Takoma Park Baptist Church, Washington, DC, Feb. 4, 1996
They came out of nowhere. From small villages and obscure city streets, from backwoods farms and hard labor coal mines; from workingmen’s cottages, but not from the plantations, and from the ranks of domestics and cooks, but not from the great ladies. They were a humble people, schooled by experience rather than the universities; and a modest people, doing without elegant things, living on plain food, wearing nondescript clothes.
They were much like those described by the Apostle Paul in his letter to the Corinthians, “not many wise, not many powerful, and not many of noble birth.” An ordinary group of people.
They would never have been noticed by the historians, except for one thing.
They were a fiercely independent people. They held a belief so powerful, so revolutionary, that some of their number would stand before kings and congresses and defy them; a belief so vigorous that they chose to stand apart from all the privilege they might have had, if only they had chosen another way. A fiercely independent people, who disliked the thought of any authority over them, who would not submit to any earthly power.
And they were not only a fiercely independent people, but they were also an exceptionally aggressive people, a winsome people. They did all they could to convince others of their way, and, once convinced, those others made new converts, and they in turn made others, so that these people and their beliefs spread like wildfire, without plan or strategy, without the permission or the help of the authorities. They just grew and multiplied. An exceptionally aggressive and winsome people.
And yet, there is a shadow side to their history as well. There are some negatives. In their fierce independence, they became known as a contentious people, and others felt that they had too brittle an edge, too harsh a flavor. They were thought of as angry, insensitive.
And more. Their very success held in it the seeds of their destruction. Their very popularity made them desire popularity even more. Here and there, as they became a little too popular, they got cozy with the powers that be. They lost the ability to speak the truth, because they had prospered by living the half-truth. They lost their distinctiveness, because they wanted to be big and to be accepted more than to be faithful to their principles.
And so they began to have real troubles, these people. They began to pick fights with one another. They began to forget what had brought them into being in the first place. They became so middle-class, so respectable and acceptable, that they forgot those from whom they had come. They forgot that they had come out of the poor, the humble, the needy, and the downtrodden. These people of whom I speak caught a kind of corporate amnesia. They forgot who they really are.
These people of whom I speak are my family. And your family. Our family of faith. They are the people called Baptists. The Baptist branch of the body of Christ, after nearly four hundred years of history, some of it glorious and some of it cowardly. But it is my family and yours. It is who we are. And today I want to call you to learn from that history. I want to call us to recommit ourselves to that family of faith as children often recommit to their parents – running from them for a while, distancing, and then learning to appreciate. Just as some of you have had or have been young adult children who wanted to put a lot of distance from the family, but who finally came home, I want to ask us to think about this Baptist family and to see if we can be at home with it.
Paul teaches us a profound lesson about living within a family of faith: Galatians 6:7-10
I
“You reap whatever you sow. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh.”
We need to confess that as a people we have sown to the flesh and are reaping corruption from the flesh. We Baptists have sown to the flesh, we have catered to selfishness. And today we are paying the price for that.
What do I mean, sown to the flesh? I mean that in our eagerness to be successful, as the world counts success, we have damaged our witness.
First, we have damaged our witness by playing to the galleries instead of being serious in our thinking. We have found it easier to be entertaining, easier to whip up the troops, than to be honest and serious thinkers.
I wonder if I could get anyone this morning to admit that there are times in which you do not even like to admit to being a Baptist? Are there circles in which you travel where the name Baptist carries with it the stigma of being rough-and-ready over-emotional know-nothings?
The reputation we have is for being opinionated and overly emotional. You know the old joke about how when you get three Baptists in a room, on any question you will have at least four opinions. You have read in the newspapers about some senator making a speech, and they will say that he sounded more like a Baptist preacher than a reasoned statesman. Much of the world thinks we don’t make sense. Heat but not light. Sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I remember years ago attending a chapel service at Berea College. The college had done the unthinkable, they had invited a Southern Baptist preacher for chapel. No, no, no, they had always had folks from the respectable denominations, from the Methodists and the Presbyterians and the Episcopalians, the proper people, the people who could be counted on to keep their self-control. Well, somebody had slipped in to the mix Dr. Kenneth Chafin, who was at that time Professor of Evangelism at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Texas. Of all the stereotypes! Southern Baptist! Evangelism! And Texas!
And so when it came time to President Hutchins to introduce the preacher, as he always did, he stood up, adjusted his glasses, and began to read the biographical information. “We are pleased to have … uh, well, we have tonight Dr. Kenneth Chafin, who is Professor of … evnsm … at the Southwestern … the Southwestern Theological Seminary. Thank you. Dr. Chafin.”
Poor old President Hutchins couldn’t believe his academically respectable school had actually invited somebody who taught evangelism and that somebody was a Baptist, from Texas. He couldn’t bring himself to say all those words. And, as Dr. Chafin proceeded … and if you’ve ever heard him, well, he is a southern fried version of Tony Campolo … you laugh until your sides split, but you really get a message. And as the students came out from behind the books and papers and sleepy eyes they brought to required chapel, even poor old Dr. Hutchins looked as though he halfway enjoyed the service!
All of that is to say that we have a reputation in the rest of the Christian world of being too shallow, too noisy, too harsh, and too brash. When we live up to that reputation, we are sowing to the flesh and reaping corruption. The Baptist family has been rent now for several years around this one thing: whether we are going to start making sense in what we teach and preach, or whether we are just going to play out the same old stereotypes of ignorance and emotional excess. I suggest to you that in a world where men and women are going to the finest universities and studying the most exotic subjects, the old way is not going to get it done. We have to commit to excellence; not to popularity, but to excellence. Else we will reap dwindling acceptance among young people, decline among leadership people, and irrelevance to the needs of the 21st Century.
“If you sow to the flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh.”
