arrogant big business bullies who continue to rape our land and poison our water, to cry out in protest.

All my ministry life I have insisted that Hitler could have been stopped in his tracks if, on any given Sunday, every pastor in Germany had stood against him and his evil bullies, publicly denouncing his insane rage and malignant inferiority complex.  If I had failed to do that very thing today, I would never again deserve to be called “Pastor.”  If this cry by an anguished shepherd to his flock leads instead to my dismissal from among you, I look forward to one day hearing Jesus say “Well done, good and faithful servant. You were found faithful.”

“For all the saints who named your will, and showed the kingdom coming still, through selfless protest, prayer and praise, accept the gratitude we raise.”

May all who come behind us find us faithful, and may the eternal God of history protect and defend the United States of America. Amen.

Lean on Me

April 3, 2020

Okay, I didn’t see it coming, alright?  But I was glad it did.

Betty and I, fresh off a Friday afternoon back porch barbecue of chicken wings (cooked over charcoal, for heavens sake, as any true believer would do … none of this silly gas grill nonsense) had just settled into the den with Judy Woodruff and the PBS NewsHour. 

There was Dr. Anthony Fauci, apparently the only adult in the room these days for White House briefings, explaining in his classic, measured, intelligent tones that if we don’t use our brains on this COVID thing we’re all going to die.  I love this guy, don’t you?  And he’s been at it since he counseled the Reagan administration on how to thoughtfully respond to the AIDS threat.  Talk about speaking truth to power.  We’ll see how long that’s tolerated in this particular Oval Office incarnation.

Then Judy, without warning me to brace myself, announced the death of Bill Withers.

Okay, Millennials.

He was a guy, a guy whose 1974 hit “Lean on Me” may not have boasted the most sophisticated chord progressions, but Lordy did his gravelly voice and those heartfelt lyrics speak to a lot of folks.  Then and now.

Before she noted that health care providers and first responders have resurrected his lyrics as their anthem in these times-unlike-anything-we’ve-ever-seen, Judy said “Here’s Bill Withers, from 1974, singing the song that made him famous.”

Bam.  There came those simple walking-up-the-scale chords my snooty little music major friends loved to make fun of back in the day, and then The Voice.  And the words.

“Sometimes in our lives, we all have pain, we all have sorrow.

But, if we are wise, we know that there’s (wait for it) always tomorrow.”

From out of nowhere, the tears welled up in my eyes.  What was going on here?  I mean, I always liked the song, but it wasn’t Marvin Gaye, for goodness sake.  Or Percy Sledge.  Or Sam Cook.  Or Ray Charles.

I hoped Betty hadn’t noticed my visceral response.  Not that she wouldn’t be gentle and understanding.  She would be.  She always is.  Has been, for over 38 years.  She and our children have long since accepted my role as Designated Crier in the Simpson household.

No, I hoped she hadn’t noticed because I wasn’t sure myself what had stirred me so.

Bill just kept singing.

“Lean on me, when you’re not strong, and I’ll be your friend, I’ll help you carry on.

For, it won’t be long ‘til I’m gonna need somebody to lean on.”

If you know me, you know how dear the hymns of faith are to me.  This was not a hymn, not a church song at all.  Just the Gospel, sweet, undiluted and healing.

“You just call on me, brother, when you need a hand.  We all need somebody to lean on.  I just might have a problem that you’ll understand.  We all need somebody to lean on.”

Yes we do, Bill.

And somehow, just knowing you won’t be around any more to be that leaning post made your passing and the cascading heartbreak all around us all the more wrenching.

If there’s somebody you think might welcome a call from you right now, this very minute, make the dadgum call.  No, not a text.  Your voice, in real time, to their ear.

We all need somebody to lean on.  Who knows, maybe somebody right now is trying to call you.

Mitch

A Kind of Hush

March 27, 2020

My junior year in high school, fresh-faced British band Herman's Hermits topped the charts with "There's a Kind of Hush All Over the World."  Those words slammed back into my consciousness this week as the evening news relayed image after image of empty train stations, deserted Italian piazzas and unoccupied sports stadiums across the globe.  There is a certain eerie beauty about those barren landscapes, prompting in me this thought:  It would be a shame to waste a good pandemic on foolhardy souls eager to put its horrors behind us with no lessons learned. You know, the old "close the wound, hide the scar" approach.

This is not to minimize the unfolding tragedy looming before us, nor to make light of the overwhelming human suffering everywhere apparent, nor to assume I may not be among the next slate of folks testing positive for COVID-19.  None of that. As a recently retired pastor of 47 years in ministry, I am staggered by the growing chorus of human misery gaining momentum by the hour. There is nothing redemptive about random suffering for the sake of suffering, hurting untethered from healing.  

