Good Friday Meditations, 2005

Good Friday Meditations

March 25, 2005

Autobiographical meditations offered at St. Stephen's Good Friday Vigil, March 25, 2005, by the Rev. Cork Tarplee

The meditations I am offering today grew out of a course I have taught during Lent entitled, “Listening to Your Life.” Participants in the class reflected on the ways God has spoken to them in the events and people of their everyday lives. In my own experience, I have heard God speaking most clearly through other people, and my reflections today are about those people.

MEMORIES OF BRIAN

‘A midlife crisis’ is the label we put on the quirky events of one’s life between forty and fifty. It is when settled married folk have affairs, buy sports cars, and embezzle money from the company. I’ve participated in enough mid-life foolishness as its, but I would have done more—probably some really self-destructive things—if I hadn’t met Brian.

In the last twenty years or so, Episcopal dioceses, spurred on more by lawsuits over sexual misconduct than by the suffering that precipitated them, have come to recognize that clergy often lead emotionally isolated lives. To counter that isolation, Bishops have encouraged their clergy to find spiritual directors or at the very least spiritual companions among their peers. When I met Brian at a district clergy gathering, I thought he’d make a good spiritual companion and that nothing but a little time could be lost by scheduling a regular time to talk things over with him. I picked on Brian because he was a great burly bear of a young man with an irreverent sense of humor. He was the bachelor assistant rector of a wealthy church in my area and someone who shared my interest in working with the youth of the diocese. More than that, I picked him because I sensed in him the quality of compassion. I chose well.

Brian and I set up a regular time for coffee once a month—no business agenda allowed. Our meetings were strictly for talking about our personal lives. That might sound like an easy assignment, but men don’t get personal very easily. You know the stereotypes: men are only comfortable talking about cars and sports, never about their emotions. After you’ve gotten past “What do you think about them Mets?” what more is there to say? Brian and I checked out those topics pretty quickly. We soon learned that neither of us much cared about cars or sports, so for icebreakers we turned to gossip about other clergy in the diocese and the kids we had worked with in the diocesan youth program. But Brian learned that I had more to talk about, and I found out he did, too.

About the second time we met, I decided it was time to get really personal. My marriage, I told him, was on the rocks and had been for almost as long as the marriage had lasted. I told him about my temptations: the village I served seemed to be teeming with desperate housewives who let me know that they were interested in me. To my relief, Brian responded at a similarly personal level. He offered some anecdotes in kind: his parish was full of parishioners who wanted to fix him up with eligible young women. He was always being invited to meals at which there was a special someone for him to meet. Pastoral conversations were not off-limits to the matchmakers. Even at hospital bedsides and on their deathbeds parishioners would introduce a special niece or granddaughter.

After we’d come back to these topics on a couple of successive visits, we got really clear that romance was getting in the way of pastoral duties for both of us. We talked about setting boundaries and being very clear about our pastoral identities. That talk came as a godsend for me because not long after that a church employee came to me to “confess” that she’d fallen in love with me. At least one of the reasons I was able to keep that conversation on track and appropriate was that I knew that I’d be sharing it with Brian. By the grace of God and with Brian sitting figuratively on my shoulder like the angel who sits on Bugs Bunny’s shoulder in the cartoons, I told the woman that I was flattered by her affection, that I found her attractive, but that it would not be a good idea for either of us to act on that attraction. I explained the psychological mechanism of projection and said that people often project positive characteristics onto clergy without really knowing them and that was a bad foundation for any relationship. By the grace of God and my conversations with Brian, I maintained a good working relationship with the employee and both of us held onto our marriage vows.

When Brian and I met next, I first gave him credit for keeping me chaste, then I gave him the blame. I told him that sometimes what I thought I needed to keep my sanity was a good hot affair. I said I’d like to be in his place as a bachelor and to have the opportunity to have lots of liaisons. Brian said that in the age of AIDS that wouldn’t be such a good idea. I said—and in those days AIDS went along in most people’s minds with homosexuality—that since I wasn’t in the at-risk category I wasn’t worried. “Well,” said Brian, “I am. I am gay, and I would give anything to be in your place. Every heterosexual man I know wants to find a way out of a monogamous union. I would give anything to be able to find a great guy and to settle down to a life of commitment.”

