Ambivalence

In the past three years, I think I have been beginning to gain a foothold on the ambivalence of the apostle Paul about the faith communities with which he corresponded throughout the third quarter of the First Century.

This is not a foothold I wanted or sought.

Aware of my passion for justice and my activist heart, I have been invited repeatedly to take roles of leadership in the interest of bringing peace with justice to different settings - communities and country. I have been in attendance at meetings between clergy and community leaders with the governor of my state, chiefs of police, mayors and other highly placed officials. My mainstream (white, married, male, heterosexual, middle class, parent...) presence has helped to ensure that the variety of minority communities concerned about the implications of the killing of Michael Brown by a Ferguson police officer are reinforced by equally concerned majority members of society.

We must not forget. We must never forget: Eighteen years old and African American, Michael was unarmed as shots rang out. He was struck multiple times and killed by Officer Darren Wilson with whom he had struggled earlier. Dead and uncovered, Michael's body was left lying in the street for nearly four and a half hours for all to see. Whether intended or not, the Ferguson Police Department by leaving his body so exposed appeared to make Michael an example for others who might dare to defy authority. The scene rang familiar for many who declared that it resembled a Southern-style lynching or a Roman-style crucifixion. Michael's name has been added to a seemingly endless roster of African American men and women prevented from realizing the fullness of promise within them.

My wife and I have lamented his death and the growing amount of blood being spilled and muddying the steep trail towards equality and unity. Coco posted then on Facebook,

"How young is young enough to teach Gwen to be guarded around white folks? Praying for peace in Ferguson."

I confessed in a sermon once that I had wished when Gwen was born that Americans as a people might have finally erased, by the time she was old enough to understand the words of W. E. B. DuBois, the "color line" he so poignantly described at the turn of the 20th Century.

But it hasn't. If anything, its clarity is sharper now than ever. And in an era in which our younger generations clearly will choose to disregard color or sexual orientation when judging a person, it is sickening that there is still enough racism left in us to fill the killing of so many people with souring overtones.

I want to cry out, to call for justice. And repeatedly I have been invited to do just that.

This much, however, weighs in the balance: I am my daughter's father, while at the same time I am also the pastor of a police officer who has been called up for duty, keeping the peace in Ferguson during these wakeful nights there.

I know, at least second hand, the delicate balance of protecting and serving. Law enforcement can be a maddening profession. "The quality of mercy," as Shakespeare referred to the problem of executing the law, may be "not strained," but the administration of justice certainly can be. And here we have one of those strained moments.

And I am the pastor of dear friends of the grandparents of Darren Wilson, that same couple who reared him from his earliest years into the man he became. The grandparents and my parishioners were out to dinner together when Officer Wilson called from an emergency room to say that he had been involved in an encounter which had ended in the death of a young man he had shot.

There is not a fiber of my being that believes any American police officer would presume to join the force encumbered with a racist heart or imagination. With the purest of intentions, they expect to protect and to serve. The blindfolded character of justice is presented in that way to assure the balance of the scales she holds. Every individual in law enforcement I have ever known has entered the field with the personal expectation that she or he will exercise that measure of equanimity.

And we citizens expect no less of them. We want no one citizen afforded greater deference than any other. All ought to be able to expect treatment with respect and dignity.

Then a moment comes to pass like the one that Saturday afternoon in Ferguson, and so many times before and since. Fear or passion or rage or haste escalate as divisions we imagined we individually had overcome prove insuperable, because our society still has a very long way to go toward the defeat of prejudice and fear of one another. Heated words may be exchanged, the situation may come to blows. The gentleness and kindness to which we are called in the Christian tradition do not prevail, and principled people descend into the hell we sometimes make of earth rather than the heaven to which the Almighty beckons us.

Two thousand years since Paul wrote his letters, we still witness how Paul loved the people to whom he wrote, and the ambivalence he felt about them because he loved them.

The opening of nearly every one of his letters includes almost fawning praise for them. But it never took long for him to turn from praise to preaching. In the first letter to the Christians at Corinth, Paul described groups with different dietary restrictions, and mysterious categories of "weak" and "strong" adherents the precise qualities of which we no longer comprehend. He cursed at the Galatians for confusing the gospel with its messengers. Later letters indicated that there were in some among the Christians who sought to undermine or even overthrow their rulers, perhaps because of the freedom they had come to know in Christ, and Paul would offered warnings about keeping in line with authorities, presumably to keep his own religious minority safe (Romans 13).

