Once a month, while pastoring a busy
church in the 1970s/1980s, I’d receive John Claypool’s printed sermons in the
mail. Invariably the rest of the morning was spent devouring them. He was –
still is - the best ‘writing preacher’ I’ve ever read. If there is one spot on
this planet where I’d choose to spend a six-month study-sabbatical, it would be
in a quiet room at the Southern
Baptist Historical Library and Archives, reading their collection of his
sermons.
John Claypool
didn’t fit easily into the conservative milieu of the Southern Baptist
Convention. He was regarded with some suspicion as one of those ‘Moderates’ or
‘Cooperatives’ who inhabited the cutting edge of theological enquiry and
socio-political issues – especially racism.
John Claypool was
ordained to the Baptist ministry in 1953 and pastored five Southern Baptist
churches - in Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, and Mississippi. Ordained an
Episcopal priest in 1986, he served as Rector of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in
Birmingham, Alabama, for nearly fourteen years. He retired from full-time
parish ministry in 2000 and then served as Professor of Preaching at McAfee
School of Theology, Mercer University in Atlanta, Georgia…
Why ‘writing
preacher’? I’ve met John Claypool, and heard him preach. His preaching-style
was thoughtful, and his vocal presentation a bit ‘dreamy’. But his words and
ideas-about-ideas, if you ‘hung in there,’ were often mind-blowing.
But John Claypool
was not simply an intellectual. His brilliant book The Preaching Event (the
1979 Lyman Beecher Lectures at Yale Divinity School) discusses the what, why,
how and when of preaching. The preacher, he says, is a reconciler, who seeks to
re-establish trust at the deepest level. We are ‘gift-givers’: too often
preaching can fulfil our own needs for love and status. We are witnesses:
making available our own grapplings with woundedness to help others in their
pain and grief.
In a memorable
interview with Claypool conducted by The Wittenburg Door magazine (April/May
1978) he revealed the core issues which made him the person he turned out to
be. His spiritual awakening happened in College when he read C S Lewis, and
with a ‘real flash of insight saw that Jesus was the clue to ultimate reality’.
Why did he enter
pastoral ministry? Among other reasons, to ‘earn the blessing of his mother’. When
this realization hit him later, he developed a ‘confessional’ preaching style –
which, he would tell students in his seminary classes, can be a subtle form of
exhibitionism if you’re not careful.
He had a close
friendship with Martin Luther King Jr. (a ‘first-rate thinker’) and was active in
the civil rights movement. Once he was in a coffee shop with Dr. King, and a
journalist took a picture of the two of them. When that photo appeared in the
Louisville Courier, he and his family received hate calls and mail, crosses
were burned in their front yard, and his children were threatened. When he
championed the idea that a Nigerian seminary student (‘that our missionaries
had converted’) should be permitted to attend their church ‘a lot of people
left and the money dropped off’.
Another significant event was his surprising
resignation – after only 5 ½ years - from a church of 5,000 and 11 staff, to go
to a much smaller pastorate. Why would a gifted preacher step down the rungs of
the ‘success ladder’ and do such a thing? Simple: he was tired, and for him
‘fatigue became a moral category’. He was challenged by Gayle Sheehey’s book
‘Passages’ about the dangers in mid-life of over-investment in work and
under-investment in relationships. Conducting hundreds of funerals of people he
didn’t know (and hoping he pronounced the names right) became wearing. ‘A major
mistake,’ he confessed later, was that I didn’t call in the community. I acted
in isolation: there were surely many options in any situation that address the
panicky fear of a tired person’. So he negotiated a paid month off before
starting in his new role to study at Yale Divinity School. Slowly he was
re-invigorated, and learned that ‘God is the God of fertilizer: God can take
dung and bring things of beauty out of it’.
But his most
‘wounding’ event was the death of their little eight-year-old girl, Laura Lue,
diagnosed with acute leukemia. She lived only eighteen months and ten days
after that first shocking news was given to her parents. Tracks of a
Fellow Struggler, his first and probably his best-known book,
comprises sermons he preached during that time, together with a final chapter
‘Learning to Handle Grief’, preached three and a half years later. It’s the
book I’ve shared with many parishioners who’ve had to journey ‘into the valley
of the shadow of death’ with a loved one.
He often told this
story about his way of handling grief:
“We did not have a
washing machine during World War II and gas was rationed. It was going to be a
real challenge. At about that time one of my father’s younger business
associates was suddenly drafted into the service. My father offered to let them
store their furniture in our basement while he had to be away. Well it so
happened that they had an old grey Bendix washing machine. And as they were
moving in, my father suggested that maybe they would let us use their machine
in lieu of our giving them some storage space.
“The next question
became, who is going to become the wash person in the family?
