On Wednesday of Holy Week, the world lost a prophet and America lost a brave voice at a time it sorely needs all that it can get. The Rev. William Sloane Coffin Jr., a former CIA agent, a Presbyterian clergyman and former Yale University chaplain whose early activism against the Vietnam War brought him international notoriety during a lifelong career of civil disobedience, died Wednesday at his home in Strafford, Vt., of congestive heart failure. He was 81. This obit reminds us what a lose this is for all of creation.
The witness of his life lives on in the people who he touched. His words below capture the good news of the empty tomb, the risen Incarnate God:
The central problem for the Christian church in America today is that most of us fear the cure more than the illness. Most of us prefer the plausible lie that we can't be cured to the fantastic truth that we can be. And there's a reason: if it's hell to be guilty, it's certainly scarier to be responsible -- response-able, able to respond to God's visionary and reative love. No longer paralyzed, our arms would be free to embrace the outcast and the enemy, the most confirmed addict, the reddest of Soviet communists. No longer paralyzed, our feet would be free to walk out of any job that is harmful to others and meaningless to us, free even to walk that lonesome vallley without fear of evil. Everything is possible to those whose eyes, no longer fixed on some status symbol or other, are held instead by the gaze of him who can dispense freedom and llife in measures unheard of.
But as the hand of love freely extended always returns covered with scars (if not nailed to a cross), it is not dumb to refuse the cure; it is not dumb to remain paralyzed, stuck on the palet; but it is boring. And alas, whether they occupy pulpits or sit inn the puews, most American Christians are still on the pallet. Like the paralytic, they know they are sinners, at least in a vague sort of way. But lackingn his will to be cured, lacking the courage to be well, they do not seek the forgiveness that offers a new way of life; instead, thhey seek punishment -- which, by assuaging the guilt, makes the old way of life bearable anew. And they find this punishment not only in boring sermons and services, but allso in a religion of legallism and moralism that turns people who could be free and lovinng into mean little Puritans, into blue-nosed busybodies.-- William Sloane Coffin, Credo page 150.
Comments