Which is how Brian, my spiritual friend, came out to me. It took me a little while to deal with all my prejudices about what a gay man looked and acted like, but before long I believed him, and we started going back over all his problems with the matchmakers in his congregation. The problem wasn’t just the blurring of pastoral boundaries. Nowhere back then was the Episcopal Church very accepting of gays in the priesthood. Brian’s problem not only made it hard for him to DO his job, it was very likely to make it impossible to KEEP his job. When that became clear to me, I was incensed. Of all the priests I’ve known, Brian was without question the one with the most pastoral skill and the most integrity. He was also the one I’d known who was best able to manage the stresses of staying in a chaste committed relationship. For him to be at risk of losing the job God had clearly called him to because he wanted to settle down with a life partner seemed not just wrong, but somehow the epitome of evil.

My spiritual friendship with Brian didn’t last long after that. Brian—against my advice—came out to the rector of his church and was fired. With Brian’s example of integrity guiding me every step of the way, I finally found the courage to get divorced. And to my delight, something less than two years later I was remarried and really understood for the first time the challenges and joys of a mature and committed relationship. I have never seen Brian again—our lives have taken us in different directions and to different localities—but Brian still lives on my shoulder. Every time the issue of homosexuality comes up in the church, Brian will not let me compromise. I have had parishioners stand up on the seats of pews and denounce me in the middle of church services because of my stance on this issue. I have lost jobs because of it. Always I’m tempted to play it safe and to avoid a confrontation. But Brian won’t let me do that. Somehow to be safe would be to ignore one of the deepest truths of my life. It would be like Peter saying to the people outside Jesus’ trial, “I do not know the man.” I can’t do that, because I do know him. He is good and decent and a priest of this church. And he is gay. And he is not gay in spite of it all. I believe he is gay AND a man of integrity BOTH by the grace of God. AMEN

BERTHA ANDERSON

Confucius believed in the synchronicity of domestic tranquility and national harmony. If the home was happy, the nation would be too; if the nation was happy, the home would prosper. I have heard this belief dismissed as naïve, but I think I share it. “Take the beam out of your own eye,” said Jesus, “before you take the mote out of another’s.” His advice was always to practice integrity, to let what happens in private reflect the public morality. Perhaps that was why he did not answer Pilate’s charge of treason: there just wasn’t anything to say. If Jesus’ private behavior spoke truth enough, it didn’t need to be argued as a matter of statecraft.

I have shaken the hands of three prominent leaders in my lifetime. The first was Ronald Reagan when I was ten and he was stumping for governor and visiting every local TV studio he could. My best friend’s mom was a local talk show host and invited us boys to meet the celebrity. The latest prominent leader I’ve met is Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Tutu has long ties with this diocese and I once served with him at a diocesan Eucharist. Even when I was 10, Reagan struck me as one of those adults with superficial charm who talked to you but wasn’t really listening. Looking back, I remember an actor’s sense of how his condescension to a pair of kids would look to the crowds. Desmond Tutu, on the other hand, for all the millions of people he has met, for all the priests he has served at countless altars with, was really and appropriately present. He took time to speak to all of us who were to serve with him, remembered details of the lives of those he already knew, asked questions of me that suggested a real desire to know who I was and where I lived and what mattered to me. In our brief time in the sacristy together, he paid attention to who was to do what in the service: an appropriate focus for the chief celebrant, and the appropriate concern for a priest who wanted an act of public worship to go well. The impression was of a man who has spent a lifetime forming personal connections and for whom the personal is always the place in which one encounters God. I get the impression that the end of Apartheid for him was never a matter of political gamesmanship, but was a matter of reconciliation, of people reconnecting with each other.

