We live in a society that is increasingly polarized with the culture wars; we have blue and red states. Churches seem to be reflecting the same polarization and are organized less around doctrinal convictions and denominational loyalties and are becoming more Fox News churches and MSNBC churches or Republican churches and Democrat churches, educated class congregations and blue-collar working class ones, with churches based upon differences of race adding to the various divides.
Clarence Jordan used to point out that among Jesus’ disciples in the Gospels were both Matthew the tax-collector and one called Simon the Zealot. We know nothing more about Simon except his identification, which means that he probably stood against and hated everything that Matthew the tax-collector stood and worked for. In the ancient Jewish world of Jesus’ day there were no positions and identities more polarized than these. Yet both were among Jesus’ twelve disciples. Clarence said that he figured that on more than one occasion Jesus had to sleep between the two around the campfire to keep one from sticking a knife between the ribs of the other. Yet this was the nature of discipleship with Jesus. Polar opposites called together to follow Jesus and having their differences transformed so that they both became more like the one they followed. This is what the Apostle Paul called the ministry of reconciliation (2 Cor 5:18). Here is the picture of the church based not upon affinity, but upon the reconciliation of Christ.
I’ve never known anyone more devoted to the ministry of reconciliation than Will Campbell. He started off as a young Southern Baptist from Mississippi committed to fighting the racism of his native South. Will learned the hard way to be ever careful about choosing up sides. God in Christ does not choose sides, but in dying makes us all whole. Our job is to join up with what Christ has accomplished: be reconciled!
Will worked hard at building reconciling friendships with the most unlikely of people. He was friends with black activists but also with white members of the Ku Klux Klan. This did not mean that Will had no critical words for the Klan; it meant that he spoke to them as a friend and reconciler.
In his book And Also With You Will tells the story of being in the deepest part of the Mississippi woods walking alongside Sam Bowers of the Ku Klux Klan and Kenneth Dean, long-time civil rights activist. Bowers is taking them to a secret gathering place of the Klan.
“Beside me was Bowers, a man alleged to have been responsible for multiple murders, bombings, and mayhem. On the other side of me was Ken Dean, a man who had risked his own life trying to save the lives of black citizens … It was the greatest test of my tentative understanding of unconditional grace as overshadowing, overcoming, conquering humanity’s inherent sinfulness I had ever known. The scandal of the gospel I had heard preachers and theologians talk about in generalities all my life assumed an even more outrageous posture. Is grace abounding here in this darkening arcane forest? Truly unconditional grace? Something as crazy as Golda Meir chasing Hitler around the pinnacles of heaven, and after a thousand years he stops and lets her pin a Star of David on his chest? Who said that?… I felt a strange oneness with the two men with me. And an even more unfamiliar concord with those I knew had convened on this ground to plan missions of atrocity.”6
Church is not about finding “our kind of people.” Rather church is learning how to have all kinds of people in the same congregation where together we are reconciled, become friends, and are transformed to be Christ’s people.
No easy task, but nevertheless that’s our calling.
6. Campbell, And Also With You, 264.
The Hood Abides
Kyle Childress
Twenty-five years ago some pastors shared a meal at a Baptist meeting full of division and fighting that made us desperate to be with friends. Soon our meal and conversation evolved into a quick overnight gathering, frantic with frozen pizza, cold beer, cigars, and talk into the wee hours. It didn’t take long before we were doing the overnight thing twice a year; after Joe and Charlie came up with generous and beautiful ranch houses with plenty of room, owned by extended family members, we turned our get-together into a week and Nathan gave us the name “the Neighborhood” for Will Campbell’s little radical band of friends in his novel The Glad River.
Six of us clergy friends meeting twice a year for a week for over twenty-five years—that’s the Neighborhood, or the “Hood” for short. We block the dates on our calendars six months out and even our congregations do planning around them. We talk and plan and joke and anticipate with increasing excitement in the weeks approaching our little gathering while tending to myriad pastoral tasks so the Hood will be worry-free over what we’ve left undone back home. We bring books and sermon materials (Hood or no Hood a sermon still awaits us when we get home), and movies. We love our movies. Or to be more exact, we love a particular movie: The Big Lebowski.
We drive, fly, speed, shop for groceries and whatever else we need to do in order to be at the Hood by Monday evening. Rushed and tired from rushing, still on full-speed-ahead-time, we are excited and full of adrenaline; though we are glad to be away from the frantic stressors behind us, the habits of speed are still with us. We are committed to slowing down but it takes a while and it takes intention. The poet Theodore Roethke said, “I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow”; that’s us as we move into Hood time on Tuesday morning. Slowly we get to our coffee and the first order of business that sets the tone for the rest of our week of learning to abide —living into hanging out; learning simply to be. With coffee in hand we sit down and watch The Big Lebowski, the Coen Brothers comedy about the Dude, of whom narrator Sam Elliot says, “he’s a lazy man—and the Dude was most certainly that. Quite possibly the laziest in all of Los Angeles County, which would place him high in the runnin’ for laziest worldwide.” After fifteen years of watching the movie twice a year we’ve all memorized the script, favorite lines are repeated to one another throughout the year, and obscure references show up in our emails and conversation. The Dude has become a kind of hero or saint to us. He shows us the way.
Every one of us is amused that the Dude is the patron saint of the Hood. In our various ways and contexts, we are now or have been driven pastors in thriving churches and ministries with much going on. To enjoy to the point of cult status a movie character known for underachieving slacking, whose preferred dress is pajamas and a bathrobe, and who will blow an evening lying in the bathtub, getting high and listening to an audiotape of whale songs, is ironic, to say the least. In a kind of summary of who he is at the end of the movie the Dude says, “Yeah man. Well, you know, the Dude abides.”
Abiding is not something that comes to mind when thinking about our modern lives or even our church’s lives. We not only do not abide, we don’t even know what it is anymore. “Get ’er done” is more our motto. Church members are working longer hours or perhaps working two jobs, while also running kids to their numerous after-school activities, and we clergy are frantically fighting to find ways for them to worship God and to serve others. Even when I go to our local ministerial alliance the most common response to “How are you?” is “Busy.”
For us and for our churches, the old social activist saying, “If not us, who? And if not now, when?” echoes in our heads. With concealed racism rampant and unconcealed sexism on the rise, impoverishment, climate change, injustice, plus church members with cancer and heart disease and all of the rest, someone’s got to do something!
But “abide” keeps whispering to us. Not just from the Dude, but more, from Jesus himself (didn’t Jesus go around in a robe, too?). Jesus says that in order to know God, know love, and be able to do the specific work of this loving God, we have to abide in him. Simply being—being together in Christ is essential, not an addendum (John 15). When someone used to ask Will Campbell what we are to do in a world going to hell
