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Sunday, November 1, 2009

All Saints Day

God’s People

Revelations 21 1-6a; Matthew 5:1-12 (Cotton Patch Version)

Reverend Richard Allen Jr.

All Saints Day is a holy celebration that commemorates the lives of all the otherwise forgotten people of God.  Other saints are remembered by name:  St. Augustine, the church’s first great theologian, has his own feast day, as does St. Paul, the missionary and writer of most of the New Testament.  Of course, St. Peter is remembered on his own day, as is the other great theologian, St. Thomas Aquinas.  St. Francis the church remembers with his own feast day.  And St. Theresa, the mystic, is remembered both with a feast day and a classic sculpture by Bernini that captures her holy rapture.

But the church realized early on that so many saints who changed history in small ways were just ordinary people like you and me.  After a generation or two, no one would remember them.  But to forget them all seemed wrong, too, because while history is shaped by the memorable, most of us ordinary folk are shaped by history’s forgotten ordinary folk:  teachers, preachers, choir directors, camp counselors, merchants, doctors, and college librarians.  They need to be remembered, too, of course.  The church remembers them, and will remember most of us, as a body, once a year, on All Saints’ Day.  I suppose this day is special to me because I include myself in that mixed bag.  And yes, I include you, too.

 So today I want to tell you about one of God’s saints, someone who helped shape his world and ours just a bit, but one whom you probably don’t remember because you probably never heard of him.

 His name was Clarence Jordan.  That’s J-O-R-D-A-N, though it’s pronounced “Jerdan.”  I never met Clarence Jordan, but I feel like his life touched mine, if only lightly, from the time I heard about him in 1971.  He touched more lives than you might imagine. Born in 1912, times were tough in his little South Georgia hometown, but Jordan went to college, then to seminary.  He earned a degree in agriculture and another, a Ph.D., in New Testament Greek.

 His family and friends expected him to become a pastor, but from the start, Clarence was different from most students, most Baptists, and most Christians in those days.  You see, his faith didn’t stop at his head; it was in his heart, too.  And his faith wasn’t just a felt thing; it was something he knew he had to DO as well.  He knew he had to follow Jesus.  So, though he was trained to be a preacher and take a little church somewhere, he had a bigger vision than that.

 His vision was of living the life that Jesus taught. Therefore, in 1942 Clarence and his wife Florence moved back to a tract of land outside rural Americus, Georgia.  They and their friends, some former American Baptist missionaries, had decided to put their faith into practice.  They founded a community:  a farming community, supported by pecans and peanuts, but also a Christian community of mutual respect and love. 

Clarence taught and he plowed and, sometimes, he preached. The Sermon on the Mount was central, of course.  And yes, you guessed it:  today’s reading is one of Clarence Jordan’s translations – Southern paraphrase, if you prefer.  He called his translation “The Cotton Patch Version.”  Not that radical, really, but jarringly simple, like this verse, which begins the lesson:  “The spiritually humble are God’s people, for they are citizens of [God’s] new order.”  (Matthew 5:2, Cotton Patch Version.)

 Clarence and his friend took that teaching seriously.  They lived in humility built on respect and humility.  The community that the Jordan’s and their friends built was called “KOINONIA Farm.”  And yes, “koinonia” is a Greek word; it means “communion,” or “fellowship.”  But critics of their little community thought it meant communist.

 And there were critics, lots of them.  I confess that I left out one little detail about the Koinonia farm:  it was a Christian farming community, in a quiet little corner of southern Georgia.  Because Jordan and his friends believed the New Testament, they believed that all people should be treated equally:  old people and young people; men folks and women folks; everyone lived in similar homes; everyone shared as they had need in the farm’s income.  They practiced their faith as social equals; they shared all they had; they owned all in common; they rejected violence; they believed in being “green” though then they thought that was just a color.  And this too:  they didn’t accept distinctions based on color.  They believed in racial equality.  Yes, since its founding in 1942, Koinonia was, has been, and still is, an interracial community.