The third prominent leader whose hand I’ve shaken was Martin Luther King. I was fourteen and King had just begun his rise to national recognition. His schedule was still light enough to permit him to come to speak to a local prayer service sponsored by the ecumenical clergy association in our little city of Lynchburg , Virginia . My father was the convenor of the group that year and arranged the event, so when King finished his sermon, Dad took me up with him to the podium of the AME church at which the service took place and introduced me. It was neither an exercise in hypocrisy as my meeting with Reagan had been, nor was it a moment of personal connection as my meeting with Desmond Tutu would be. It was the sort of brief, mutually sincere, but empty meeting that clergy have at church doors all the time. Nobody doubts that the “Good sermon, reverend,” is sincerely meant on the one hand, or that the “Thank you, and thanks for coming,” is meant in response. The occasion just doesn’t lend itself to any depth. King was tired. He was traveling a lot in those days, and he spoke with intensity. I meant it when I said I enjoyed his words; and he accepted my thanks graciously. Except that he began appearing in the TV news and on the radio right after that, I’m not sure that I would have remembered him any more than he could possibly have remembered me.

The day after that service I went back to life as usual. At fourteen that meant school, and after school, household chores and homework. I barely noticed that day my constant afternoon companion, Mrs. Bertha Anderson, whom my parents employed as a domestic. I usually came home from school, checked to see that Bertha was there because I didn’t really like being home alone, then turned on the television set and began my daily chores. Bertha Anderson was usually doing laundry and ironing by then and I usually ignored her presence. Occasionally, very occasionally, I would stop to talk with her, but for the most part she was an invisible presence in my home, an African American woman who worked in the shadows doing the chores nobody else wanted to do for as little compensation as we could get away with. I do remember that she had a family: children my own age whose names I never bothered to learn, and a husband, whose name, Herman, was one I heard often because his illnesses sometimes meant that Bertha would have to change her schedule and I was the one to whom she reported these events. But mostly, we had no contact. As a teenager, that was fine with me. Except for a comforting presence in the house, I was just as happy not to have any contact with any adults. I suspected that it would be good to keep it that way. What little I did hear from Bertha about her children suggested that she was a very demanding parent and I doubted that she would approve of me. I preferred to think of Bertha as a co-worker: she did her chores and I did mine.

Only recently has it occurred to me to be grateful for Mrs. Anderson. Not only was she company in an empty house, she was level headed and a steadying influence. I suspect there was a great deal of wisdom and sound guidance that I could have gotten from her if I had bothered. I remember that it was I who drove her home to a small house in the shabby black part of town just after my mother had broken the news to her that she and my father were separating. Through the ride, Mrs. Anderson, typically was silent, but kept blotting tears in her eyes. As she left the car she exclaimed, “I thought this was a family!” I’m pretty sure she let herself cry as soon as she was in the house. As I remember that scene, I read into it a deep concern for the well being of the people in whose home she spent much of her life, a sense of strong values she was willing to sacrifice a lot for, and just a hint that her own life held a lot of pain she was too proud to share. This past week I got word that Mrs. Anderson is dying of cancer. I wrote her to thank her for caring for me and providing a moody and unresponsive teenager with some a steadying adult presence.

Besides apologizing in the letter for being sullen and aloof, I might also have apologized for the appalling working conditions of our home, for low wages, and no real concern for the needs of her family, and for the culture of racial discrimination that made those things possible. I might have apologized for shaking the hand of Martin Luther King, but not even caring to meet her teenage children who lived across town. I might have apologized for supporting racial integration at a national level, but never having made friends with a single black person. This matters to me because I do not think we ever get very far with a national agenda if that agenda is not reflected at home. “What is truth?” Pilate asks at Jesus’ trial. Truth is where you live your life, not what you say you believe. AMEN

THE DEATH OF A BABY

Noah was born on William Shakespeare’s birthday. His father, a budding writer and scholar, thought that was significant. The night he was born, the ice sank in Lake Michigan and spring came to Chicago suddenly. His father thought that was significant, too. The father walked home from the hospital after the birth charmed by the sight of crocuses blooming, and sat down to write his new son a letter. It was a letter full of good omens and full of hope. The father filed it away in his much loved book of Shakespeare’s plays.

