by The Reverend Dr. Gary A. Wilburn
Senior Pastor, First Presbyterian Church, New Canaan, CT
http://www.fpcnc.org/
[In Memoriam: William Sloan Coffin
June 1, 1924 – April 12, 2006]
NOTE: BILL COFFIN DIED FOUR DAYS BEFORE I DELIVERED THIS
TRIBUTE TO HIM AT THE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH.
IT IS A COMPOSITE OF HIS OWN WORDS IN SERMONS, BOOKS AND INTERVIEWS OVER THE
YEARS – g.a.w.
[4-17-06]
"To Bill with Great Love and Appreciation" – Gary
"I am reminded of all the undergraduates I knew and loved, many now
crowding sixty, even seventy. Some of them have aged like vintage wine,
heeding Albert Camus’s wisdom: ‘To grow old is to pass from passion to
compassion.’
A few of them, however, looking back on the springtime of their lives,
say, ‘Ah, those were the days!’ --- and the worst of it is, they’re right!
It was not the days, I suspect, but they who used to be better!
You have to unlearn as well as learn, to clear away the weeds and
thickets in order to see more clearly the various paths ahead. [The same
applies to our faith.]
Harry Emerson Fosdick, the founding pastor of Riverside Church in New
York, once wrote, ‘The world has tried in two ways to get rid of Jesus:
first, by crucifying him, and second, by worshipping him.’ Jesus doesn’t ask
us to worship him. [In fact, he specifically told his followers not to
worship him.] He said, ‘Follow me.’ Faith is a matter of being faithful.
It’s not believing without proof; it’s trusting without reservation.
Over the years I have been convinced that the more important question is
not who believes in God, but in whom does God believe? Rather than claim God
for our side, it’s better to wonder whether we are on God’s side. Faith is
being grasped by the power of love, and there are many atheists with
‘believing’ hearts -- the part of us that should be religious if you can
offer only one.
God’s love doesn’t seek value; it creates it. It’s not because we have
value that we are loved. It is because we are loved that we have value. Our
value is a gift, not an achievement. Just think: we never have to prove
ourselves; that’s already taken care of. All we have to do is to
express ourselves – to return God’s love with our own.
What makes Easter so exciting is the cosmic quality of it. For Easter has
less to do with one person’s escape from the grave than with the victory of
seemingly powerless love over loveless power. Easter represents a demand
as well as a promise, a demand not that we sympathize with the
crucified Christ, but that we pledge our loyalty to the
risen one. That means an end to all loyalties, to all people, and to all
institutions that crucify.
For example, I don’t see how we can proclaim allegiance to the Risen Lord
and remain indifferent to our government’s [and the world’s] intention not
to abolish nuclear weapons. Or how can we think that the Risen Lord would
applaud an economic system that reverses the priorities of Mary’s Magnificat
- filling the rich with good things and sending the poor away empty? (Almost
one American child in four lives below the poverty line, and one in three
children of the world exist in terribly horrible poverty.)
Few of us are truly evil; the trouble is, most of us mean well – feebly.
We are just not serious. We carry around justice, love, and peace in our
shopping carts, but along with a lot of other things that make for
injustice, hatred, and war. Churches in our day are a bit like families:
they tend to be havens in a heartless world, but they reinforce that world
by caring more for its victims than by challenging its assumptions.
Christ wants us to challenge the assumptions of our nation and world,
just as he challenged those of his. In a democracy dissent is not disloyal.
Christ today wants his disciples to tell the nations that their disastrous
cult of power leads to the pretensions of the powerful, and to the despair
of the powerless, leaving all lovers of life filled with unutterable
sadness.
What I think God wants us to do is not practice piecemeal charity
but engage in wholesale justice. Justice is at the heart of religious
faith. When we see Christ empowering the poor, scorning the powerful,
healing the world’s hurts, we are seeing transparently the power of God at
work.