It’s just that I keep hearing the timeless counsel of our Creator, given voice by our Hebrew forebears in Psalm 46: “Be still and know that I am God …”   Or, to put it more literally, “Grow quiet in the face of my wondrous care for you, which cannot be fully comprehended.” Hush, God whispers, and listen for the gentle, rhythmic breathing of my love for you, deep in your soul. 

That’s it.  That’s what occurs to me as those images of deserted public spaces, including church sanctuaries, appear on the screen.  There are worse things than being stilled amidst our accustomed clamor, even (and especially) when the racket is intensified by religious noise.  What if one of the abiding lessons to be learned from this shattering cascade of events is this: Sometimes, the most authentic response to numbing cataclysm is sheer silence.  No sermons necessary, no self-assured sanctimony required. Just quiet listening for God’s whispered assurance.

There are worse things than altered schedules, interrupted plans, missed deadlines or thwarted intentions.  Chief among those worse things must surely be our addiction to unceasing, frenetic activity. As one wag insisted, “Busyness is not of the devil, it is the devil.”  It’s time we admitted that “multi-tasking” really amounts to doing too many things at once, none of them very well. 

God’s firm directive to hush is about far more than merely sheltering in place.  It’s about listening, perhaps for the first time, for the soft tread of God’s pursuing love ever with us.

I am as eager as you for all this fearful time of testing to be over.  I only pray that when it has passed, we will not rush headlong back into the very chaos this health crisis may have given us opportunity to briefly transcend.  Before we present God with our list of questions requiring immediate answers, perhaps we would do well to recall God’s response to Job’s demand for an explanation to the misery he was enduring: “Where were you when I created the heavens and the earth?”

May the Hush be with you.

Mitch

Bubbles

March 22, 2020

That loud popping noise we all heard a couple of days ago was the sound of a huge bubble bursting.  Maybe several bubbles, actually.

One of them was the bubble of American invincibility, the notion that every day in every way, our harried schedules and exaggerated sense of entitlement would just never end.  Oh sure, those other less-favored nations might struggle with poverty and viruses, but not America, the land of the free and the home of Manifest Destiny. Then March Madness was cancelled, and all bets were off.

Another bubble was the chronic denial of our own mortality. Especially in the part of the world where I live, with multiple first-rank medical centers at our back door, what was the worst that could happen?  If you get sick, there's a pill for that. Or a surgery. Or therapy. Or something. People don't just get sick and die with no warning, for heaven's sake. Until maybe now.

Another bubble was the self-sufficiency delusion, which was particularly hard to acknowledge because we've been pampering it ever since the ending of World War II, when our GIs marched triumphantly home, we abandoned our front porches in favor of air-conditioning and television, we stopped waving at our neighbors because we no longer knew their names anyway.

And then there's the myth of assured financial security, but since I officially retired March 1, it's probably best I not even try to go there.

For me, however, a pastor for nearly half a century, perhaps the most distressing alarm of all is the rising lament from certain quarters that all our misery is somehow God's fault, as in "How could a loving God let this happen?"  Let's be very clear about it: God doesn't cause pandemics. God's great heart is the first to break when any of God's children suffer. God created a marvelous, free system of choices, laid it out before us and left us in charge as caretaker-stewards of a magnificent garden, and we have steadfastly set about to denigrate its unspeakable beauty ever since, fouling the soil, streams and the air we breathe, segregating ourselves into tribal units of skin color and language, suspicious of each other's motives and condescending toward each other's notion of God.

So then, what now?

A glimmer of hope, that's what.  

In less fractured times, we were encouraged by a former President to provide "a thousand points of light," precisely what we're seeing pop up all around us right now.  Why, the other evening as we walked our English lab Rosie through the neighborhood, total strangers grouped in safe little 6-feet-apart clusters spoke to us, smiled, inquired "Ya'll doing okay?" and just generally seemed happy to be alive for one more sunset.

Not only that, but every newscast now seems committed to ending with one story or another detailing unsolicited acts of human compassion.

My first grade school teacher wife Betty, navigating the challenges of distance learning from home, receives effusive daily expressions of heartfelt appreciation from parents of her students.

A modest proposal then, if I may:  Instead of wondering why God was asleep at the wheel, let's consider the possibility that in spite of frantic, lemming-like patterns of self-destructive human selfishness, in all these things God is working for the good among us, just as scripture suggests.  On the other side of this madness and mourning, God is already present in a brighter day, bidden or unbidden.  

We will keep faith through the darkness, and we will rejoice in the Light! No bubble required.

Thanks be to God, who constantly watches over us all.

Ever your friend,

Mitch