A PREACHER’S DREAM: FAITH AS FOLLOWING JESUS
During my seminary days, every student at Phillips Graduate Seminary was required to write a credo—a concise statement of what one really believed about God, Jesus, the Bible, and the church. As students, we joked about whether this was a legitimate academic exercise or a matter of quality control. Did they really want to know what we believed or were they just making sure we believed something before turning us loose on Christendom?
In those days (the late 1970s), three books in particular had been formative for me, giving me permission to consider an alternative vision of faith, not to mention a different way to conceive of parish ministry. One was Friedrich Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Another was Bishop John A. T. Robinson’s Honest to God. The last was Leslie Weatherhead’s The Christian Agnostic. I had arrived at seminary with more than my share of doubts, but I was also pulled along by something I could neither name nor ignore. My graduate studies had done two things simultaneously—added to my doubts and made even more palpable the pull of that unnamed and unknowable Something.
So when I sat down to write my credo, I called it, after Weatherhead, “The Credo of a Christian Agnostic.” I had significant doubts about the church as an institution, but I was also a child of the 1960s, and something in my heart hummed along when George Harrison sang “My Sweet Lord.” I too really wanted to know him.
Looking back on my early days in the pulpit, I am ashamed to say that I often inflicted a self-righteous liberalism on people who did not deserve it. In my tiny student church in Marland, Oklahoma, I preached a sermon one Sunday that disassembled, for poor unsuspecting farmers, the theory of the blood atonement. They listened patiently, their calloused hands folded, their foreheads creased from driving rented tractors over rented fields. When I had finished explaining why, in my expert opinion, they were not “washed in the blood of the Lamb,” they demonstrated amazing grace by inviting me to lunch!
I knew so little about their world that I once called on a farmer during wheat harvest in the middle of the day. He was asleep in the other room. I though maybe he was ill. When I appeared confused, the wife looked at me as if I was from another planet. “We don’t cut wheat in the daytime, young man. It’s too hot. He’s asleep because he’s been riding the combine all night.”
It is good for ministers to be honest about how little they know and how poorly they hide the fact behind religious jargon and a desire for self-display. It is also good for ministers to remember that they are the keepers of an ancient secret, a radical gospel that is both a product of its time and timeless. And like it or not, we are all priests, no matter how thoroughly Protestant. It may frighten us, and we may not like the responsibility, but when people look at us, they see God’s ambassador. They also see a confessor.
This lesson also came home to me early, on the high plains of Oklahoma, when I was called to the hospital in Ponca City to visit a dying member of that same student congregation. We hardly knew each other, but this elderly man had insisted that “the young minister come.” I stood next to his bed, and he said, “Dying is hard. Last night I tried to suffocate myself.”
I stood there absolutely mute, trying to figure out why none of my classes had prepared me to say anything in this situation (and thus, mercifully, I said nothing), when suddenly he changed the subject.
“Reverend Meyers,” he said, “when I was young, we had a housekeeper, a woman who cleaned for us, and she was handsome.” He emphasized the word “handsome” by making a curving motion with his weathered hand. Then he paused and looked out the window for a long time. Then he looked at me and said, “Reverend Meyers, I got too close to that woman once.”
After a long silence, he pulled me down close to him and said, “Do you know what I mean?”
I said, “Yes, sir. I know what you mean.”
The years rolled by, our children came, and after two years of postgraduate study at Drew University, I was called to the pulpit of Bushnell Congregational UCC in Detroit, the most racially divided city in America. I visited the Ford River Rouge plant, where raw steel went in one end of the plant and Model T’s rolled out the other. I studied the legacy of Reinhold Niebuhr, whose only pastorate was in Detroit and whose memoir, Notebook of a Tamed Cynic, suddenly made sense to me. Just beneath the happy, but fading Motown sound, racism and the riots smoldered under every conversation. In a Detroit coffeehouse, I read Moral Man and Immoral Society.
When the chance came to return to Oklahoma, it was to become the pastor of Mayflower Congregational Church in Oklahoma City. It was small, made up mostly of three extended families, and politically conservative. On a good Sunday, sixty people showed up to worship and they wanted nothing to do with the UCC. “Too liberal,” they said.
So began an adventure in ministry that has lasted twenty-five years and renewed my faith in the possibility of the church as a beloved community. Those early years were difficult, because trust comes slowly in parish ministry. Looking back, I realize that I grew up with the congregation, that some of the older members were very patient, but that through it all we did not turn loose of one another.