“In that mysterious way that families assign roles, I became the wash person at the grand old age of eleven! For the next four years, I had a ritual every Tuesday and every Friday. I would come home from school, gather up the wash, take it down into the basement, fill the old Bendix with water, put in the clothes, add some soap, and then watch as the plunger would make all kinds of configurations of suds. It had a hand roller to wring the washed clothes out and I can remember as a child trying to stick my finger between those rollers to see how far I could go without it cutting off circulation. In other words, I became affectionately bonded to that old mechanism in those four years.
“When the war was over my father’s friend came back. One day when I was at school, a truck came to our basement, took out all of their things, including the washing machine, and nobody had told me. It was a Tuesday. I came home and gathered up the clothes, went down in the basement, and to this day I can remember my sense of horror as I saw that empty space where the old Bendix had been. I put down the clothes and rushed back upstairs and announced loudly, ‘We have been robbed! Somebody stole our washing machine!’
“My mother, who was not only a musician but also a wise human being, sat me down and said, ‘John, you’ve obviously forgotten how that machine got to be in our basement. It never did belong to us. That we ever got to use it was incredibly good fortune.’ And then she said, ‘If something is a possession and it’s taken away, you have a right to be angry. But if something is a gift and it’s taken, you use that moment to give thanks that it was ever given at all.’
“That was the memory that resurfaced for me the night Laura Lou died. [That little girl] was in my life the way the old Bendix washing machine was in our basement and I heard the voice of my mother say, ‘If it is a gift and it’s taken, you use that occasion to give thanks that it was ever given at all.’ And that memory helped me to decide that night to take the road of gratitude out of the valley of sorrow. The Twenty-third Psalm speaks of walking through the valley of the shadow of grief. I would suggest to you that the road of gratitude is the best way I know not to get bogged down in our grief but to make our way through it.
“Life is gift, birth is windfall, and all, all is grace. And I give you the gift that was given to me and I pray that somehow the sense of life as gift will enable you to make a brave and hopeful journey, not just into the valley of the shadow of bereavement, but through that valley to the light on the other side. May your journey be a brave one. Amen."
“In that mysterious way that families assign roles, I became the wash person at the grand old age of eleven! For the next four years, I had a ritual every Tuesday and every Friday. I would come home from school, gather up the wash, take it down into the basement, fill the old Bendix with water, put in the clothes, add some soap, and then watch as the plunger would make all kinds of configurations of suds. It had a hand roller to wring the washed clothes out and I can remember as a child trying to stick my finger between those rollers to see how far I could go without it cutting off circulation. In other words, I became affectionately bonded to that old mechanism in those four years.
“When the war was over my father’s friend came back. One day when I was at school, a truck came to our basement, took out all of their things, including the washing machine, and nobody had told me. It was a Tuesday. I came home and gathered up the clothes, went down in the basement, and to this day I can remember my sense of horror as I saw that empty space where the old Bendix had been. I put down the clothes and rushed back upstairs and announced loudly, ‘We have been robbed! Somebody stole our washing machine!’
“My mother, who was not only a musician but also a wise human being, sat me down and said, ‘John, you’ve obviously forgotten how that machine got to be in our basement. It never did belong to us. That we ever got to use it was incredibly good fortune.’ And then she said, ‘If something is a possession and it’s taken away, you have a right to be angry. But if something is a gift and it’s taken, you use that moment to give thanks that it was ever given at all.’
“That was the memory that resurfaced for me the night Laura Lou died. [That little girl] was in my life the way the old Bendix washing machine was in our basement and I heard the voice of my mother say, ‘If it is a gift and it’s taken, you use that occasion to give thanks that it was ever given at all.’ And that memory helped me to decide that night to take the road of gratitude out of the valley of sorrow. The Twenty-third Psalm speaks of walking through the valley of the shadow of grief. I would suggest to you that the road of gratitude is the best way I know not to get bogged down in our grief but to make our way through it.
“Life is gift, birth is windfall, and all, all is grace. And I give you the gift that was given to me and I pray that somehow the sense of life as gift will enable you to make a brave and hopeful journey, not just into the valley of the shadow of bereavement, but through that valley to the light on the other side. May your journey be a brave one. Amen."
~~
John Claypool wrote
eleven books, and in 2008 a new collection of his sermons on the twelve
disciples, entitled The First to Follow, edited by his widow
Ann Wilkinson Claypool, was published.
He died on September
3, 2005 aged 74. In a eulogy Kirby Godsey, President of Mercer University,
said, “John Claypool touched our souls. Amidst our wounds and our triumphs, his
voice became for us the voice of God - a special measure of grace and with
unfettered gentleness. John's presence in our lives and our histories is more
than mere death can ever take away. He will continue to walk among us, giving
light to our steps, wisdom for our hearts, and hope to our souls. John
Claypool's life and presence and teaching were profound and enduring gifts to
the entire Mercer University community."
Rowland Croucher
Many of John
Claypool’s sermons are available online: including a few on our John Mark
Ministries website (jmm.org.au). I have borrowed some ideas from his notable
homily on Ananias and Sapphira and adapted them here: http://www.jmm.org.au/articles/2400.htm
.
Rowland Croucher
Rowland Croucher
