Back at the Jefferson Street Baptist Chapel, when the five little old ladies who comprised the congregation lost their collective minds and “called” me to be the minister, I think that they knew things were going to be different. Nothing about my days as a professional Christian were normal.
Of course, neither was the calling. Buna Wynn, one of the five little old ladies, had a butcher knife in her apron, a Maxwell House coffee can in one hand and a large black Schofield Reference Bible in the other. At first I told them no. I wasn’t minister material.
Buna seemed to take this personal and loudly told me that I sure as hell was taking it. Then she gave me a death stare.
Now I am a 23 year old first year seminary student who was there primarily because I’d followed my friend Guy Sayles to Louisville (yes folks, it is all Guy’s fault). I stood there staring at Buna who was staring at me with her nostrils flaring. I processed the information.
If I declined the call to become their minister, I was likely going to be spit on (hence the Maxwell House coffee can), knocked over the head with a 27 pound Bible, or stabbed. I was beginning to understand how the Lord works.
So I said yes and that is how my professional career was born.
I tell you that story to tell you this one. We did crazy things at Jeff St. as it was called. The baptismal pool was a bathtub and party central (whoever invented baptismal pools is one of the greatest people ever. I mean they have so many functions! If you’ve never made out in one then you really haven’t lived!)
We also had radical worship services. Anything went! One Christmas we put Santa Claus on trail for selling out and making the birth of Jesus a commercial racket. At Easter we would cover all of the windows in the Sanctuary so that the place was pitch black. We were just as likely to have the organ play “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones or “He Arose!” Then the paper would be torn from the windows and “Celebrate Good Times” would play and we would dance in the aisles. We closed once a year to go on retreat. Homeless people lived in Sunday school rooms.
We had fun.
At least we had fun until the Baptist at corporate headquarters in Atlanta got wind of everything that we were doing. We attracted a lot of press and kept getting in the newspaper. My all time favorite headline was “Baptist Minister calls gay man the most Christian person he knows” or something like that. That was the fasted I’d ever been summoned to Baptist Headquarters in Atlanta.
But the most holy place in the three story inner city building was not the Sanctuary, or the baptismal pool, or the social hall where we really spent all of our time. Nor was it the Sunday school rooms that homeless men found sanctuary in.
It was the roof.
Down the hall from the two-bedroom apartment my family lived in was a ladder that led to a hatch that popped open. And at night we were get chairs from the social hall and hand them to one another and go up on the roof (and yes God had provided James Taylor’s version of the song at this time just because we were blessed people).
And the stars put on a show for free. And the Ohio River rolled by right over there. And on hot nights the stink of the Louisville Stock Yards hung blood in the air. Clarksdale, the housing project, was across the street and some nights it seemed like the whole damn city was crying.
But holiness was every where. And we would grow quiet and just take it all in. The Spirit of God blanketed us.
Maybe the reason that I spend so much time on my Beloved back deck or Shirley’s sad little holy dock or on the beach is that I’ve never forgotten being up on the roof. With God.
