January 16, 2011

"View From the Second Row"
Sermon on John Claypool - 50 yrs later
John Rowan Claypool V, preaching 

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Crescent Hill Baptist Church
Louisville, KY

Scripture read by John Rowan Claypool VI
Luke 15: 11-24

There are many approaches to this daunting task of talking about Dr. John R Claypool-I have chosen but one. I have envisioned what I would say if asked: “tell me about your Dad’s time at Crescent Hill.” I have not tried to build it around my experience or talk as much about my Mother-Lue Ann Claypool-though she is worthy of extensive discussion too. Without her faithful, devoted companionship, and support Dad could never have pursued his work with such great vigor.

My perspective was gleaned from a position in the second row-first here on my right sitting with my Mother and sister and later in an exertion of masculine independence, here on the left next to my friend Perry Nutt and his brother Toby just in front of the long arm-reach of Grady and Eleanor Nutt. This was my vantage point for eleven years before we moved to Ft Worth, TX when I was thirteen.

But to set the mood further, I would like to start with some atmosphere. It was the 60’s after all and things were different. First, I am grateful to the women who wore hats today in memory of Mom who wore one every single Sunday-and I have now inherited dozens of them in her attic back in Ft Worth. She believed you were simply not dressed for church without a hat.

Interestingly, Dad never talked about that first Sunday in October of 1960 but he did talk about his trial sermon in mid-August. In that era, Crescent Hill had no air conditioning. It was a test of parishioners’ faithfulness that they could endure the sweltering heat. So to move some air, four huge floor fans were placed along the front of the sanctuary, two her and two here, blowing at full speed-something like this!!!

(Sound effects of loud fans are blasted over speakers)

It was like an airplane on the runway Dad said.

Likewise, the windows were all open so that the constant noises of Frankfort Avenue and the periodic trains outside could be heard as if they were in the church too. !!!!!!

(Sound effects of trains are blasted via loud speakers)

(Pause while noise permeates the sanctuary)

This was the atmosphere in which Dad preached his first sermon at Crescent Hill.

Sit for hymn.

Who would think coffee with a friend could get you in so much trouble? By great good fortune in Atlanta, GA Dad had gotten to know Martin Luther King Jr. as a personal friend-eating monthly meals together for a year in a small group of Black and white associate Baptist ministers.

When King came to preach at the Seminary chapel in the spring of ’61, a few short months into Dad’s tenure, it was perfectly natural for him to accept an invitation to catch-up over coffee in the small Seminary canteen. The resulting picture that ran on the front page of the Courier-Journal set off a firestorm. This high profile association with King infuriated many in the church. At a minimum it violated the genteel acceptance of the separations of the races among the middle-class, all white membership of Crescent Hill in the early 60’s.

There was an immediate business meeting called and Dad’s continued employment, our family’s livelihood, hung in the balance. I am sure Dad made an explanation of his actions and convictions, but then the rancor began. Finally, after many had said their piece and hours of heated discussion had passed, Homer Parker, a well respected businessman, stood and simply said: “Let’s see how this turns out.” And sure enough there was church the next Sunday and then the next Sunday and then next until the storm passed without the sky never falling. 

While in the middle of the ordeal Dad was sulking around the corridors of the Seminary bemoaning his misfortune only to run into one of his former professors-a gentleman he said he never really liked. When he started to whine, this professor stopped him abruptly and said: ”You have made your bed-there is no going back-the only question is what you will do going forward.”

It was at that moment that Dad made up his mind and fully committed to his direction to work toward better race relations. There is no doubt this propelled Dad much further to the forefront of the Civil Rights movement than he would have otherwise instinctively have chosen.

It lead to leadership in opposing steering and insidious real estate practice that leads people of one race or faith to only a limited inventory of houses in a particular area of town on the theory that people want to be with their “own kind.” Blacks were steered to the West End, Jews to the Highlands and Catholics to St Matthews. It was the mechanism that the community used to maintain segregation and doomed many to live in poor, impoverished neighborhoods.

He spoke out publicly on the courthouse steps in favor of an Open Housing ordinance. Ironically, Dad had been in a real estate agent as a seminary student and had seen the realtors’ insiders map. He had first-hand knowledge of this shameful practice was real, pervasive and intentional. This visible stand caused bomb threats to our home and even though freighting, my Mother stood by Dad and his commitment to make this stand to improve race relations in Louisville.

At my age (7-12) this was a period seeing, but not fully understanding. I knew Dad was a proponent of equality and wanted to bridge the racial divide, but I couldn’t know much about what it meant. He drove me down to the Parkland neighbor, in the heart of the West End to view the complete devastation of that area the day after the riots when Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. I recall marching with him down Broadway in a memorial for King. There was a somber, dark tone that grey day. I only saw as a child, knowing it was important, but not fully comprehending the magnitude.