For one curious hallmark of Christian communities in ancient Asia Minor and Greece seems to have been their attractiveness to a wide variety of humanity. As Paul would put it in one letter, those churches included not only male and female, but "Greek and Jew, ... barbarian, Scythian, slave and free" (Colossians 3:11). And these would have difficulty getting along, even in the uniting love of the Holy Spirit.

I love my parishioners and never want them to imagine that I somehow disrespect them or trivialize their professions or ignore their struggles. I bear within me the heart of an activist and the concern of a pastor. I find these better selves within me at odds with each other. In the same moment as my conscience insists that I must demand justice, for the sake of my daughter and my brothers and sisters who also are Black; my Christian heart and pastor's role insist I must extend mercy to those charged with keeping the peace in places where injustice seems very visible. I must be compassionate toward both at once.

It is this sort of concern which confuses the heart. And isn't this ambivalence like what Paul must have been feeling when he saw his churches divided over rights and privileges, and then asserted (perhaps fatalistically) that he had to be "all things to all people"!

The Gospel According to Thomas White

Readings

1 Corinthians 12:1-11

John 2:1-12

I cannot hear the story of the wedding at Cana without being reminded of the critical importance of every human being, and of the riches we discover within ourselves when we are in relationship with God through Jesus Christ.

That may sound like a pretty evangelical thing to come out of my rather progressively theological mouth, but it’s true. Those six jars of water became potent wine because of their encounter with Jesus. And Jesus didn’t really want to have anything to do with them! He just messed with them because his mother basically told him he had to.

So, I don’t think that it should be unexpected that any of us would on occasion do a bit better than we had imagined we ought to be able to — given our background or upbringing or personal failings — because despite those things, we encountered the Christ.

Sometimes, God just messes with us, because somewhere along the line we said that it would be OK.

Now you may say that I’ve just blown my metaphor, because jars of water don’t have the ability to refuse what happens to them whereas people have a choice. Jesus encountered those jars, but they didn’t encounter him the way we do.

But I said before that the jars are metaphorically representing us, and every metaphor breaks down eventually.

Anyway, deal with it. You once were filled with plain old water. But now you’re filled with the best wine anyone could ever imagine, and you ought to do something with it.

To give you a sense of what’s actually possible, I want to tell you a story about a man building a church.

His name was John White.

Or maybe it wasn’t.

You see, his name wasn’t important to anybody but the people around him, back in 1845. No one wrote it down.

The souvenir program from the 100th anniversary celebration of the Rock Hill Presbyterian Church in 1945 says that his name was John. On the other hand, Henrietta Ambrose, the North Webster historian, says that his name was Tom. And indeed, the census of 1880 probably proves her right. (What the Rock Hill historian did is the definition of White Privilege, by the way. You get to rewrite history, whether you intend to or not.)

But however unsurprising it may be that history should be confused about the name of the only man (as far as I’m concerned) worth remembering from Rock Hill in 1845, it is nevertheless a pity that his name should have become mislaid in the interim.

Rock Hill Presbyterian Church as it appeared
not long after completion.

For, as far as I am concerned, this man in bondage — apparently one of as many as perhaps a dozen slaves assigned to the work of building the stone church that once stood at the corner of the Rock Hill and Manchester roads — was one who spoke the only good news regarding the construction of that house of prayer. And it was a gospel of Sabbath-breaking for the sake of human dignity, just the sort of thing Jesus himself used to do.




You know about the Rock Hill Presbyterian Church building. It stood until early 2012 but has since disappeared. A vintner downstate claims that he purchased the stone in order to reconstruct the church on his property as a wedding chapel. But his website shows no evidence of it, in the invitation it makes to couples to stage their weddings there.

My friend Ed Johnson, an alderman for the city of Rock Hill, suspects that the stone never made it to the vineyard. And I think it would not be any surprise to discover that one white man might have miscalculated the power required to move that stone the first time by twelve black men, hewing it and hauling it and laying it.