 Another of Koinonia’s distinctive features was that as people needed housing, the community built it, together.  The homes were unimposing, but clean, well designed, and affordable.  Folks paid for the materials themselves, some with no-interest loans that built up a fund that was then used to build more homes.  Some of critics called their system ‘socialist,’ Jordan called it ‘Christian.’ 

 As the 1960’s heated up racial tension in the nation, crosses were burned at Koinonia, and shots were fired.  But Jordan and his family endured.  He even preached around the South, translating from the Greek “on the fly” I suspect. 

 My favorite story about Clarence Jordan is one I’ve carried in my memory for years, so I’ve forgotten where I first heard it.  Jordan was preaching down South somewhere, from his beloved New Testament, about Jesus’ call to lives of true devotion.  He was unrelenting in his call for social equality, and especially for racial justice.  At the end of the service a grey-haired woman took him to task.  “I can’t believe what you’re calling the gospel,” she said to him.  “My grandfather fought for the South, years ago.  He would be shocked at some of what you say.”  Jordan made a simple response, “Ma’am, I guess you just have to choose:  whether you’re gonna follow your grand-daddy, or you’re gonna follow Jesus.”

 Jordan died in 1969, suddenly, of a heart attack.  His body the Koinonia community placed in a shipping crate, and he was buried in an unmarked grave.  There is no monument.  Many people have still never heard of him.  But I liked how the Wikipedia article about him ended.  It quoted a neighbor, who said in 1980, “He be gone now, but his footprint still here.”

 Friends, the lives we celebrate this day, this All Saints’ Day, are lives of those we’ve known and loved, those whose footprints we still see, or remember.  We remember today the lives of all those who’ve followed Jesus without much fanfare and not always with total success.  They learned as best they could.  They gave as best they could.  They sang and visited and shared casseroles and stories and jokes and maybe a tear or two, as best they could.  We remember them today, but we’ll be gone all too soon ourselves. The world will forget us all, and one day the even our world will be gone, too, burned to ash as our dying sun explodes into nothing.

 No one will remember, then.  But God will remember.  God will recall those who did their best to follow.  God will remember Clarence Jordan.   Florence.  And the nameless men and women, boys and girls, black and white and myriads of shades in between, at Koinonia Farm.

 Today, we gather at here the Lord’s Table and we celebrate all those whom God remembers.  In God’s economy, in God’s life, in God’s holy heart, we are all here together:  Peter and Mary Magdalene are here, and Paul and Barnabas and Aqulia and Priscilla.  St. Augustine is here, still laughing that God forgave him for saying so memorably in his lustful years: “Lord, make me chaste; but not yet.”  And Clarence Jordan is here, and his friend Millard Fuller whom Clarence taught to build houses for the poor using the Koinonia model.  My Sunday school and second grade teacher, Emily Clarkson is here, and I can’t wait to show her the seed cone from the Sequoia tree I picked up in California.

 This table is our Koinonia seed.  The family we gather here is not yet perfect, except as God makes us so.  And most of us are barely memorable.  But we are precious to God, and when that vision of John’s comes true, when the new heaven and the new earth replace our own tired, war-weary, sinful, sun-charred ash of a planet, when we gather before the Lord’s throne in glory, we may look around and think, “I don’t remember their names.”  But God will remember.  I can imagine that God will introduce us, and we’ll see each other as if for the first time.

 I can even imagine that one day God will bring Clarence Jordan up to the throne and say to him, “Look, Clarence, there are the folks you taught to love me, the ones you told about my love for them.  You called them ‘God’s people,’ and you were right, Clarence.  You were right.”  And God and Clarence will grin at each other, and may even give each other a knuckle-bump. And the rest of us will knuckle-bump, too, though some of us more awkwardly than others.  And we will laugh.  And it will truly be Koinonia:  True community, forever.  And every day will be All Saints’ Day, for none of God’s people will be forgotten, ever again.  Amen.

 Mamaroneck United Methodist, November 1, 2009.

 Amen.

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