Seeking to build a liberal Protestant church fashioned after Riverside in New York without the cathedral, we attracted the attention of a Reformed Jewish congregation and a progressive African American church—and we entered into covenant with them. At the time, I was blissfully unaware of the existence of Muslims in Oklahoma City.
A generous member offered to put the sermons of the May-flower pulpit on the radio, and people began to listen, because “faith comes by hearing.” Our worship services remained simple, covenantal rather than creedal, and we resisted many of the changes in worship style and music that were emerging. We still prefer the human voice, live music, and the clear glass windows of a meetinghouse to high-tech auditoriums.
In the meantime, which W. H. Auden reminded us is the most important time of all, we pledged to reject only those people whom Jesus would have rejected and neither made claims of absolute authority nor offered assurance of personal salvation for the doctrinally “sound.” The congregation took responsibility for its own ministry and mission and has evolved into a force for love in Oklahoma City that astonishes me to this day.
Ministers love to believe that when a church thrives, it is mostly their doing. Not so. Our job is to turn loose the community property that is the gospel of Jesus Christ and then remove obstacles that keep people from thriving in such a community. The success of Mayflower Church has come mostly from the irrepressible desire of its people to respond to the call of God. The church now feeds and clothes six hundred homeless persons a month. We’ve built a year-round medical clinic in the remote mountain town of Jinotega, Nicaragua, and an orphanage for deaf children. In Oklahoma City, we repair homes for the elderly, tutor public-school students who are falling behind in reading, and house the state’s first comprehensive program for children with autism at no cost to parents. The level of monetary giving from our Benevolence board is remarkable for a church of seven hundred and fifty members, as are the number of candidates in our church who run for public office. We have been a center of resistance to the war in Iraq since before it began.
None of this occurred because we set out to be politically correct or intellectually self-righteous. We wanted to be, ultimately, followers of Jesus. The questions we asked ourselves were simple, but more radical than we knew. What would happen if we accepted original blessing over original sin and stopped trying to prove our worthiness—to a parent, to a spouse, to an employer, or to God? What if we took seriously Paul Tillich’s counsel that we “accept the fact that we are accepted”?
What if we could pull off a modern-day miracle and persuade a whole community of human beings that faith is characterized by what I have called from the pulpit “the end of striving”? What if we could shift the idea of salvation from survival of personal identity to radical freedom? Not freedom from—obligations, promises, fidelity, commitment, and self-sacrifice—but freedom to—live beyond angst, be delivered from self-pity, escape the prison of self, grow old gracefully, master the ego, live in harmony with the natural world, and break the chains of fear itself, especially the fear of death? What if we followed Jesus, instead of just worshiping Christ?
We have certainly had our share of failures, and we are by no means a collection of saints. But somehow the power of the beloved community has triumphed over everything—and this is the miracle of parish ministry. Staying in one place a long time can be an astonishing incubator of grace. Instead of searching in vain for perfection, we need to stay put and harvest the joys of intimacy. It was Flannery O’Connor who said it best: “Somewhere is better than anywhere.”
To begin this book, I told a true story in the Prologue about a nightmare that is not uncommon these days. Like lots of other people, I have wondered what it means to call oneself a Christian today. But not all dreams are nightmares. Indeed, my own congregation has ended up giving me hope in a world of despair, and for this I will never be able to repay them.
Mayflower Church, in fact, has become a different kind of dream, and it deserves to be shared also. It inspired a very different vision recently, as I drifted off to sleep on a Saturday night. The alarm was set for 5 a.m., and in what constitutes a luxury in my world, the coffee was already made, and all I had to do was push the button. As always, I woke just before the alarm went off, silenced it, slipped out of the bed where my beloved lay, and went down the hall past the room where my son slumbered in deep, adolescent oblivion.
The coffee gurgled, and the house filled up with the aroma of consciousness. I sat down at the computer to write my pastoral prayer and get ready for the early service. The house was dark, but the birds were stirring. They grow loud just as the day breaks, even through no human eye can see it—the instant when the dawn steals the night.
