I Will Overlook Your Sophistry

The decade of the eighties had begun. I was 30, single, only a couple of years out of the ordination chute, a graduate student in religion and the new pastor of a historic church on the outskirts of Nashville.  All Saints Sunday was my third Sunday on the job and I chose to include in the morning service a litany of the saints that I had found in a packet of materials from the liturgical resources office of my denomination. The litany began with references to some of the more familiar saints in the Christian calendar – St. Mary the Virgin, Mary Magdalen, Peter, Paul, Justin Martyr, Perpetua and Felicitas, Martin Luther and John Calvin.  We remembered and gave thanks for their inspiring, exemplary lives. They had lighted the path of love, devotion and courageous discipleship for people of faith through the ages. No problem, no argument. So far, so good. But then the litany seemed to veer left. Suddenly congregants who allowed themselves to be guided by the printed order of service – many of whom, I fear, had not reviewed the program before the service began – found themselves giving thanks for the blessed memory and example of saints from our own century, witnesses and trailblazers like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, Rosa Parks and Dr. Martin Luther King.

As I was walking up the aisle toward the front door to greet the people who would be emerging from the church following the benediction, I felt pleased and proud. Here in the South, in a sanctuary built with bricks that were handmade by slaves, I had maneuvered an exclusively white religious community into raising its collective voice to affirm that Dr. Martin Luther King was a saint of God and an inspiring example for us all.

My mood of self-congratulation was soon arrested by a middle-aged man who approached me bristling. He grasped my hand, told me his name, and then said, “I deeply resent the reference to Martin Luther King as a saint in today’s service. He is a known Communist. I have been a member of this church with my family for many years, but this reference is extremely offensive to me and I will not be back.”

I had been warned about The Judge – for a circuit court judge he was – but in that moment the only details I could remember were that he was a retired United States Marine Corps officer and a judge of some kind with a decidedly conservative political bent, a temper that warmed easily, a deceased wife, a dashingly handsome son and a beautiful daughter.

The Judge walked away and my adrenaline rush dissipated. I then decided I was duty-bound to write him a letter. I would explain everything: where the material came from, the theological rationale for including King in the litany as a pioneer of social justice, the meaning of the term saint in Scripture and how the usage of hagios and its cognates had evolved in the history of Christendom and was then reformed and reclaimed to apply to all believers. Unfortunately, I not only composed the letter; I mailed it. Because I was right. And – the hardest thing to admit these years later – I needed The Judge to understand why he was wrong and I was right so he could bless me by conceding the point.

He never did any of that, and I was left to grow up as best I could. Before the end of the week, I had received his written reply. Perhaps someday I will find it, discolored by mold, in some obscure basement box of papers. On picking up the mail, I read the letter slowly and carefully. He retracted nothing, although his handwriting was composed and graceful, his tone courteous. “I will overlook your sophistry,” he wrote. That’s the only phrase from his letter that I distinctly remember.

Not long ago, I came across The Judge’s obituary. He lived into his mid-eighties. He had retired from the bench, taken diplomas in the culinary arts and bartending, become a hotelier in Florida and finally bought a hotel somewhere in the South Pacific. But they didn’t bury The Judge in the South Pacific.  They brought him back home to Middle Tennessee. His funeral was held in the church he said he’d not come back to.

If I could write The Judge another letter, I’d request clemency for youthful arrogance. I’d say it often takes time for some of us to get over the need to be right. I’d come clean about not knowing what I don’t know, then or now, my easy assumptions about the bigotry of others and the regrettable sense that I have little to learn from people who are not like me. If I wrote the letter well enough, using adverbs sparingly and eliminating all the sophistry I could wring from it, maybe The Judge would give a delayed ruling in favor. Or at least I like to think he might.