But there is another way in which we Baptists have sown to the flesh and are reaping corruption. And that is in the arena of race. Here we are, inheritors of the historical accident that more African-Americans are Christians of the Baptist family than of any other variety; and that simultaneously, the largest Protestant group in the United States, and especially in the South, is the very white Southern Baptist Convention. Still we have racial misunderstanding, still we have separation, still Sunday morning at eleven o’clock, as Dr. King once said, remains the most segregated hour in the American week. How long will we continue in this condition? How long will those of us who know another way just shrug our shoulders and say, “Oh well, some things never change?”
What if Thomas Helwys had shrugged his shoulders and had said, “Oh well, James is king and there’s nothing I can do about him?” Not Helwys, who went to court and thundered out his message, “The king is a mortal man and not God, and we will not have it that he should reign by divine right.” What if Elder John Leland has shrugged his shoulders and had said, “They won’t give me a license to preach, so I will have to quit.” Not John Leland; Leland went to jail in Henry County for the crime of preaching the Gospel without a license, and, when he was released, hurried off to the likes of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison to urge on them that language in the Constitution every one of us should know by memory, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” No, these men defied power and custom and everything else, in the name of conscience.
And so have other Baptists. Martin Luther King and so many of his associates defied both law and custom a scant few years ago, to bring down a system of justice that other Baptists had tolerated for years. Oh, that today there were others of us who would get so defiant, so convicted, about the sorry state of race relations in today’s America that we would not rest until it were done and done well!
Insofar as we Baptists fail to confront racism and the accommodations we have made to racism within our own ranks, we are sowing to the flesh, and we will reap corruption from the flesh.
II
But happily there is another side to Paul’s principle, and there is another side to our history. It is not all doom and gloom. We have done something right. And in that something right there is the clue to our possibilities. This something is the reason I do not intend to leave this family, rebellious though I may feel at times.
“If you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit.” If you put your energies in the right things, eventually you will gain, eventually the will of God will be accomplished. “If you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit.”
We Baptists still have something going for us: missions. That we are still a missionary people just might save us from ourselves.
What does it mean to say that we are a missionary people? Not only that we have thousands under missionary appointment right now; not only that there are well over a hundred nations in which the Baptist witness is felt; but to say that we are a missionary people is also to say that we still feel deep down a drive to cross the street, or cross the city, or cross the ocean, to help somebody else. There is still, down inside us, praise God, that unsettled feeling that tells us that we ought, no, that we want to reach out and touch somebody’s life, that we want to reach out and make a difference.
Some groups have lost this, you know. Some groups have disbanded their mission boards and have quit doing evangelism. Some churches have satisfied themselves with baptizing only the children of their own families and with helping only those in their own fellowships. But thank God, we Baptists have not yet lost that feeling that we have something to give to those who have not heard. Missions. Missions defines what we are about.
Missions means sharing what we have, it means teaching what we know, it means caring about the heart and soul of other people. It means reaching out with the most revolutionary message around. Do you know that missions is a subversive activity?! It is revolutionary!
You go around telling people they are somebody, that God in Christ Jesus loves them, and things will happen. Tell them that they are important to God, though they be a member of the untouchable caste in India, though they be an AIDS patient in Uganda, though they be a leper in Indonesia. You tell people that, and you know what? They will get up on their feet and will act like human beings, and there is no keeping them down anymore! Missions is subversive stuff!
About fifteen or twenty years ago Baptist churches around the country got into bussing. Everybody’s church was driving school busses around to pick up children for Sunday School. Every church that was any kind of evangelistic church at all had what they called a “bus ministry,” and they would drive for miles to pick up kids for Sunday School.
Now, mind you, this was at the same time that the whole country was in an uproar about weekday school busses. So many were upset about taking kids from one part of the school district to another, so that they would not be separated racially. Nothing was more emotional or more anger-producing than school bussing.
Now think of the irony of this! Monday through Friday parents raised holy hell because their little ones were being bussed across town so that they could interact with children of other races and cultures. The parents hated it.
And then on Sunday these same kids were gladly packed on busses and sent off to Baptist Sunday Schools, where, guess what, they interacted with children of other races and cultures! And they loved it. The churches loved it. The churches changed. Churches which would never have evangelized a family of another race found all sorts of children entering their Sunday Schools, and then those children’s friends, and their parents, and on and on.
Do you see why missions is subversive? Why, if we sow the seed of evangelism, we are going to reap eternal life? Why, if we can just be truly Baptist and proclaim again and again, everywhere, that God so loved the world that whosover, whosoever, may come … if we just do that, we are going to change ourselves and our world?
Oh, don’t miss the power of what we are doing today in sending a few dollars and a few hymnals to brothers and sisters in Alabama. Don’t miss it. We are reaching out to those in need, but more than that. Much more than that. We are loudly insisting that the very gates of hell, though they be ranged against us, shall not prevail against the church of the Lord Jesus Christ! We are subverting the arrogant racism that took those buildings, and we are saying, “The body they may kill; God’s truth abideth still. His kingdom is forever.” Missions is subversive. Reaching out to others destroys the power of evil. “If you sow to the spirit, you will reap from the spirit eternal life.”
To boil it all down: I am not going to leave the family of faith called Baptists. I do have a lover’s quarrel with that family. There are a lot of things I don’t like, and will not accept. I will not accept shoddy thinking in the place of honest scholarship. I will not accept sheer emotionalism instead of careful thought. I will not accept the political status quo or the social situation just because it is there.
But I will commit to a missionary people. I will stay with an evangelistic people. I will be a part of a caring people. I will continue to try to lead this little branch of Zion to establish more ministries and reach out more ways, by all means saving some.
And I will not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up. So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith.
There is one body and one spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism. And one loaf and one cup to which we are called.
