Observations Of A Life: William J. Brown

Bill Brown died in New Orleans in his sleep last week, and today there will be a memorial service.

I don't like funerals, but consider them a bit of an obligation.  They're places where we reflect on the meanings of our own lives as well as those of the ones who are finished.   There's something sad but triumphant at the funerals of people whose debts are paid, whose accounts are solid.  

When there are unspoken irresolutions at a funeral (these are often poorly attended anyway), they're challenging, a sort of reminder not to die with unfinished business.

Bill's life is one of the many that make evangelicalism such a compelling and relevant force in America.  I knew him well enough to know that not everything in his personal life was triumphant.   He had the usual catalog of struggles as a man and a father and husband.   And I disagreed with him heartily on his dogmas and doctrines, which were as inflexible as they were kindly offered to one and all.  

But as so often happens, you can't argue with the love or the personal power that came from his faith.  In a man who sells himself for his convictions, when those convictions are good and worthy, most of the failures are not of the sort that cannot be reconciled.

Bill came down to New Orleans from Canada.  As an associate minister at a Presbyterian church in New Orleans' Mid-City in 1967, he became increasingly disturbed by the racial injustice of the city.  He left a relatively secure post, therefore, and embarked on that least-materially rewarding of ministries: work among the poorest he could reach.

Sometimes it's easy to forget the kind of courage such a stand required back in the 'sixties, when very often the white denominations lent their semi-official support to segregation and to more subtle forms of oppression.

But Bill, a former boxer, tank-driver at D-Day, and all-around rugged individual, brought the force of action to his conviction that his God did not sanction the neglect of human beings who had needs.

His ministry, so far as I know, was never about lifting blacks to the level of whites.  It was about racial reconciliation, about respect offered to disenfranchised and politically powerless people from a position of social power.

It was also profoundly evangelistic.  Bill believed that without Jesus, black people were as lost as white people, but that with Jesus there could be forgiveness for past sins and hope for a brighter future.  In other words, he believed that they had stories to tell, that their redemptions were as much a cosmic drama as his own.  

And as so often happens, this proved a (self-) fulfilling belief.  To have faith in a thing is to connect oneself to a greater story.  The story Bill told was one of infinite hope in a hopeless situation.  Jesus, the target of his faith, represented, symbolized, and (Bill would insist) actualized that hope and made it real.

And sometimes I think that evangelicalism's most devastating failure, its inability to grapple with history, is the dark side to its greatest strength: its optimism about the future.

Bill Brown incarnated that.  In a real sense, he incarnated his god, who never believed that the darkness had the final say.   No matter the state of a person's personal life, no matter their social condition, it could join the great story Bill had to tell about the future just like a drop of water joins the Mississippi, and it could swell in its small way that story.

The memorial service today will involve one of the strangest things: blacks and whites in the same church.  You can get blacks and whites at a football game together, or a city council meeting.  But churches have the most difficult time with this.  The god of evangelicalism might be black or white, but he has a hard time being both together, or neither.

Not Bill's God.  

Bill's God said, "It can be done.  No story is ever finished, because Jesus is alive."

Bill made sure it was true, showing once again that we come to resemble what we worship.

Bruce Cockburn, another great Canadian, once wrote, "Gonna kick at the darkness 'till it bleeds daylight."

Thank God for these courageous people who, whatever their faults, give us a yardstick to measure our lives, and who give us a reason to ask, "What's left to do?"  

Update on Sunday, October 24, 2010 at 2:21PM by Otter

Bill's legacy continues.