Noah and his young mother, too exhausted to move, came home from the hospital in two days. Noah was restless and unsettled, and cried a lot. His father was gratified that the thing that seemed to comfort his son the most was lying skin to skin on his father’s naked chest. Even now, almost forty years later, he can still feel the baby warmth and smell the top of the baby’s head.

There was only a day of these sensations, then the crying got worse, and between cries, a kind of ominous listlessness. The couple called the doctor. There was nothing to worry about, the doctor said, all babies cry. The couple waited and finally after about twelve hours more they called again. Nothing to worry about, said the doctor, but if it will ease your mind, stop in to the emergency room.

They took a cab to Children’s Hospital where the doctor practiced. On the way they were so worried they yelled at the cab driver. The cabbie, a young foreign national, absorbed their worry and sense of urgency. He rear ended another car, just a minor dented fender, but potentially a big loss of time. Noah, wrapped for the trip in his receiving blanket, barely whimpered. The parents pleaded with the other driver who let the damage go without even an exchange of insurance information.

At the hospital when finally the emergency room staff called Noah’s name, they placed the baby on the admitting secretary’s counter so the nurse could have a look. They had a hard time telling whether the baby was still breathing, finally found a pulse and suddenly after hours of professionals saying not to worry, the professionals sprang into action. “What have you done to this baby?” they asked, at a loss to explain the sick infant they were seeing. The couple offered the short, sad history of their child through a veil of tears. Telephone calls were made to verify the birth, attending physician, and the pediatrician who attended the baby before he left his birthplace. There was a long period of silence while a specialist was found. Finally, a word of comfort: a motherly doctor took the couple to a private room and gently explained that they were doing everything they could for Noah. He was suffering from a virulent infection, probably something he came home from his birth hospital with, something that slipped by the doctor’s exam before he came home. No, she said, no, don’t worry, it was nothing you could have known about, nothing you could have prevented, nothing you could have helped.

That was the beginning of the couple’s first exposure to the world of serious illness. They took up residency in the Intensive Care Waiting Room and lived there, taking the occasional cab home for a shower, subsisting on cafeteria food for what little they ate, visiting Noah in his “isolette” every hour. Over the days they watched him look first a little better, then as the side effects of the powerful drugs they gave him took effect and new drugs were given to counter the side effects, he began to look worse.

Other people came and went in the ICU waiting room. A few, a very few, stayed. Those were the parents of the other gravely ill children. The father could tell whose kids were getting better. As those parents received good news, gradually they stopped talking to the parents who were there long term. Over the weeks, he came to know the others whose children were not recovering. The parents of the child born premature with immature lungs. The parents of the twelve year old girl who hurt her head in a freak household accident. The parents of the four year old who fell into a dormant swimming pool. Those were the ones who stayed. All watched what they called the roller coaster ride, the dizzying cycle of slow improvements, giving way to sudden failure and near death, only to be followed again by another slow improvement. With each swing, hopes went up, were dashed, and went up again. Only the parents who were on that ride could bear to hear the details, only those parents realized how much the others needed to talk and needed to blow off steam with outbursts of grief or anger or gallows humor.

The current catch phrase is “being there for you.” Those parents were there for each other. In an older more religious age, they would have said they bore each others sorrows, and somehow that language describes what happened best. The daily listening to the details, the daily offer of tissues to dam the tears, the daily sharing of the awful jokes lifted the weight of grief for a moment and made it possible to endure. An Anglican bishop describes the warmth that travels from one person to another when both are sobbing as the living presence of the Holy Spirit. Noah’s parents were not particularly religious, but even they recognized something sacred in those moments. It made them open to having Noah baptized by the hospital chaplain, and made the father open in the recesses of his heart to prayer.

And he did pray. At first, fervently and always for recovery. Then, as the news came from the ICU of possible brain damage, he prayed for the strength to care for a disabled child. And then, finally, when the scans came back with almost no brain function, he realized that he could no longer pray for Noah to live, and prayed for a quiet and merciful end. Let the roller coaster ride end, he prayed, and just give my boy peace.

Of all the prayers, that was the one answered. In the midst of prayer, Noah died, and his father went home and burned the letter to his son.