I cupped my hands around the steaming mug, closed my eyes behind my fogged-up glasses, and realized that I had been dreaming. In my dream I had seen a “surge” of a different sort—soldiers coming home, and sun-soaked markets in Baghdad where nothing explodes, and dark-eyed children flying kites again. In my dream I saw Americans stop their shopping long enough to pay their respects to every flag-draped coffin and to mourn every death, regardless of where, or how, it occurred.
In my dream, I heard the voices of a new generation of leaders who will one day restore dignity and honor to this land I love, and who, in humility, will know what they do not know. War will again be the horror of last resort, and peace will be waged at the highest level with the help of the church of Jesus Christ, the Prince of Peace. Fashions may change, but one thing will remain constant—the church can be counted on for an unwavering commitment to nonviolence. We will never again argue the case that violence saves.
In my dream, TV preachers had all retired to serve local parishes because preaching into a camera and asking strangers for money was not what Jesus had in mind. On Sunday morning, the inside of a church had become the only place where a millionaire could end up seated next to a homeless person living with HIV, or a church matriarch could sing hymns in harmony with a teenage runaway who joined the youth group just for the pizza. I woke up thinking: if this is Christianity and these are Jesus followers, I want to be one.
In my dream, I saw walls knocked down, built by nations that once condemned their enemies for building walls. Preachers got their nerve back and thundered: “Nothing advertises human failure like a wall, and no human being should ever be called an ‘alien,’ illegal or otherwise.”
In my dream, no one had to choose between science and religion, as if the head and the heart cannot marry, and women took their rightful place around the open table, serving as well as being served. Sexual orientation was an identity, not a curse, and money was a form of portable power, not an instrument of oppression. I woke up thinking: if this is Christianity and these are Jesus followers, I want to be one.
In my dream I saw churches lead the way to protect the environment—conserving energy, recycling, preaching the virtues of organic farming and lawn care, and establishing community gardens. Sunday school classes were free and open forums in which adults could ask any question, and no one feared new ideas or new ways of being faithful.
In my dream, gays and lesbians were constituents of creation, not freaks of nature. In light of our incomplete knowledge about the mysteries of human sexuality, the church vowed to make up for human ignorance by practicing divinely inspired radical hospitality—in other words, to act like a church. Opponents of gay marriage like to say, “God made Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve,” but at Mayflower we have a follow-up question to ask: “So who made Steve?” As evangelicals are fond of saying, “At the foot of the cross the ground is level.” I woke up thinking: if this is Christianity and these are Jesus followers, I want to be one.
That’s when I remembered where the dream came from. The seeds of this vision had been planted by a sermon I heard years ago.1 The story came out of Appalachia, from a place called Watts Bar Lake, where a certain preacher served a tiny rural mission among the poorest of the poor. It was their custom on Easter to have a baptismal service in the evening—by immersion of course—at sundown.
After the candidates for baptism moved into the water to be dunked, they waded across to the shore, where the congregation had gathered to sing and cook supper. The folks on the shore had built little booths for changing clothes out of hanging blankets. After those newly baptized had dried and changed, they formed a circle around the campfire to get warm, and then the rest of the congregation formed a larger circle around them.
A man named Glenn Hickey always did the honor of introducing the new people, giving their names, explaining where they lived and where they worked. Then the ritual would begin. One by one, each person in the outer circle would make an offer to those standing by the fire.
“My name is … and if you ever need somebody to do washing or ironing…”
“My name is … and if you ever need anybody to chop wood…”
“My name is … and if you ever need anybody to babysit…”
“My name is … and if you ever need anybody to repair your home…”
“My name is … and if you ever need anybody to sit with the sick…”
“My name is … and if you ever need a car to go to town…”
Around the circle it went, until those who had symbolically died and risen to Christ were officially “adopted.” Then they all ate and had a square dance, and at the appointed time a man named Percy Miller, with thumbs in his bibbed overalls, would stand up and say, “Time to go.”
He lingered to put out the fire, kicking sand over the dying embers. Then he looked at the preacher and said, “Craddock, folks don’t ever get any closer than this.”
When I first heard this story, it was from the mouth of the preacher himself. In the silence of the sanctuary, after a long pause, Fred Craddock looked out at all of us, peered over his spectacles, and let the story sink in. Then he said, “Once, when I told this story to a group of city folk, they looked amused, but confused. One of them said, ‘Fred, what do they call that where you come from?’”
He replied, “I don’t know what you call it where you come from. But where I come from we call it … church.”