In Remembrance of John
In Remembrance of John
William E. Hull, Research Professor
Samford University, Birmingham, AL
Note: This Memorial Service sermon was preached at the Crescent Hill Baptist Church, Louisville, Kentucky, on September 24, 2005.
In the majestic prologue to the Gospel of John, eternity is described as entering into time with this simple statement: "There was a man sent from God, whose name was John" (1:6). Today we are gathered to celebrate the life of another "man sent from God, whose name was John," not John the Baptist but John Claypool. Having cherished him as the dearest of friends for more than fifty years, I offer four reflections on how the divine strategy of sending a forerunner to prepare us for Christ was repeated in his ministry.
The Gospel as Radical Grace
For at least a century after the Civil War, the South was a failure-obsessed culture bent on redeeming itself by the most compulsive religious exertions. Words such as "decision, commitment, and faith" were all given urgency by the necessity of proving one`s worth to stand before God. Fear, and even a hint of terror, lurked around the edges of these negotiations, fueled in some cases by "hell-fire-and-damnation" preaching that left no doubt as to the tragic consequences of failing to do the right thing.
John was born into a family and a denomination that took this enterprise with the utmost seriousness. His Claypool forebears in Franklin County, Kentucky, were religious to the core and this awesome earnestness was polished to a high gloss by the Buchanans on the maternal side of his family. John entered the ministry during the religious revival of the 1950s which filled Baptist churches with folks who loved to sing "Amazing Grace" but, just in case that was not enough, were also determined to demonstrate their piety by building the biggest sanctuary in town.
John soon realized, however, as Samuel Rutherford once put it, that "grace grows best in winter." Irony lurked everywhere behind the facade of ecclesiastical success. Despite a great show of sanctimoniousness, the southern church was hopelessly racist, unready even a century after Emancipation for the desegregation that was inevitable following the massive social upheavals prompted by World War II. Instead of bonding together to lead their troubled congregations through the rigors of the civil rights movement, ministers were busy knifing each other in the back over slogans such as "liberal" vs. "conservative" designed to prove who among them might be the most orthodox.
The deeper John plumbed the dark places of the human heart, the more he discovered, not freedom, but fear: Christians captive to tradition, cankered by resentment, afraid to die but even more afraid to live. In response, he began to redesign the popular understanding of grace by viewing life itself as God`s good gift, by emphasizing that what we become is based on what we already are, that our being in God is antecedent to our doing for God. Grace was reinterpreted, not as a reward for frenetic activism, but as that vast benevolence that bears us up when, in moments of impotence, hands fall helpless to our side. Bearing witness to the centrality of grace explains why John made the Parable of the Prodigal Son a favorite preaching text in those early years of fashioning his gospel.
Preaching as Vicarious Confession
The great problem with John`s view of grace is that it tempts the recipient to become soft on sin. A guilt-ridden southern culture had long welcomed the gospel of grace in its more sentimental form. Witness the host of rededications at the annual revival meeting, some of them repeats from the previous year. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, in The Cost of Discipleship, reminded us how easily cheap grace could become the mortal enemy of costly grace: forgiveness without repentance, baptism without discipline, communion without confession, absolution without sacrifice.
John addressed this problem with a remarkably effective strategy. Instead of using his sermons to preach against sin in judgmental finger-pointing fashion, he chose to use his sermons to confess his own sins. He talked with disarming candor about his doubts from childhood through college and how he was still plagued by questions that had no easy answers. He dissected the anatomy of his own heart, showing how he had often acted in ways that seemed religious when what he really wanted was the approval of others, particularly his mother. With a prim and proper Baptist background, he had no scandalous transgressions to confess, such as were often heard in "rescue mission" testimonials, but he held up his own inner life to us as a mirror reflecting the more subtle sins of pride, ambition, complacency, and condescension.
Centuries ago, Protestantism recoiled against the Catholic confessional because it had taken on an almost magical quality in the Middle Ages and was burdened by the deplorable practice of indulgences. Evangelicals retained their equivalent of the confessional during the revivalistic era when sinners were invited to the mourners` bench but, by the post-war period, this practice had virtually disappeared. As churches became larger and members more sophisticated, the central spiritual discipline of confession dropped almost completely out of Baptist life. Some pastors tried to sound the note in their public prayers, but such utterances were necessarily vague and general at best.
In this culture of deception, where our brokenness was ignored by the simple subterfuge of silence, John began to plead with his congregation to "come clean" with those innermost secrets seldom admitted even to themselves, much less to God. And because his language was autobiographical, it offered each hearer an invitation to join him on the journey of spiritual honesty. By initiating this conversation, John modeled for his members how to practice the forgotten discipline of confession so prominent in the Psalms. To be precise, John`s preaching was "vicarious confession," that is, when his parishioners did not know how to acknowledge their own waywardness, John did it for them by acknowledging his waywardness, thereby showing them how to become "honest to God."
Let me mention three important implications of this strategy for you to ponder at another time. First, John made it legitimate for Christians to question, to doubt, even to argue with God. As one of his mentors, Carlyle Marney, put it, God can take care of himself even when we come at him in a religious rage. Second, John did not approach his hearers "from above," talking down to them from that pedestal on which the South likes to place its preachers. Rather, he approached them "from below," talking up to them out of the abyss of a broken and a contrite heart. Third, this meant that his sermons were dialogical rather than confrontational. As Vance Havner liked to put it, John did not preach as a critic with microscope looking for faults but as a beggar with basket looking for bread.