In a world of sorrow that comes up to take you by the throat when you least expect it, happy endings don’t resemble the movies. Happiness is measured in small doses: the minor comforts that make things better for a time, the hope that holds you together from time to time, and most of all those who share the pain and make the load lighter. There are minor sorrows in the midst of a great sorrow, too: the indifference of a nurse or doctor who speaks roughly, the relatives who refuse to visit and make excuses, and the people who comfort themselves (but not the suffering) with glib phrases about God’s will. It is a reminder that how we approach the suffering of others does matter. We can wash our hands of each other and abandon each other or we can hold each other and share each other’s sorrows. AMEN

THE BOY ON THE BRIDGE

I was working my way through college as a road construction laborer in the summer of 1964. I worked ten hours a day, doing manual labor, six days a week. I lived in a cheap hotel room in Binghamton , New York , taking my meals alone in a diner in this city where I knew no one. Weekdays, I was in bed before the summer sun went down because my days began at 4 a.m. On Sundays I slept as late as I could and enjoyed the emptiness of the day with hour leading to hour presenting me with nothing I was required to do.

One Sunday morning the summer sun woke me early and I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I had breakfast in the hotel coffee shop and went out for a walk. I walked a lot that summer since I didn’t have a car, but walking gave me time to think. That Sunday’s walk was glorious. The sun was warm. The trees were shady. The city was quiet. The birds were noisy. I walked across the bridge over the Chenango River , around a sleepy neighborhood and passed a big church with a few parishioners leaving from an early morning service. It didn’t occur to me to go in. Churches and church services had been such an ever-present part of my past as a preacher’s kid that there was nothing special in them for me. I wandered back and started across the bridge again.

The sun’s glint on the river caught my eye and I stopped to look at the water, resting my elbows on the railing. I don’t remember thinking anything at all. I certainly wasn’t brooding about the state of the world and I certainly wasn’t pondering my future. I was just minding my own business, enjoying the light on the water. As I looked down, I saw a shack built on the mud flats on the side of the river, in the shadow of the bridge. At first I assumed it was a play fort built by some kids. It was the sort of insubstantial hodgepodge of plywood, driftwood and corrugated sheets that I used to build in the backyard, and that I have now seen in the barrios of third world cities. I only realized that this was someone’s home when the quiet was pierced by a scream from the shack.

A child of about four burst out of the shack, wailing. Even from the bridge I could see the dirt on his face streaked with tears and dirt caked on the ragged shorts that were his only clothes. On his heels, out of the shack lurched a woman in a worn housecoat, brandishing a piece of wood. As she came out she hit her shoulder on the side of the shack. The shack quivered and the woman spun around and almost fell. She bellowed at the child and swung her stick. The child ran and the woman staggered after him, swinging. They circled the shack, the woman occasionally grabbing the child by an arm and beating at him until blood trickled down his legs. Always the child broke loose and kept running. Three times around the shack they went until the woman staggered back inside and left the child sitting in the river mud, crying quietly now.

When the scene started, I had shouted down, but don’t think I was heard. I thought of running to the end of the bridge and down the bluff that led to the river to intervene, but the drama was over before I could move. I watched as the child crept finally back into the hovel, and the shack became as quiet as a coffin. What, I wondered, should I do now? What could I possibly do about the abuse I’d seen? Then the bell of the church I’d walked by earlier began to chime. It probably meant that the Sunday service was about to start or maybe it just tolled the hours, but to me it seemed like a cosmic answer. By the time the bell rang, I had seen the drama on the mud flats as a graphic enactment of the cycle of poverty and abuse. For the woman and the child there seemed no way out, no way to scale the river bluff to the nice homes above and no way out of alcoholism and violence, and their slow circle around the hut reminded me of the likelihood that the violence would go around again, generation after generation. The woman herself had probably been the victim of abuse, the child according the statistics I’d read in college would probably grow up to take out his rage on his own children. Just as I began to wonder what I could do about it, the church bells suggested an answer. In that moment, it was a summons as clear as an announcement over a loudspeaker. It said: God alone breaks this cycle, what you can do to help these people is to be a priest.

