BLOGGING TOWARD SUNDAY…

In Will Campbell’s book, Brother to a Dragonfly, he tells the story of his awakening to grace.  When asked to condense the Christian message to 10 words or less, Will responded, “We’re all bastards, but God loves us anyway.”    Later, on the darkest day of Campbell’s life, an Alabama deputy sheriff gunned down Will’s young black friend, Jonathan Daniels, for trying to make a phone call in a white grocery store. 

P.D. East reminded Campbell of his definition, and asked him if both the shooter and the victim were, indeed, bastards.  The victim, Will said, was one of the most gentle men he’d ever met, but yes, it’s true that everyone is a sinner, so a bastard he was.  The shooter was a cold-blooded murderer, so there was no doubt about him.  Then East asked him, “OK, which one of those two bastards do you think God loves the most?”

Here’s how Campbell described the moment:

Suddenly everything became clear.  Everything.  It was a revelation….I walked across the room and opened the blinds, staring directly into the glare of the street light, and I began to whimper.  But the crying was interspersed with laughter.  It was a strange experience.  I remember trying to sort out the sadness and the joy.  Just what I was crying for and what I was laughing for.  Then this too became clear.

I was laughing at myself, at 20 years of a ministry which had become, without my realizing it, a ministry of liberal sophistication….

I agreed that the notion that a man could go to a store where a group of unarmed human beings are drinking soda pop and eating moon pies, fire a shotgun blast at one of them, tearing his lungs and heart and bowels from his body, turn on another and send lead pellets ripping through his flesh and bones, and that God would set him free is almost more than I could stand.  But unless that is precisely the case, then there is no Gospel, there is no Good News.  Unless that is the truth we have only bad news, we are back to the law alone.

Will Campbell, Brother to a Dragonfly, Seabury Press, 1977, pp. 240-244.

Filed under: Blogging Toward Sunday