God is not too hard to believe in. God is too good to believe in, we
being such strangers to such goodness. Two things are clear to me: that
almost every square inch of the earth’s surface is soaked with the tears and
blood of the innocent…and that it’s not God’s doing. It’s our doing. That’s
human malpractice. Don’t chalk it up to God. Every time people see the
innocent suffering, and lift their eyes to heaven and say, ‘God, how could
you let this happen?’ it’s well to remember that exactly at that moment God
is asking exactly the same question of us: "How could you let this happen?"
If you back off from every little controversy in your life you’re not
alive…and what’s more, you’re boring! [The truth is] you can be more alive
in pain than in complacency. It’s not enough to pray, ‘Grant us peace in our
time, O Lord.’ God must be saying, ‘Oh, come off it! What are you going to
do for peace, for heaven’s sake?’ It’s not enough to pray for peace. You
have to work for justice. You have to suffer for it, and you have to endure
a lot for it. So don’t just pray about it.
People in high places make me really angry – the way that [some]
corporations are now behaving, the way the United States government is
behaving. What makes me angry is that they are so callous, really callous.
When you see uncaring people in high places, everybody should be mad as
hell.
Self-righteousness destroys our capacity for self-criticism. It makes it
very hard to be humble, and it destroys the sense of oneness all human
beings should have, one with another.
My understanding of Christianity is that it underlies all progressive
moves to implement more justice, to get a higher degree of peace in the
world. The impulse to love God and neighbor, that impulse is at the heart of
Judaism, Islam, Christianity [and the other religions of the world]. God is
not confined to Christians.
I am not a pacifist. About the use of force I think we should be
ambivalent – the dilemmas are real. All we can say for sure is that while
force may be necessary, what is wrong – always wrong – is the desire to use
it. It is hard to get even with violent people [especially terrorists]. What
is easy is to get more and more like them. ‘The warhorse is a vain hope for
victory, and by its great might it cannot save.’ (Psalm 33) War is a
coward’s escape from the problems of peace.
God is not mocked: what is grossly immoral cannot in the long run be
politically expedient. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof.’
Only reverence can restrain violence, be it violence against nature or
against each other.
President Bush rightly spoke of an ‘axis of evil’ but it is not Iran,
Iraq and North Korea. A far more dangerous trio would be: environmental
degradation, pandemic poverty, and a world awash with weapons. Far beyond
individuals, communities and nations, the world itself is on the brink of
destruction. If we were serious, with the other nations, to engage the war
on poverty around the world, that would stem the flow of recruits to the
ranks of terrorists.
Every nation makes decisions based on self-interest and defends them on
the basis of morality. In our time all it takes for evil to flourish is for
a few good men to be a little wrong and have a great deal of power and for
the vast majority of their fellow citizens to remain indifferent. The danger
today is that we might become more concerned with defense than with [being a
country] worth defending.
Terrorism is a clear and present danger, but our present policies are
nourishing rather than restraining terrorists.... Let’s not forget what that
Israeli journalist wrote: ‘The terrorism of suicide bombers is born of
despair. There is no military solution to despair.’
Norman Mailer compared our present pursuit of terrorists to a Sherman
tank going after a hornet hiding in a building. By the time the building is
flattened, arousing considerable resentment, the hornet is safely in the
attic next door. With terrorist cells in over sixty nations we need allies,
lots of them, who think not ill but well of us. Most of all, we must agree
to be governed by the force of law, not by the law of force.
For our presently tormented and endangered planet to survive, it will
require a politically committed spirituality. Patriotism at the expense of
another nation is as wicked as racism at the expense of another race. Let us
resolve to be patriots always, nationalists never. Let us love our country,
but
‘…pledge allegiance to the earth,
and to the flora and fauna and human life that it supports;
one planet indivisible, with clean air, soil and water;
with liberty, justice and peace for all.’
Before I die, I want to see all nuclear missiles beaten into homes for
the homeless and land for the landless, into day-care centers and good
schools for our poorest kids and compassionate care for our elderly.
