Post-Newtown Choices 2

"Adoration of the Shepherds"

by Gerard van Honthorst  1622

In a recent post I mentioned a person whom most Catholics have not heard of and most evangelicals have forgotten—Clarence Jordan.  I thought I might have mentioned Jordan in a previous posting but checking back, I don’t find that I did.  Sometimes I find that I become to “Catholic” but not “catholic” enough in the way I focus this blog.   In any event, Clarence Jordan (1912-69) was an Evangelical Protestant from west-central Georgia who from his youth was conscious of the plight of the African American and white sharecroppers in his State.  To help with this problem he studied agriculture at the University of Georgia but then was convinced that the problem was not only a matter of economics but of spirituality.  He attended the Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville and earned a Ph.D. in New Testament Greek.   He never presented himself for ordination but he remained a New Testament scholar throughout his life, able to translate the scriptures on sight from their Greek original into contemporary American English.  In fact he produced the “Cotton Patch” edition of many New Testament books—a paraphrase of the scriptures in the language and culture of the American South.  In his adaptation of the Christmas story Jesus is born not in a stable but a garage, and laid not in a manger but an apple-crate.  And at the end of the stories, Jesus is not crucified at the instigation of the High Priest and Sanhedrin, but lynched at the urgings of Baptist preachers.  Explaining his “adaptation” of the story, Jordan wrote: “they crucified him in Judea and they strung him up in Georgia with a noose tied to a pine tree.”  Of course Jordan was not the first to take the story and give it this sort of a twist.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in his novel The Brothers Karamazov, has Christ brought for an interview before the Grand Inquisitor, representing the powers of the Catholic Church, who condemns Christ to death.  (In the end, however, the Inquisitor allows Christ to leave rather than consigning him to the stake to which he had been condemned.)

In 1942 Jordan and his wife, Florence, along with another couple, Martin and Mable England, began Koinonia Farms, an interracial commune modeled on the early Jerusalem Christian community described in the fourth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles.  This sparked a huge outrage among the locals as it was against the law for blacks and whites to live within the same household.  The community was dedicated to the principles of racial equality, ecological responsibility, common ownership of possessions, and a rejection of violence.  How un-Georgia could you get?  It also turned out how un-Southern Baptist could you get as according to theologian Stanley Hauerwas, Jordan was dis-fellowshipped from the Convention.   As the Civil Rights movement began to pick up momentum, Koinonia Farms became the target of much violence but Jordan and his friends  remained committed to what they saw as the path of Christian discipleship.  Millard and Linda Fuller came to Kononia Farms in 1965 and Jordan’s example and inspiration led them to the establishment of Habitat for Humanity.   Another American influenced by Jordan’s Christianity is President Jimmy Carter.   Clarence Jordan died in 1969.  Consistent with his evangelical life he was buried in a pine-box in an unmarked grave on the Farm at a funeral attended by family and the neighboring poor.  In many ways, Clarence was a Protestant Saint Francis—a man whose love for the Gospel led him to follow Christ in his poverty and his passion for the poor.  He gives us something to think about and reflect on this Christmas season.  The baby came for a reason and the work he began isn’t finished yet.  Clarence took up the work for the span of his years.  There is a need for others to take up that work today. 

O Wisdom!

The incipit of a medieval

copy of the Book of the

Wisdom of Solomon.

 The Church is coming close to Christmas—on Monday we started the O Antiphons.  The O Antiphons are a series of seven antiphons sung at the Magnificat of Vespers from December 17 to the 23^rd.  They build in drama until the final:

O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster,

exspectatio Gentium, et Salvator earum:

veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster

 

           O Emmanuel, our king and giver of the law,

hope of the gentiles and their Saviour:

Come to save us, O Lord our God.

I love these antiphons and look forward to them each year.  In the liturgical reforms following the Second Vatican Council they are also used as the alleluia verse at Mass.  Some priests adapt them for the strophes of the penitential rite.   And of course the hymn Veni, Veni Emmanuel (O Come, O Come Emmanuel) is based on a very close adaptation of these marvelous hymns. 

The antiphons themselves go back at least to the eighth century where it is recorded that they were sung at Vespers both at Rome and at the Abbey of Fleury in the Loire Valley.  This indicates that their usage was widespread in the western Church pretty early on and some claim that they may even come from the fifth century.  On the other hand, as there is no trace of them or their influence in the Eastern Rites, it is not likely that they were much  earlier than the fourth century.   

The first of the O Antiphons is O Sapientia

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,

attingens a fine usque ad finem,

fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

 

O Wisdom, proceeding from the mouth of the Most High,

Stretching  from one end (of the earth) to the other,

powerfully yet gently ordering all things:

Come to teach us the path of prudence.

 This morning I heard Dr. Richard Land, president of the Ethics Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, say that he would prefer to see teachers and school administrators armed (with guns) in the classroom as a means of preventing the sort of violence we saw last week at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown Connecticut.  Dr. Land is not a stupid man—he holds a D.Phil. from Oxford—but obviously neither is he wise.  Wisdom and Knowledge are not one and the same thing, and neither, for that matters, is wisdom and intelligence.  Nor, to be honest, is intelligence and knowledge.  Intelligence is a capacity for knowledge but does not itself fulfill the potential it offers.  It is not enough to be intelligent, one still has to acquire the knowledge. Knowledge, for its part, is something that we acquire, hopefully to whatever capacity our intellect gives us.  Wisdom, on the other hand, is—at least in our Catholic tradition—an infused gift.  It is something that only God can give. 

I would not be inclined to look to the Southern Baptist tradition for Wisdom—nor for that matter, ethical gravity—as it is a denomination historically founded on the most base racist principles.  The congregations  associated with the SBC certainly did not do themselves gospel-proud during the Civil Rights movement and the SBC distinguished itself in advocating racism when according the theologian Stanley Hauerwas it excommunicated Clarence Jordan, one of the most saintly evangelicals in the history of American religion.  Of course, to be fair, Jordan brought down censure on himself when in his popular telling of the Gospel story relocated from the first-century Holy Land to the twentieth-century American South, he has Jesus not crucified but lynched by the Church leaders.  Dr. Land, for his part, has a history of making comments that if not deliberately racist certainly betray an ignorance of racial sensitivity.  He also was vocal in his support of George W. Bush’s bringing the nation to war against Iraq.  His comments today on NPR show a consistency with his views of an America that fits H. Richard Neibuhr’s Christ of Culture model in which religion sells itself out to support a prevailing socio-economic and political culture rather than challenge that culture with the Gospel.   In other words, Dr. Land is one of those “let’s make the good news bad news” sort of people.  But then again, as this blog has pointed out, we have plenty of “Bad-News Christians” in the Catholic Church too.  Calvinists and Jansenists drink from the same poisoned well.    

Let’s give some meditation time to the First of the O Antiphons

O Wisdom, proceeding from the mouth of the Most High,

Stretching  from one end (of the earth) to the other,

powerfully yet gently ordering all things:

Come to teach us the path of prudence

And ask Wisdom how best to order all things in this world of violence and human anguish so that teachers don’t have to carry guns for children to learn in peace and safety.