Andy

 

He’s been called our “Kosher Congregationalist”, raised in a Jewish family near Boston, educated at Kent State where memories run deep of the day  the Ohio National Guard opened fire on students–the May 4^th Massacre.   He came south, guitar and banjo in hand, and “discipled” on the music of Rev. Gary Davis who provided a repertoire that moves through the stories of Ezekiel, Daniel in the Lion’s Den,  Jesus Who Healed the Lepers and the Walls of the City envisioned by John. 

 

His debut into the liturgy of First Congregational came Easter Sunday, over a decade ago.   We’d hired his wife, Larkin, actually–one of the country’s best dulcimer players.  How beautiful, we imagined, to have the gentle, welcoming music of her dulcimer strings giving testimony to the power of a new beginning.  An Easter message, to be sure.

 

Instead, I stood at the entryway of the church and watched as Larkin stepped back, and Andy stepped forward.  In a voice that seemed to settle powerfully and provocatively on the edge of every pitch (how many protesters and activists through the years had been rallied by that confident, unfettered voice, I wondered) he belted out, “Gonna die one time and I ain’t gonna die no more!” 

 

What it lacked in subtlety, it made up for in honesty and confrontational courage.  My mind flashed to the various Easter services of my life with their various “calls to worship”—sweet handbells twinkling “Jesus Christ is Risen Today” at St. Matthew’s Episcopal, a sonorous tenor proclaiming, “I knowwwwwwwwwwww my Redeeeeeemer Livvvvvvvvveth!” with indisputable confidence at Christ Church, Waterbury; various high school trumpet players spitting into cold metal at Ebenezer Church in Augusta, Missouri, bravely calling forth the sunrise on those all-too-frequently-freezing-cold Easter mornings.  We’d had lovely, even elegant choral “Alleluias” some years; on others, an occasional venture into a joyful Mexican folk tune. 

 

But never had it been put this bluntly:  “Gonna die one time and I ain’t gonna die no more!”  No negotiation offered there.

 

Maybe Andy’s Jewish, Marxist, union background hadn’t acquainted him with that more “ruffly” side of Easter—the egg hunts, the new patent-leather shoes and matching purses that accompanied the just-purchased pastel Easter dresses.  And Rev. Gary Davis, from whom the song came . . . well, you know those Southern country preachers.   Never known for their tact.   We’re a southern church, to be sure, here in Memphis.  But not THAT kind of southern church, if you get my drift.

 

Leave it to the Kosher Congregationalist.   The way the Gospel of Mark reads, when the women went to the tomb after Jesus had died his “one time”, they were terrified when they went only to find the grave empty.   Better the death we know, I guess, than the change we aren’t ready for. 

 

Mark tells us that they were so frightened that they never said nothin’ to nobody about what they saw (or didn’t see) that morning.  Now, we know that’s not exactly true.  Somebody had to say something to somebody or we wouldn’t be ringing our handbells and pulling out the expensive tenors this many centuries later. 

 

Gonna die one time and I ain’t gonna die no more. 

 

When I listen to Andy sing, I find myself hearing that “cloud of witnesses” the Bible talks about.  I feel the courage and the idealism of those students back at Kent State.   He carries their memory in his voice as it rises.

 

When I hear Andy singing some of the old evangelical hymns we sometimes sing at church, it makes my heart glad.   However we die, it’s often a bloody mess and the evangelicals aren’t afraid to get right down into the thick of it all.  Of college kids massacred on a beautiful day in May.  Of a Memphis mother whose baby, Jakira, died in her arms from a wild bullet in a drive-by shooting.   Of foreclosed homes and all the dreams that wither when a family packs up.  “There is a fountain filled with blood…,” the old hymn reminds us.

 

 Indeed.   The messiness, the tragedy, the sheer difficulty of life doesn’t just belong to Christians and neither does the experience of Resurrection.  It belongs to all of us who have had the wind kicked out of us, who know what it means to do the right thing and see it go nowhere, who find, in one chapter of life or another, that we just can’t lie about who they are or the way the world is anymore.  Something in us says “enough”, and in desperation or exhaustion or whatever it is, we let go.

 

A lot of us have died one time or another, given ourselves over to what we couldn’t control for all the willpower, hope or sheer determination that we carried in us. 

 

A lot of us have died one time or another and realized as we were falling that we weren’t going to die anymore.  “This is it,” a voice testifies as we walk straight towards the cross, the conflict, the injustice.   We stop running scared and put ourselves in better hands.  Call it trusting in a higher power, call it succumbing to grace.  I call it salvation.

 

Resurrection, I have learned through the years, rarely impresses us with its classy cadence or its fluttery gentility.   When we see it, when it happens to us, we are often like the women in Mark’s story—we don’t say nothin’ to nobody ‘bout it.  Why?  I guess we’re conscious that we’ve still got scars to show from the experience.   Best to be humble about miracles when they come our way.  They don’t come cheap.

 

“Gonna die one time and I ain’t gonna die no more.”  You got it, Andy.

 

 

 

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