Only God has the right to destroy all life on the planet. We haven’t the
authority; we only have the power. Therefore, to threaten to use nuclear
weapons must be an abomination in the sight of God. We have to recognize a
single standard for all nuclear weapons: either universal permission or
universal abolition.
Courage means being well aware of the worst that can happen, being scared
almost to death and then doing the right thing anyhow. As Robert Kennedy
said so well, ‘Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve
greatly.’
[We] can either follow [our] fears or be led by [our] values and [our]
passions. All of this fear-mongering today (of immigrants, homosexuals,
crime, and terrorists), I’m afraid, is quite deliberate because the more you
can make people fear, the more a government can control you. The American
people don’t feel a sense of personal accountability for what the nation
should stand for. No one need be afraid of fear; only afraid that fear will
stop him or her from doing what’s right.
[Yet, in the face of all of this…] I remain hopeful. Hope needs to
be understood as a reflection of the state of your soul, not as reflection
of the circumstances that surround your days. Hope is not the equivalent of
optimism. The opposite of hope is not pessimism, but despair. Hope is about
keeping the faith despite the evidence so that the evidence has a chance of
changing.
If Christ never allowed his soul to be cornered with despair - and his
was maybe the greatest miscarriage of justice in the world - who the hell am
I to say I’m going to despair a bit? Hope criticizes what is, hopelessness
rationalizes it. Hope resists, hopelessness adapts. Hope arouses, as
nothing else can, a passion for the possible!
There never was a night or a problem that could defeat sunrise or hope!
We may not know what is beyond the grave, but we do know who
is beyond the grave. And there is more mercy in him than sin
in us, more faith in him than doubt in us, and more hope
for the world in him than in anything else on the horizon.
‘Thine is the Glory, Risen, Conquering Son, Endless is the Victory, Thou
o’er Death hast won.’
NOTE: William Sloane Coffin died four days before I delivered this
Tribute to him on Easter Sunday. It is a composite of his own words in
sermons, books and interviews over the years. The following sources have
been most helpful to me in this compilation – G.A.W.
"Make Love Your Aim," Sermon, First Presbyterian Church, New Canaan, CT,
January 12, 1997.
"Easter 1984," Sermons from Riverside, April 22, 1984, p. l.
"Easter and Forgiveness," The Living Pulpit, Vol. 7, No. 1, p. 8,
9.
"Do Not Be Afraid," Sermon, Pilgrim Congregational Church, Lexington,
MA., April 11, 2004.
"The Good Samaritan Revisited," Sermon, First Parish Church, Lincoln,
Nebraska, October 27, 2002.
"With a Warrior’s Conviction, Coffin Affirms Peace in Visit," Yolanda
Jones, Idlewild Presbyterian Church,Memphis, TN, February 3, 2003.
"Profile: William Sloane Coffin," Religion & Ethics: Interview by Bob
Abernethy, August 27, 2004, Episode #752.
"Modern American Patriot: William Sloane Coffin," Center for Defense
Information, Washington, D.C., February 5, 1995.
"Rev. William Sloane Coffin Dies at 81; Fought for Civil Rights and
Against a War," The New York TimesObituaries, Thursday, April 13,
2006, p. A21
Yale Alumni Magazine, 1967.
Yale Class of 1968, 35th Reunion, May, 2003.
The Courage To Love, William Sloane Coffin (San Francisco: Harper &
Row Pub., 1982)
Living The Truth In a World of Illusions, William Sloane Coffin (San
Francisco, Harper & Row Pub., 1985), Chp. 15.
A Passion For The Possible: A Message to U.S. Churches (Louisville:
John Knox Press, 1993).
The Heart Is A Little To The Left: Essays on Public Morality, William
Sloane Coffin (Dartmouth College, University Press of New England, 1999),
pp. 60, 66.
Credo (Louisville, Westminster John Knox Press, 2004), p. 132.
Letters To A Young Doubter (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press,
2005), pp. 21, 97, 134.