The logical fallacies in this line of reasoning didn’t really become clear to me until I took this story to the parish priest back at college. He had a hard time taking my little drama seriously. It made no sense to him that the ministry of word and sacrament to which he was devoted might somehow be about bringing hope to the poor in any direct way. Maybe if he had been older. Maybe if he had been called to an inner city ministry instead of to a college town to minister to the philosophy and religion faculty. Maybe if he had known me better and known how different this vision on the bridge was from anything I’d ever known. Most likely he was right and there were whole huge parts of my account I’d never thought through. For example, why did I interpret this as a call to ordained ministry, not to some direct service like social work? What skills and experiences did I have that led me to believe that I could be a priest? What made me believe that God called people through this sort of scene? At any rate, the parish priest’s only comment was a dismissive, “Well, if you are going to be a priest, you’d have to come to church, first.”

I left the parish priest’s office feeling shamed and belittled, but still convinced that something deeply mystical had happened to me, whether anyone else understood it or not. The only thing that seemed clearer to me than that was that there was no place for me in the ministry of the Episcopal Church.

I have, as you can see, reconsidered that conclusion. It took me fifteen years of waiting, three changes of vocation, two years of vocational counseling and three years of screening by the Episcopal Church, but I did finally decide that I am called by God to be a priest. None of the counseling and screening, however told me that more conclusively than my experience as a college sophomore on a bridge in Binghamton , New York . Now, as I look back on it, the whole experience stands as a warning not to make assumptions about matters of faith. Those who cannot articulate beliefs or who talk about them in non-religious terms may have profound experiences of God. Even Pontius Pilate went on the public record as affirming Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. Perhaps he was more in touch with God than even he knew himself. I suspect a lot of us are. God is always a lot sneakier and a lot closer than we imagine. AMEN

FRANKIE THE WHIP

A program of theological education I subscribe to uses the theological term "Judgment" to label all those events in life that bring you up short and make you rethink your position. Judgement events are an important part of learning and sometimes lead you to a kind of salvation. In a nutshell, they are like that moment not long before the summer of Frankie the Whip that my mother helped me see that there might be a problem with my attitude. She was in the passenger seat of the car and we were stopped for gas on the way up to Upstate New York where I was going to start my summer job working road construction. I'd paid the attendant, but he was still cleaning the windscreen. When he finally finished, I started the car and began to pull away. "You didn't thank the man," my mother scolded. "He was just doing his job," I replied. "You should be ashamed of yourself," she said. "Everybody has a job to do, but nobody deserves to be treated badly. You need to learn to treat people with respect no matter who they are." It was, as I say, a Judgement event.

But the main Judgment event I want to tell you about involved Frank Whipple, Frankie the Whip. Frankie stood about five feet tall and wore fancy imported cowboy boots because they were one legitimate way he could wear high heels and add to his height. He dressed up to his boots, too, and in those last days of the Kennedy administration, he looked kind of flashy to me. He was short and short tempered and proud. My uncle told me that when he stopped after work at a local Cadillac dealer they treated him rudely. Probably because he worked as a superintendent on a construction job and he drove into the dealership in a dusty work pickup truck. Anyway, the point of the story was that Frankie came back the next day and bought the new Caddy he'd been looking at. The dealer started to get out all sorts of forms for loans and such, but Frankie said, no, he'd pay cash. He reached into his jeans and took out a wad of cash and peeled off thousand dollar bills until he reached the price of the car.

On the construction job, I didn't see much of Frankie. He was the super of the part of the job I worked for, but I was a day laborer, working most of the day in a ditch with a pick and shovel and Frankie drove around in his company pickup. That summer, most of my companions were a lot lower in the pecking order than Frankie. There was "Farmer" Mickey Scott who was almost sixty and had worked his whole life trying to make a go of a small dairy farm. He was working as a construction laborer because he was going bust as a farmer and the bank would take the farm if he didn't. Then there was Red who was eighteen like me, but unlike me wasn't going to college in the fall. Red had a wife and baby on the way. And Jake was in his mid thirties, an established family man with a wife and two daughters. Then there was me. I was no stranger to the notion of work. Every penny I ever had came from mowing lawns and babysitting, but I'd lived in Episcopal rectories all my life and went to private school. I couldn't claim to know much about really working for a living.

