Memory and Hope

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Memory and Hope
By Foy Valentine

[These remarks were made by Foy Valentine on the occasion of the Fiftieth Anniversary Celebration of the Christian Life Commission of the Baptist General Convention of Texas on Monday evening, February 28, 2000, at the Park Cities Baptist Church, Dallas, Texas.]

Thank you. It is good to be introduced by a man with a glib tongue, a vivid imagination, and an elastic conscience.

This is the 50th Anniversary of the founding of the Christian Life Commission of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. It is an occasion of very special significance to most of us in this room and especially to those of us who have been involved in it from the first day until now. Lord Acton rightly said, however, that "no awe surrounds institutions of which all have seen the beginning, and which many helped to make." So, forgive me for saying up front that this king, even after 50 years, still doesn`t have much clothes. (The establishment is everlastingly determined to do us the great favor of not stifling our creativity with the tranquilizer of affluence.) So, it is not awe that I bring to this occasion tonight. It is astonishment. Astonishment, and wonder, and amazement, and delight at the ways of a Kindly Providence, the grace of God.

Phil Strickland said 15 minutes. 15 measly minutes. And after all I`ve done for him. (Hillel said, however, that we ought to expound all of Torah while standing on one foot and then honoring the rest as commentary.) Well. I may quit on time. But I plan to be awfully bitter.

We are gathered under the banner, Memory and Hope.

As the lead dog on this sled team-think about it-I ask you to focus your attention with me first on Memory. And then I ask you to join me in a brief gallop toward Hope. Bear in mind that I am an old man, biblically authorized to dream dreams-dreams that envision the fleshing out of our visions. Dreams and visions of Promise. Dreams and visions of Hope. Dreams and visions of fulfillment. Dreams and visions of Blessing far beyond what we know to ask or think.

When Marcel Proust wrote his seven part magnum opus, Remembrance of Things Past, he touched the chord I now want to touch.

Remembrance is a special gift from God; and remembrance is a discipline to which we submit with profit.

It was for remembrance that God expected the Jews to go up to Jerusalem at the Passover to remember God`s grace in delivering them from the grim visitation of the Death Angel; it was for remembrance that the Jews were instructed to observe the Feast of Tabernacles as they recalled God`s grace given through forty years of wilderness wanderings; and it was for remembrance that the Jews were instructed to keep the Feast of Pentecost as a reminder of God`s grace in providing His people with sustenance for the necessities of life.

And it was for remembrance of our Lord`s supreme sacrifice that the church was given the ordinance of the Lord`s Supper–"This do in remembrance of me"; and it was for remembrance of His death, and burial, and resurrection that the ordinance of baptism was given and is still faithfully observed.

So, tonight we remember. It is good. And it is good for us.

I remember how inordinately pleased I was, a 29-year old callow youth, to be elected in 1952 to the Christian Life Commission`s official board, coming home to Mary Louise in the parsonage of the First Baptist Church of Gonzales in a state of euphoric elation to share this fantastic good news.

I remember Dr. A. C. Miller, the Christian Life Commission`s first director. He was a,man of character, integrity, commitment, courage, intelligence, and honesty; and he had an incurable case of authentic religion. He liked his chili hot, his heroes human, and the truth with the bark on it. He was was a lot like Moses who at 120 years of age had it said of him that his eye was not dimmed and that his natural strength was not abated. Tonight we rise up to call him blessed.

I remember how hotly I wanted to be in the Christian Life Commission harness when Dr. J. Howard Williams first talked to me in 1952 about becoming the Commission`s new Director when Dr. MIller moved to Nashville and then how torn I was about whether or not actually to take the. job when he asked me to do it.

I remember how eagerly and with what clear vision and prophetic leadership Dr. Williams wanted to see the fledgling Christian Life Commission succeed, to do well, to realize its full potential, and to help Baptists, as he often said, "where the water hits the wheel."

And then after I prayerfully and with uncharacteristic trepidation finally decided to accept the call to become the Christian Life Commission director, I remember the mounting excitement and

unvarnished thrill I experienced as I moved with Mary Louise and our little girl, Jean, then 5 years old, to Dallas and this new task.

I remember how diligently and how hard the Christian Life Commission members worked to release our tsunami of Christian ethics on Baptists who in the middle 1950s, in the fullness of time, seemed ready to ride this tidal wave with us. There were T. B. Maston, Orba Lee Malone, Herbert Howard, Frank Pool, Arthur Rutledge, John Bagwell, Harold Basden, W.F. Howard, Jimmy Allen, and many more like them, all with hearts aflame with the power of an idea whose time had come. These were God`s anointed who understood what Aristophanes in The Clouds was talking about when he had Socrates to say, "If you try to keep your feet on the ground, you never discover anything; gravity draws at the juices of the brain" (228-234).

I remember how carefully and meticulously we labored in those early days over our literature which we were offering to Baptists, some of which is as relevant and useful and needed today as when we first hammered it out with conviction, heat, unbridled aggression, and near violence. I recall no Commission member who struck me as being afflicted with the tiniest bit of timidity or self-doubt. There were, however, occasional lapses of slack-jawed stupefaction. (One Commissioner once tried to persuade us to crusade against occasionally undressed manikins in downtown Dallas store windows. No man among us had a firmer grasp of the obvious. And still another Commissioner, when I wanted to name a series of pamphlets "What It Means to Be a Christian" in family life, citizenship, daily work, race relations, and so forth argued heatedly that what he thought and said and did about race relations had absolutely nothing to do with Christianity. His name was Legion. Still is. Indeed while history was fashioning a disorderly, dysfunctional, and ambiguous spectacle on many fronts, we sometimes had meetings that were wracked by spasms of inanity so that we ourselves contributed our fair share to all that dysfunction, which is to say a right smart.