What you may not know is why Ed thinks that a 167-year-old structure should have mattered... more than because it was a venerable, sacred space.

It’s because it was constructed by slaves.

Its stone was quarried by those same slaves.

And the labor that put a roof on that structure was donated by the team of slaves who also raised up the walls and laid the floor and perfected its interior and exterior.

After the church began to take shape, as the Rock Hill Presbyterian Church historian told it, John (or, rather, Thomas) White, the overseer of the crew, went to James Marshall, the man who presumed to own him and whose dream it had been to build the church.

[White] said that the colored members wanted to give something for the church. When Mr. Marshall told them they were giving something by building it, John replied: “No, sir, we feel that we are working for you. What we want is to give something ourselves. We thought we could put on the roof on Sundays—on our own time.” The roof was the contribution of the colored people, who felt that thus they had a special part in the building of the church.

Rock Hill Presbyterian Church just before it was razed.

Even for as condescendingly as the teller of that story appears to relate the request of the slave John White — a man who, mind you, was not being paid for the back-breaking work he was consigned to do — if you study it, there is also a measure of reverence underlying the telling.

For this same person who seems to excuse the slave donors by claiming that they “felt that thus they had a special part in the building of the church” (Am I wrong to infer that there is a suggestion of the phrase, “even though they didn’t” here?) is clearly humbled by a man unbent, even of a team unbent by the tasks that were being demanded of them.

The outcome of the explanation by the man whom that historian calls John White is remarkable because of the actions James Marshall appears to have taken in response, in the years following:

Ed Purnell, son of John Purnell, around 1900
Mr. Purnell had also been counted among
those enslaved by James Marshall.

1. Not only were the workers allowed to donate their labor on the Lord’s Day, to complete the construction of the building. They were evidently members in all but name. The writer of the history I quoted a little while ago does refer to Mr. White and the others on his team as “members.” 
2. They would indeed worship under that same roof at the same time on Sunday mornings as the white members. Henrietta Ambrose says that black and white worshiped together at the Rock Hill church, albeit with the bondspersons seated in the back. Nevertheless, they had seats! (And they would have them eventually in the presence of the New England Congregationalists who would come to treat Rock Hill Presbyterian as a layover for themselves until they could build a church of their own.)
3. James Marshall would set free two of his slaves along with their families in 1864, shortly before his death. These were John Purnell and Caleb Townsend, whom he provided with land and aided in the construction of their homes. Thus, he relinquished all of his human assets, so that none would be passed along when he died.
4. And, finally, Thomas White is listed as a 77-year-old servant in the home of Ernest Marshall in the census of 1880. Ernest was James Marshall’s son. There remained a clear commitment of family to family.

The Rev. Artemus Bullard
Source: Missouri History Museum

Now, I suppose it’s possible that James Marshall was a different sort of slaveholder than others. Maybe his exposure to Artemus Bullard - the first pastor of the Rock Hill church - was influential. Bullard was also the founder of the Webster College for Boys. (He’d been reared in a Congregationalist household out east and, although he worked for the Presbyterians and was criticized for it by his family — which included siblings who married Beechers who considered him soft on slavery.)

Maybe James Marshall, as it is said of Stonewall Jackson, recognized that the practice of owning human beings was evil and simply thought it ought to be handled in a more deliberate and gradual manner than sudden emancipation.

What I cannot doubt, however, is that — on a day in late spring at the construction site of the Rock Hill Presbyterian Church — James Collier Marshall was humbled by the brilliance of another Christian insisting on the sanctity of his own dignity, impressed by the efficacy of the spiritual power of one he considered inferior, chastised by the justice of God and the truth of Christ. Thomas White went to Marshall and made him an offer that bespoke his and his co-laborers’ integrity and courage.

And lately that moment is in my mind when I hear the story of water changed to wine, and remember the variety of spiritual gifts on display when we are together in Christ’s name. Lately, that is what I think of, when I consider the riches we discover within ourselves when we are in relationship with God through Jesus Christ, even when it feels as if God is maybe just messing with us because that is what God does... gifts that deserve to be recognized and honored, cultivated and practiced... the blessed and lasting impact of the action of a man building a church.

Thanks be to God. Amen.