A friend who was a religious skeptic once asked the famous Baptist preacher and civil-rights leader Will D. Campbell to define Christianity in ten words or less. Campbell replied, “We’re all bastards but God loves us anyway.”
On August 20, 1965 in Hayneville, Alabama, a white civil rights worker named Jonathan Daniels walked to a store with two black women, intending to purchase soft drinks. Tom L. Coleman, an unpaid sheriff’s deputy, blocked the door and blasted Daniels point-blank in the chest with a shotgun round. A grand jury indicted Coleman for manslaughter. He pled self-defense and an all-white jury acquitted him.
On the very day of the murder, Campbell, still seething with rage and grief, chanced to see his free-thinking friend again. The man reminded Campbell of his definition of Christianity then asked two questions: Were both Jonathan Daniels and Tom L. Coleman bastards? Campbell admitted that, by his own theology, that must be true. Then he asked, “Which one of those two bastards do you think God loved most?” Campbell, who was saved as a child and ordained in his teens, replied, “Damned if you ain’t made a Christian out of me. And I’m not sure I can stand it.” Campbell’s ministry transformed from one of condemning racists to one of loving and seeking to understand them, without ever changing his views on race. He once wrote, “Anyone who is not as concerned with the immortal soul of the dispossessor as he is with the suffering of the dispossessed is being something less than Christian.”
The story we read this morning is one of those which makes lay-people think that New Testament Greek is the ultimate get-out-of-jail-free card, a magician’s trick which can produce rabbits of spotless white orthodoxy from the blackest top hat of a text. We like to point out that, of the two words available to him for “dog,” Jesus uses the diminutive term, something more like “puppy.” This is true, but it doesn’t change anything: “Dog” was a Jewish racial slur hurled at the Gentiles by a dispossessed people seeking relief from the injustice of their own position. By taking it in his mouth, Jesus enters the worldview and uncomprehending pain of every redneck, cracker, and Kluxer, every bigoted birther and flat-earther, every neo-Nazi, race-baiter and Confederate-flag-flying poor white trash who ever burned a cross in a black man’s yard. We like to think of Jesus taking our sins on himself in his death, but I think in this instance Jesus takes our sins on himself in his life. I’m not questioning Jesus sinlessness; I’m emphasizing his incarnation. He enters the cultural space of the poor Galilean peasants he came from and lets this anonymous woman show his disciples how love trumps hate. He is so concerned with the souls of the dispossessors that he puts himself in need of redemption by the dispossessed so that his disciples can see what conquering love looks like.
Many white churches have awakened of late to the need for diversity, and usually that refers to ethnicity, and it is important that we continue to struggle forward in that regard. But I know that I, at least, have been guilty of devaluing a different kind of diversity: the diversity of the Left Behinders and the KJV’ers and the Joel Osteen followers; I have taken patronizing amusement in the views of the six-day creationists and the no-women’s-ordinationists; I’ve preached that everybody is a sinner but God loves us anyway, while secretly adding that God’s loves some more because they sin less, or at least read more. But Jesus sides with those people. He doesn’t necessarily accept their views, only their pain and their sin.
Will Campbell also tells the story of the night of his nephew’s funeral. As was the custom in the South in the old days, the family asked that Will, as the minister, sit up with the corpse. Stunned by his own grief, Campbell barely managed to remain in his pew as the church grew dark and silent. Then he became aware that someone else had stayed, an uncle who had loudly condemned Will’s civil rights work, but who cared enough to be there in the hour of need with a quiet presence and a thermos of coffee. “Until the dawn,” Campbell recalls, “I sat in the redemptive company of a racist Jesus.” May we daily find sustenance in the presence of the wrong, racist, redneck Christs who occupy our worlds and give us hard lessons to learn. May they make Christians out of us, and may we be able to stand it.
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