I remember how stalwart E. S. James courageously stood with us and encouraged us and befriended us, a tower of strength; the soul of integrity, and "a friend that sticketh closer than a brother."

I remember how Dr. Forrest Feezor stood tall when the foxes tried to gnaw our tender grapes, (That is a biblical figure for any here, who may not know because of having been so preoccupied with arguing about the inerrancy of the original autographs that they have had no time actually to read the Bible.) Well, it seems that a carload of Baptist Building divines (so to speak) went to Howard Payne one night to give the ministerial students there a dose of indoctrination, thus extracting a horrible price for their tuition partly paid by Texas Baptists. A student asked where Baptists came from. No answer was offered by the alleged divines. When the silence became awkward and then painful, I told him. On the way home, I found that Dr. T. C. Gardner and Dr. A. B. White were not exactly elated with my response. The next day the two of them arranged an emergency meeting with Dr. Feezor to prefer charges against me. "We have a heretic in this Building," they said. He asked them to explain. When they had bared the awful truth that I did not believe you could trace us back in a line of unbroken succession to John the Baptist, that I did not share their readiness to quit preaching if I did not believe that the one who baptized me had ultimately been baptized by John, Dr. Feezor leaned back in his chair and said, "Well, brethren, I believe there are two heretics in this Building."

I remember how well and with what excellence the earliest Christian Life Commission associates, first Browning Ware and then Bill Pinson, represented the Commission and the cause of Christian ethics among Baptists and beyond. Browning Ware did observe that the only thing half time about this half-time job was the salary. And, Bill Pinson did once hold out vociferously for naming one of our pamphlet series, "Lip and Life."

I remember how pleased I was in 1955 when Bill Fallis at Broadman Press accepted the manuscript for Christian Faith in Action, the compilation sermons preached mostly by our Commission members which really was the first book on Christian social ethics ever published by Broadman.

And I remember what wonderful, delightful fellowship we had in this Christian Life Commission company.

Sally Rogers was my secretary soon after I came to the Commission. Sally had just graduated, from Baylor where she was a Baylor Beauty. She was from Athens in East Texas and spoke English without a trace of an accent. She was a free spirit who brought unbridled enthusiasm and overflowing happiness to our small shop. One day the phone rang; and, thinking it was Jerry Kolls calling her from the Student Department down the hall, she answered the phone call, "This is the Christian Life Commission. The Christian is out of town. This is the life of the Commission."

Later still another of Baylor`s memorable gifts to the ongoing life and work of the Christian Life Commission, Leola LaGrone from Tahoka typed a letter from me in which I had dictated a note to the effect that we had finally got the garbed nuns out of the public schools in Bremond. Leola`s typed version came out, "We have finally got the grabbed nuns out of the public schools in Bremond."

And it was Leola who did a P.S. to a letter I had written when we finished building our cabin at Red River, New Mexico, saying, "Everything is finished but the fireplace and the skeptic tank."

Festivity has been a Christian Life Commission signature. It beats crying: Please keep looking up. There must be a pony around here somewhere.

And now for a word of hope.

What word shall I speak?

Well. We have come down some crooked lanes and through some dark tunnels to where we are tonight. The achievements have been notable. The victories have been impressive. But we must everlastingly be about our special high calling, to use Immanuel Kant`s word, of straightening the crooked timber of humanity.

So-o-o-o–

I hope that the Christian Life Commission and its now many friends will work with increasing effectiveness to help Baptists be the people of God in a state now without boundaries and in a world without borders.

I hope that your vision of Christian social ethics, of justice and peace, of truth and integrity, of personal morality and public righteousness may be increasingly clear and in focus and effective.

I hope that your prophetic forth-telling of the word of the Lord may be increasingly loud and clear and strong. Hear this word of the Lord, as recorded in Numbers 11:26-28.

So Moses went out and told the people the words of the Lord, and he gathered seventy men of the elders of the people, and placed them round about the tent. Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him, and took some of the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied. But then they did so no more.

Now two men remained in the camp, one named Eldad, and the other Medad, and the spirit rested upon them; they were among those registered, but they had not gone out to the tent, and so they prophesied in the camp. And a young man ran and told Moses, "Eldad and Medad are prophesying in the camp." And Joshua, the son of Nun, the minister of Moses, one of his chosen men, said, "My lord Moses, forbid them." But Moses said to him, "Are you jealous for my sake? Would that all the Lord`s people were prophets, that the Lord would put his spirit upon them."

We need now to recover the prophethood of all believers, matching our zeal for the priesthood of all believers with a passion for the prophethood of all believers with which we serve as God`s salt, God`s light, and God`s leaven.

I hope the Christian Life Commission will stay focused on Christian social ethics. Don`t both with trying to teach a pig to sing: it wastes your time and it annoys the pig.

And I hope we can all remember, as Cervantes put it, that the road is always better than the inn. Keep moving on and–get going.