Ministry as Wounded Healing
John`s transparent honesty in the pulpit prepared him to deal with three great crises in his own life, all of them sources of unspeakable grief because they dealt with the reality of death: the death of his daughter, the death of his marriage, and the death of his denomination. All three tragedies engulfed him in little more than a decade, from the early seventies to the early eighties, and it was in the darkness of these three events that his identity was most deeply forged.
John`s two children were just younger than ours but near enough in age to enjoy many outings together, thus we were very close not only as ministerial colleagues but as families. I still remember the hot day in July when John called with the diagnosis of Laura Lue`s life-threatening leukemia. I was standing at the back door of our home and the news struck me so forcefully that I had to sit down on steps leading to the basement. The family soon asked me to serve as its pastor during this time of darkness which eventually included conducting her funeral from this pulpit and placing her lifeless body in the ground on a cold and dreary day.
In the months after the dread diagnosis, John and I spent many days together when he had been up all night in a futile effort to relieve the pain that racked her body. I stood in the wings to preach for him on those Sundays when the whole week had denied him a moment for preparation and had exhausted his strength past the point of a public appearance. Finally, Wylodine and I were in the Claypool home on that January afternoon when the footfalls were hushed and the last cry ended as a great silence descended because she was gone, almost exactly when the doctors had predicted eighteen months earlier. At first, her medications had made Laura Lue look robust and rosy cheeked and, because her struggle was saturated with the prayers of a concerned congregation, it was hard not to hope that the prognosis would prove to be a horrible mistake, but it was not to be.
This devastating loss took a heavy toll on John`s innermost family circle, leading eventually to the loss of his marriage in addition to that of his daughter. The ties of thirty years are severed only by an amputation that leaves the heart unspeakably shattered, thus John was beginning to collect more and more scar tissue on his soul that would never go away. But his personal response to domestic tragedy was consistent with his preaching to others. Spending a year`s residency in Clinical Pastoral Education at the Southern Baptist Hospital in New Orleans was his way of understanding the outward by going more deeply inward, of seeing renewal in order to discern the future shape of his obedience, and of moving beyond blame to a life of continued growth.
When faced with frustrations that cannot be resolved, many ministers seek therapy by throwing themselves into their work with fresh determination. But at the height of his pastoral and pulpit powers, John found his context for ministry coming apart even as his marriage unraveled. An absolutist temperament called fundamentalism was gaining momentum by feeding on the fears of the Old South over the growing power of a New South, by riding the coattails of a momentous shift in southern political loyalties, and by exploiting the rising popularity of the electronic church.
Not only John, but a host of younger ministers who so admired his leadership, suddenly found themselves disenfranchised in a denomination determined to reinvent itself in forms that were alien to the best of its heritage. This prompted his turn toward the great Anglican tradition which John had long admired because of its robust ecclesiology, its sacramental love of mystery, and its attractiveness to a thoughtful constituency, a move made easier by the Episcopal roots of the new love of his life, Ann, who became his enthusiastic partner in ministry.
In all three of these crises, John faced the challenge posed by his emphasis on grace, namely, is the heavenly Father a fickle giver? God had given John a darling daughter, then suddenly snatched her away in childhood. He had given him a lengthy marriage, but now all that remained were its ashes. He had given him the goodly heritage of rootage in a denomination that was no longer welcoming of his ministry. John could hardly ignore these losses, or hide them like skeletons in a closet. Nor could he pretend that he was able in his own strength to overcome them for, indeed, all three problems proved intractable in the face of his best efforts. So, in the last great move of his ministry, John refused to allow these experiences to defeat him but instead utilized them to contribute to his enhanced effectiveness as a "wounded healer."
The phrase is from a book by Henri Nouwen, but the image is from the Suffering Servant of Isaiah 53. The reality which it describes speaks powerfully to our success-crazed culture in which winning is everything and losing is nothing. William James once said that the fear of failure is the American idea of hell, a message that is encoded on our brains hundreds of times every day. But the one whom we are gathered to remember taught us the value of being vulnerable. By fulfilling his calling without a trace of ministerial macho, he incarnated for us that ministry of negation that was the hallmark of his ancient namesake who insisted that "he was not the light" (John 1:8) but had come to bear broken but faithful witness to the light (John 1:20-23).
Life as Sovereign Victory
John and I arrived in Birmingham within weeks of each other in 1987, which permitted me to participate at close range in his climactic ministry at Saint Luke`s Episcopal Church. At his retirement dinner in 2000, which overflowed one of the biggest ballrooms in town, a grateful parish lavished affection on a beloved rector whom they had been skittish about calling because all of his previous pastorates were Baptist. I reminded them on that occasion that we Baptists had birthed and bred John, had taught him the Bible in our Sunday School and public speaking in our Training Union, had given him a good liberal arts and theological education in our schools, then had nurtured his ministerial skills in our rural, village, and city churches. I ended my summation of our denominational investment in him by saying, "When we Baptists gave you John, we gave you the best we had to offer," a claim which they affirmed with a sustained round of applause.
But then, in retirement, the Episcopalians gave John back to us. Due to restrictive policies governing his pension plan, John could receive very limited earnings from sources within his denomination, thus his primary arena of vocational service became a teaching ministry at Mercer`s McAfee School of Theology where he was able, not only to renew his Baptist roots, but to roam freely in other rooms of the great household of faith. Thus did his ministry come full circle with much lost but even more gained, with much taken but even more given, with much dead but even more alive. That is the central witness that sustains us as we salute the end of his earthly pilgrimage. John bet everything on the sovereignty of life over anything that would seek to destroy it. And in one voice our hearts cry out, "Dear John, you were right. Thank God, you were right!"
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