There was also a providential combination of place and time around Dad’s service here. He was the product of Southern Seminary. He was the prototype for that institution. And he resonated with the challenge and inspiration to speak to that community of scholars and students. An endless flow of new students lined up here every fall to join this congregation: enthusiastic to seek their role in Gods work.

To call it great preaching would be an understatement. It was an extraordinary workflow. Dad probably preached over 450 Sunday morning sermons, generally preaching it twice- in an early morning service as well as a main service thus doubling the number of deliveries. Add to it an equal number of original Sunday evening sermons and Wednesday evening prayer meeting devotionals and it was a staggering work product. 

He was literally preaching to the world as his sermons were mailed directly or passed indirectly to thousands. It was an exhausting pace and he often remarked before vacations that he didn’t have an un-preached thought.

He read and studied constantly. Even trying to sleep in his clothes so he could get up at 5:30 AM to study (though this experiment really didn’t last long). I remember many long Saturday nights as he poured over his yellow legal pads in his study trying to “get the sermon out” as he would say it.

There was a symbiotic quality about his tenure here. It was the sixties and the world-even the secular world-came to the door of the church for answers for it’s the most pressing problem. In this time of tremendous chaos and upheaval people were still drawn to the church to seek answers.

He tried to give these tumultuous events a context, a perspective from a position of faith, to interpret current events through a deeper understanding of biblical truth and great thinkers of the day. He had a reflective, thoughtful perspective often called liberal, but I would content better described as thinking, questions, seeking.

This appeared to be a state of nearly holy bliss. Dad striving for excellence while a burgeoning congregation came each week to be feed. At least until her diagnosis hit.

Laura Lue was eight and a half when we heard the frightful words: Acute Leukemia. At the time of her diagnosis the life expectancy was a mere 18 months and she lived just 18 months and 10 days.

Leukemia is an especially heart wrenching disease in that it has this roller coaster of remission when life seems normal and the cancer abated only to have the bottom drop out and within a day be back in the hospital.

Each one of these junctures was accompanied by a gruesome bone marrow test-an unsedated penetration into the bone marrow for a fresh sample of tissue. Mom was the one who bore the brunt of these seemingly endless rounds of tests. Having to hold Laura Lue’s hand as she cried out for relief.

Surprisingly, the year proceeding Laura Lue’s death was one of the very best of my life. I was in sixth grade at Emmett Field just down the road-King of the Hill, President of the student body, captain of the safety patrol. I was fully independent on my Schwinn bike to roam the neighborhood at will.

My Dad even found the time to coach my Grey-Y football team that fall. I never felt neglected though I was always aware that Laura Lue was very sick. In many ways she and I were not able to interact fully as siblings because her health was so fragile.

In this tragic period, Dad chose to turn to God and open himself to this congregation as our family started down the painful road with this ominous disease. He shared her diagnosis with the congregation and after her death, openly questioning where God was in allowing this pain and suffering to a young innocent.

This outward turning, this vulnerability, became the balm of comfort for literally thousands who have walked down a similar road with a loved one. Four sermons were bundled into his first book, Tracks of Fellow Struggler, which has been in print for over thirty years. His willingness to bear his angst and question God about this pain lead to the phrase-“Life is Gift”-a hallmark of the comfort he found.

He became a confessional preacher. Ultimately realizing, that though treasured, what we receive from God is not ours’ to possess, but ours to celebrate and ours to be grateful for-“that we had her for one hour was a gift,” he was finally able to say.

It also forged one of his most exquisite qualities: to make each person think they were special. He gave unwavering attention to the person he was addressing, leading all of us to feel, actually to know, for that moment, we where the only person in the world.

He would stand at the middle door at the rear of the sanctuary as hundreds lined up to shake his hand every Sunday to share their concerns and fears. And I, a young boy, would always stay and play in the church so I could go home late with him-a pattern I keep all my life.

It is ironic in the scheme of things that my Mother would be diagnosed with the same dreaded disease shortly after Greg’s invitation to preach this summer. She, too, fought a valiant fight against Acute Leukemia with the same inevitable ups and downs over long four months.

Traveling back and forth to Texas to be with her brought home the full impact that Laura Lue’s illness must have had on my parents. It gave me empathy for what they experienced those many years ago. I don’t know how they did it. It almost broke me.

It could only have been through the support of others that they endured: my Grandmother Effie Lue Foster and my cousin Louise Buchanan, were closest as they relieved Mom and Dad from the exhausting daily demands of care giving. But it was also this congregation’s bountiful support that lifted them up.

