The right to vote is sacred. It is sacred, because through elections, “government of the people, by the people, for the people” is established.[1] It is sacred, because it is a core definition of who is a citizen and who isn’t, who belongs and who doesn’t. And because the right to vote is sacred, because it is ultimately about belonging, it has been demanded, contested, affirmed, and denied. When elections don’t produce the desired results, political leaders are tempted to redistrict the electorate for more favorable outcomes or to make it easier for some voters to cast their ballots than for others. And, of course, there have also long been less formal, but highly effective ways to predetermine election results through violent intimidation.
Before dawn on January 10, 1966, Sam Bowers, who was the Imperial Wizard of the the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, and two carloads of his fellow Klansmen drove to a house about five miles north of Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The house belonged to Vernon Dahmer, and while he and his family slept, the Klansmen doused their home with gasoline and set it on fire, destroying both the house and an adjoining grocery store. One of Dahmer’s three children, a ten-year-old daughter, was injured in the fire. Dahmer himself lived for a few hours but died that afternoon. Witnesses testified that Bowers ordered the killing because Dahmer was allowing Black voters to pay their poll taxes in his store. More than three decades later, in August 1998, Sam Bowers was finally convicted, after four mistrials, for the murder of Vernon Dahmer. The right to vote is sacred, not least because Vernon Dahmer and countless others gave their lives for it; and they call on us to pay careful attention when state legislatures fiddle with voting laws and election procedures.
One who did pay close attention was the Reverend Will Campbell. He was a Baptist preacher and former campus chaplain at the University of Mississippi, and he wrote a terrific memoir, Brother to a Dragonfly, which was a National Book Awards finalist in 1978. Campbell had long been involved in the civil rights movement; when the Southern Christian Leadership Conference was established, Campbell was the only white person there. In 1957, together with four other representatives of the National Council of Churches, he walked with the Black students who first integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, as they made their way through an angry mob in the street.
In his days at Ole Miss, Campbell had known Vernon Dahmer and had worked closely with him on voting rights issues, and he was present in the courthouse for Bower’s 1998 trial. Nobody was surprised when Ellie Dahmer, Vernon’s widow, embraced him as an old friend. But when the defendant, Klansman Sam Bowers, gave him a hug, courtroom reporters were shocked. During recesses in the trial, Campbell was observed talking with equal warmth to both Ellie Dahmer and Sam Bowers. One of the reporters covering the trial asked Campbell how he could possibly be so friendly with both the victim and the despicable man who had committed murder. “Because I’m a Christian,” Campbell growled, and he cussed a little, just for emphasis.
While reflecting on the integration struggles at the University of Mississippi as part of a book project, Campbell had realized that he needed to spend time not only with his friends and people who shared his views but also with enemies of the movement. And so he had reached out to Sam Bowers through an intermediary, met him and spent time with him. During one of their meetings, Campbell had been riding with Bowers in a car and Bowers had stopped by a local cemetery to pray at the graveside of a friend. And when he came back to the car, Campbell remembered, Bowers had tears in his eyes. And that was all it took for Campbell to see the human being behind the mask of the Imperial Wizard.[2]
I’m telling you this story because it shines with the gospel. Brother Will paid attention in ways familiar to anyone who cares about social justice, but then he took one step further, one huge step outside his comfort zone, and discovered ways to connect with difficult others, relationships he could barely have imagined before. He was very much in the world but he didn’t belong to it. He belonged to Christ. Campbell’s testimony in the courtroom wasn’t part of the legal proceedings. He acted as a witness, but not for the prosecution or the defense; he was a witness for a way of love and life associated with the name of Jesus.
When I think about continuing to grow in faith, Brother Will comes to mind, and his willingness to surrender to love’s uncomfortable call to connect with the difficult other. I’ve read some of his writings and sermons, and I’ve watched some clips of interviews, but only once was I in the same room with him. In 2005, during the General Assembly of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Portland, Oregon, he spoke at a local church, an old man with a cane, bent over and moving slowly and with great caution. He only spoke briefly. The deepest human hunger, he said, can only be stilled by love, unsentimental and dependable love.
The Gospel according to John tells a story, and to the casual listener its testimony can seem wordy, its narrative style, a little weird. It tells the story of Jesus, from the beginning of time to creation’s completion in glory: it tells the story of Jesus as the story of God and the world. And it tells it with the hope that through its testimony we will receive Jesus and with him the life God wants for us: life in fullness, eternal life.
The deepest human hunger, Will Campbell said, can only be stilled by love, unsentimental and dependable love. Jesus, says John, is the bread that stills that deepest hunger. Jesus entire mission – his being born in our flesh, his life and ministry, his death and resurrection and return to the Father – all of it, all of him, is but one gift of unsentimental and dependable love.
In John 17 we are invited to listen as Jesus prays. That evening, his eyes had been on the disciples. He had washed their feet. He had shared a meal with them. And he had taught them, given them the new commandment to love one another as he loved them. Now he looked up to heaven and prayed, and we are given the privilege of overhearing his prayer.
Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son so that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all people, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.[3]
This is eternal life, this is fullness of life, that we may know God. The end of the story of God and the world is life glorified in the truth and goodness and beauty of God.
“I have made your name known,” Jesus prays, “I have made your name known to those whom you gave me from the world.” In the life of Jesus the name of God is being made known to us, not as a combination of letters, but as the revelation of who God is. “This is eternal life, that they may know you,” he prays, and this knowing doesn’t take us out of the world and onto distant islands of bliss. On the contrary. “As you have sent me into the world,” Jesus prays, “so I have sent them into the world.”
In the gospel of John, “world” is not just another name for the planet or the universe or for the stage on which the drama of human history unfolds. In John’s usage, the “world” is that part of creation that doesn’t know God; it is that part of life that is so out of tune that it is actively opposed to God’s will and purposes.[4]
As disciples of Jesus we are not taken out of the world in a great escape, spiritual or otherwise; we are sent into it to continue Jesus’ work in the world — as those who no longer belong to the world. We belong to Jesus, we belong to the story of grace and truth, and with the life of Jesus as the pattern of our lives, we participate in the divine mission in the world.
The deepest human hunger, Will Campell said, can only be stilled by love, unsentimental and dependable love. The only way to overcome a world hostile to the purposes of God is to love it – and there is nothing sentimental about that love, as even the most casual glance at the life of Jesus will show. God does not respond with hostility to a hostile world, and neither does Jesus. You remember the famous passage,
For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.[5]
And Jesus sent his disciples, sends us into the world to live as witnesses to the dependable love of God. Unsentimental love is difficult work, and so Jesus prays, “Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one as we are one.” He prays that we may not give in to the temptation to condemn and exclude the difficult other. He prays that we remain true to the name of God which Jesus has made known to us.
I began by stating that the right to vote is sacred. It is sacred because ultimately it is about belonging, about who is included and who is not. The God and Father of Jesus Christ won’t let the world get away with being loveless, whether it’s at the intimate, personal level or the systemic, societal level. Because justice is what love looks like in public: unsentimental, dependable, and difficult love.
[1] See Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
[2] Bartholomew Sullivan, “Bowers Convicted of Killing Dahmer. Ex-Klan Leader Gets Life Term in ’66 Murder,” Commercial Appeal, August 22, 1998; http://www.asne.org/kiosk/writingawards/1999/sullivan.html#Aug22 . See also Thomas G. Long, Testimony: Talking Ourselves into Being Christian (San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass, 2004), 102-103.
[3] John 17:1-3
[4] See John 1:10
[5] John 3:16-17