The summer was full of learning experiences for me. I was not an athletic kid, so just learning how to handle a pick and shovel was a challenge. I remember Jake showing me how to shovel gravel with sweeping strokes. "Here," he said, "this is the easy way. And I find that the easy way is hard enough." He was right. But the learning experience to beat all of them that summer involved Frankie the Whip.

It was raining that morning. When it rains on a road construction job, sometimes they shut down. We used to argue about whether it was best if they sent you home before or after you started to work. If you got sent home before they put you to work, they had to pay you two hours show up pay and you didn't get wet and muddy. If you went to work in the ditch they had to pay you for at least a half a day and chances are they'd make you work the whole half day in the pouring rain. So that morning I was standing under a tree beside the road we were building and I was watching the rain come down in sheets and hoping that they'd just send us home. When the superintendent's truck pulled up and Frankie rolled his window down, I ran over, expecting the good news. "Bring your shovel," he said, "and get up on the back of the truck." As an afterthought he said to the rest of my crew. "The rest of you can go on home." So I was already feeling sorry for myself as the truck drove me away in the rain.

I felt even sorrier when I saw where we were going. Part of the drainage system of a super highway consists of something called "box culverts." These are big square concrete boxes that connect the surface drains and the subsurface drains. They can lead to drains deep under the roadway that carry water across the road to where it can drain out. By the end of my encounter with Frankie the Whip I would have figured out that this particular box culvert was plugged up by leaves and branches and construction debris and that if it had stayed plugged up the water eventually would have backed up around it and would have eroded the road we were trying to build. I figured that out eventually, but when the truck pulled up, all I saw was a quagmire of ooze, churning slowly as more water poured down the hill and carried the clay surface of the roadway with it. Frankie motioned to me to come on and I got off the back of the truck and came up beside him. "Get down in there," he said "and clear that stuff out."

The self-respecting part of myself wants to believe I didn't really understand what he wanted me to do. But the honest part of me is also sure the awful sight of the deep muck contributed to my confusion. Whatever it was, I hesitated long enough that Frankie the Whip, he of thousand dollar bill and fancy cowboy boot fame, took my shovel and jumped into the mire. He pried the debris enough so that the drain started to open with deep sucking noise. And I finally understood the problem. I understood the problem with the drain, but mostly I understood the problem with me. I'd been thinking I was too good to get into the muck. Feeling sheepish, I reached for my shovel again and without a word of criticism Frankie handed it over. "Clear out the rest of that stuff so she'll run clear," he said. I did. When I was done, he told me to get in the back of the truck, drove me back to my sheltering tree and told me to go home. I'd worked for a half an hour and got paid for the half day.

Nobody could confuse Frankie the Whip with Jesus. In fact the next week our crew saw him driving his pickup by and he raised one finger as an imperious acknowledgement of our existence down in the ditch. "Little bastard," said Red and he spit. "Thinks he's God." I said maybe he wasn't so bad; and I told them what had happened at the box culvert. I've told a lot of people that story since--in sermons and classes and spiritual autobiographies. And it has always seemed to me that Frankie spoiling his imported boots in that churning mud hole helps in some small way explain the mysterious power of the cross. When someone who doesn't have to does something unpleasant without a word of complaint, something simply for the common good, then it has an eerie effect. I know that there isn't much that Frankie the Whip could have asked me to do after that day that I wouldn't have done. The power of the cross is like that and it is acted out all the time. Sometimes by noteworthy people like Martin Luther King standing up to evil in a way that put him in danger of that fatal bullet. Sometimes by people who are barely remembered like Mickey Scott taking a construction job to save his farm at an age when a lot of people think of retiring. And sometimes by people like Red and Jake who spend the prime of their lives in roadway ditches so they can feed their families. The cross stands in judgment on those who are too proud to love. AMEN