It is a further irony, that as we pushed this sermon forward in time because of Mom’s illness, we have landed in the same week in January -41 years later that we buried Laura Lue.  It was the same bitter Kentucky cold that week as it was this past one, when we laid her to rest in Cave Hill, and just six weeks ago that we did the same for Mom.

This time there was frost on the ground and our breaths hanging in the air as we sang Shall We Gather at the River next to her casket. Mom had said very little about what she wanted when she died-only that she wanted to be buried next to Laura Lue.  When she spoke of her loss, which was not often, she would say: we are not consoled, though I feel she is now.

My parents had grieved is very different ways: My Dad taking his grief outward making it visible and Mom taking hers' inward and private. Inevitably, this became one of the major fractures leading to their divorce ten years later. It was the dividing fork in their relationship that they never resolved. Each had sought to heal their wounds and those paths lead them apart.

There is one final element to this summary: Dad’s individual journey of faith. If you were a regular listener to his sermons you would recognize an extraordinary frequency of the parable of the Prodigal son that John just read.

In the days before the lectionary Baptist ministers were free to roam the scriptures for sermon topics and Dad lit on the Prodigal story over and over. It was his way, I think, to resolve his seminal relationship with the single most powerful influence in his life – his Mother, Marietta Buchanan Claypool.

My Grandfather, John Claypool the third, was a traveling insurance salesman leaving early Monday morning and not returning until late Friday afternoon every week of my Dad’s rearing. It was left to my grandmother on a daily basis to raise two children-my dad and his older sister Marie. Her world was a traditional Southern Baptist world. Southern Baptist life was the Alpha and the Omega and the closer it got to her homestead in Blue Mountain, Mississippi the better it got.

Dad, in part to win her approval, but also drawn by his on convictions and gifts, chose to be a minister while in college. And he did have extraordinary gifts. His ability to tell a story was unsurpassed. He could tell any story he heard better than the originator. And he had a wonderful sense of humor that lifted everyone up.

But the acceptance and love from the one who was literally the source his life was tenuous and conditional. This tension, this unfulfilled quest, was played out in the exploration of the Prodigal story. It was not that Dad was either the Prodigal, the sinful and wanton younger son in a foreign land, nor strictly speaking the faithful older brother. No, it was rather, the concept of whether there was a loving parent at the end of the road, a parent who would enthusiastically throw their arms around us and kill the fatted calf just for the joy of our return.

He worked this spiritual ground over and over, especially in his thirties while he was here, to see what was truth he could find there. In the decades to come, it became the one of his strongest messages: we are surround by grace. A grace we do not deserve but cannot rescind.  It was captured in phrases like “God’s goodness is bigger than our badness” and “despair is presumptuous for we do not know what the Father in Heaven holds for us.”

He was able to find grace-God’s unconditional love for us all. The blessing that is not earned, but granted by a loving God. In the end, he found his most profound message-that the prodigal, all of us, will certainly be welcomed home.

He gave this fatherly blessing to me. He was an exceptionally loving, though not flawless, father and as an adult a wonderful friend. When he was diagnosis with multiple myeloma, yet another blood born cancer, I committed to talk with him in Atlanta every day I could. We did. I couldn’t tell you much about any particular conversation other than they were loving and engaged and I miss them intensely.

We shared a sort of a funny twist. Even though was one of the great theologians of his day he confessed that as he struggled with is own mortality he found that bumper sticker theology seemed to be the most satisfying.

The one we loved best was: “If life brings you to it, God will get you through it.” We would speak this simple hopeful message back and forth to each other as his cancer progressed. His only regret was the party would end too soon.

So this brings me back to where I began (as Dad would often say in his sermons):

Noise of the city outside

Four huge fans droning on

The faithful gathered in this sanctuary.

It is the same today as it was 50 years ago. Can we hear the God’s message over the noise?

Four fans symbolizing the challenges for us:

To be courageous and speak for those in need and stand up for those who less fortunate than us.

To be prophetic and speak the word of Christ in a world that needs answers and guidance.

To comfort and pastor to those who are wounded-in short all of us-with the loving arms of faith and hope.

To seek grace and share it with others-let the world know that we are all loved by a generous Father-the welcoming parent standing at the end of the road waiting for us. All we have to do is rise up and go to him.

For eleven years, John R. Claypool, my Father, spoke to and for these things. And for a while God entrusted him with this pulpit, this sanctuary, and this congregation. God blessed him and us. It was a wonderful, wonderful Gift.

web editor note: Claypool benediction