"CO'S, FELONIES, AND GOD'S IRONY"

“CO’S, FELONIES, AND GOD’S IRONY”

            For those in the ATL area, don’t forget that I am preaching at North Decatur Presbyterian this Sunday, June 17 – worship is at 10 AM!

            I heard from several folk in response to last week’s blog on my journey, and one of my long-time friends, David Billings, remembered all that we had shared together.  With his permission, I’m sharing one of the many stories of our adventures together.  David has written a powerful book on white racism entitled “Deep Denial,” and if you have not read it, please get a copy and do so.  You can order one from the publisher http://www.cddbooks.com/Bookstore/DetailPage.asp?item=978-1-934390-04-7

or from Amazon.

            David and I grew up together in Helena, Arkansas, and we bonded over the years, so much so that after our sophomore years in college (he at Ole Miss, me at Rhodes), we went to Brooklyn together to work in the summer program of Lafayette Presbyterian Church, working with black kids from the Bedford-Stuyvesant area.  Our hearts were changing from our white supremacist roots, and we wanted to see what life outside the South would be like.  To be truthful, we were dazzled by the thought of being in New York City!   We sampled many delights and mysteries of the city, but the biggest impact on us was that the experience changed our lives forever – we could no longer believe the lies of white supremacy.  Racism still lived in our hearts, but we began to see a different world.  I thank God for David – I don’t think that either of us would have gone to NYC by ourselves – and we have continued to help each other grow over lo these many years.

            That background brings me to this week’s story.  We both went to seminary after college – me to Vanderbilt and he to Perkins at SMU.  In the spring of 1970, we both were part of a student movement to oppose the Vietnam War by dropping out of seminary and challenging the draft system to take away the automatic deferments of seminary students and ministers.  As I wrote last week, our movement failed miserably, and the draft board was delighted to draft us, which they did.  David and I both applied for conscientious objector status, which I got, but he did not.  We heard on the street that the local draft board turned him down because he had a raucous reputation in high school, and they knew that he was just trying to get out of the draft. I had always been seen as a likely ministerial student, so they figured that I was sincere.  David was scheduled to be drafted and sent to Vietnam.

            But, in his background, there was a strange and oppressive case.  In his last two years at Ole Miss in 1966-68, he had become involved in a United Methodist coffeehouse on campus, a place that sought to get black and white students together (James Meredith had become the 1^st black student at Ole Miss in 1962).  He did great ministry there, and because of that, he became well known to the local white authorities.  They developed some trumped up charges against him and some others, charging him with grand larceny.  It was a ridiculous case, and we felt that it would be easily dismissed.  But, a local white friend contacted David’s dad and told him that the authorities were serious – they would send David to Parchman prison on this charge.  So, his dad found a good local attorney, and they worked out a plea deal – David would plead guilty to malicious mischief, a felony, and he would be sentenced to 5 years probation and 5 years exile from Mississippi.  David reluctantly took the deal, and it was a huge injustice – small, of course, compared to many in Mississippi, but nonetheless an injustice.  We cursed the state of Mississippi, and David left for New York, awaiting word on the draft.

            In no small touch of irony, David finally heard from the draft board – they had discovered that he had been convicted of a felony, and thus he was ineligible for the draft – he would not be allowed to serve his country by being blown up in Vietnam!  With a sigh of relief, we got a good laugh at the ironic development, until we remembered all the young men who died and whose lives were scarred forever in that war.  We also sobered up when I heard from a friend on the Helena draft board that they never saw our applications for the CO status, that the secretary of the draft board had decided that issue, a rank violation of the law.

            So, as we tremble to wait to see what war Donald Trump will drag us into, I am heartened by this memory of David’s and my journey together, by our friendship and love, and by all the twists and turns that we have shared together.  I have known him since 1956, the year that the Yankees (his favorite baseball team) won the World Series yet again, and Mickey Mantle won the Triple Crown (in baseball, not horse racing).   I am so grateful for these 62 years and counting.

"ON THE JOURNEY"

“ON THE JOURNEY”

            On June 23, I will be giving a lecture at the Barth Pastors’ Conference at Princeton Seminary on the “Witness of the Pastor.”  I have been working on it for awhile, and that work has called back memories of the beginning of my pastoral journey.  I was ordained as a pastor 43 years ago this week on June 8, 1975 by Norfolk Presbytery.  Caroline and I had been called to be the first clergy couple to serve in a local church in the former Southern Presbyterian Church  (PCUS).  We were called to serve St. Columba Ministries, which included being pastors to the 12 member church there and to develop a community ministry for the 1500 low income families housed in Robin Hood Apartments.  It was funded by Norfolk Presbytery.  At my ordination ceremony, the pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Virginia Beach irritated my mother greatly by indicating that, if at any time, I wanted to get out of the ministry, I could do it.  As he spoke those words, my mother heard that he was discrediting me, but I heard it that he himself was tired of the ministry.

            I did not take I personally because it had been such a hard journey for me to get to that place in my life.  As regular readers of my blog know, I grew up in the church, and I was nurtured greatly by it.  The members of First Presbyterian Church in Helena, Arkansas, helped my mother to raise me as a single, working mom, and on that level, they were the community that they were supposed to be.  Whereas I told myself that my main definition was “boy abandoned by my father,” they told me and showed me that my real definition was “boy claimed by my Father (and Mother) God.”  It was a powerful gift to me, and I will forever praise them for it.  They also told me over and over again that I would someday make a fine minister.  That part was not so believable.  In white, Southern culture, the ministry was largely de-humanized because we did not want to experience Jesus as a real human being.  We did not want to focus on the life and ministry of Jesus, because if we did, it would be difficult to support slavery and neo-slavery.   So we chose to make Jesus other-worldly, and we chose to make the purpose of life to get us into heaven when we died.  Even at a young age, this was unattractive to me – I liked life and living too much!

            Then I went off to college and learned how much the church had been complicit in slavery and exploitation of women and in believing in redemptive violence.  So, I dismissed the church as a viable option for me, and besides that, I never wanted to be in the public eye as ministers were.  I loved theology and religion, though, so after college, I went to seminary to study religion and move towards a doctorate in theology.  It was right in the middle of the Vietnam War, and I wrestled mightily with the automatic deferment that I received as a seminary student.  In the middle of all that, my fiancé broke up with me, and my world went swirling around.  In May, 1970, after the USA began to openly bomb in Cambodia and Laos, I joined a seminary movement that sought to get deferments from the draft taken away from ministers and seminary students.  The idea was to force churches and ministers to oppose the war.  I joined a small group of students who decided to drop out of seminary and challenge the draft-exempt status of church-related occupations. 

            To no one’s surprise, the draft boards were happy to have more fodder for the war, and I was drafted.  I knew that I was not going to be a soldier in such an unjust war, and I wrestled for several weeks about what to do.  It was either Canada, jail, or conscientious objector (CO). I felt like the CO was a lot like the draft-exempt status of ministers – it was an educated person’s way out of the war.  My friends Ed Loring and Harmon Wray helped me discern that the CO could be much more than that, and so finally I applied for it and got it.   Ironically, I did my two years’ service  as the manager and director of a halfway house for men getting out of prison in Nashville.  It changed my life, and later, Ed Loring again helped me to re-start my 7 year journey through seminary.  He was then on the faculty at Columbia Seminary, and I ended up going there and graduating in 1975, and then it was on to Norfolk.

            It has been quite a journey, and I thank my mother and God and Caroline and so many others for it.  Now, after 43 years, it’s on to the next phase, whatever that is!