What Would Jesus Do? (While we run for cover)

No one knows who was writing under the name of Peter – maybe it was the Rock himself – but one thing seems sure. In the third chapter of the first epistle of that name, Peter was preaching to a choir that no longer exists.


“Who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good?” he asks ingenuously. “But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed.”


Yeah, right.


There’s little evidence that U.S. Christians are eager to take risks to do “what is right.” A 2002 Gallup poll suggests four in five Americans would rather be secure than free, and four in ten are worried terrorists will get them. About a third would be glad to allow the government to read their email or listen in on their telephone conversations if that will make them safer. Seventy percent want U.S. citizens to carry ID cards with finger prints.


Security and comfort first, Americans are telling pollsters. They may not openly object to Peter’s view – that “It is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil” – but many are adding a silent caveat: “So long as it doesn’t involve risks.”


This obsession with security is one of the reasons people danced in the streets and sang the Star Spangled Banner when President Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden. The elimination of the quintessential terrorist may not have made us safer, but it made us feel safer. And perhaps the only spending issue Democrats and Republicans agree on these days is national security. The proposed Homeland Security budget for 2012 is $57 billion and the Defense Department budget for fiscal year 2010 totals $670.9 billion.


But true security, like tomorrow, is promised to no one. And the world faced by Christians in the early centuries was dangerous and uncertain. When Peter advised Christians to be ready for abuse, he wasn’t talking in metaphors. All of his listeners knew about the violent hatred of Christians by the government authorities.

The date of the epistle is uncertain. Some scholars speculate it was written long after the Rock himself had died, possibly between 75 and 112 A.D., by which time the anti-Christian venom of the Roman emperors came in daily doses. The emperors would have included Caligula, whose depravity and madness were so entertainingly captured by actor John Hurt in I, Claudius, and Nero, under whose rule Peter and Paul are said to have been crucified in Rome. The official persecution of Christians lasted for 300 years and included forcing Christians to face hungry lions in the arena – the subject of many a droll cartoon today, but probably less amusing to those who faced the big cats.

The situation changed dramatically for Christians in 312 A.D. when the Emperor Constantine I, facing the battle of the Milvian Bridge, saw a cross (actually, a chi rho) in the sky and went on to kick ass. He concluded his blood letting must have been blessed by Jesus so he converted to Christianity. Where the emperor prays, the empire stays, so the once despised religion became the dogma of the day.


That didn’t necessarily mean Christians were more secure. Missionaries and desert fathers were always prey to pagan tribes as they sought to spread the gospel throughout Europe and Asia. A millennium and a half after Jesus’ resurrection, the Reformation begat the Inquisition and Christians commenced drawing, quartering, burning and beheading one another. Soon they began to encounter enemies more brutal than the lions: themselves.


The really disturbing thing is, regardless of which side of the smoldering stake they stood, Christians believed they were acting Christlike. Saint Thomas More, the man for all seasons, ordered the execution of six Lutheran reformers in England. More’s sanctimony was noted accurately (and perhaps inadvertently in the otherwise spurious but erotically entertaining Showtime series) The Tudors.


King Henry: I hear you’ve been burning heretics, Thomas.
Thomas More: Yes, Majesty, and they were well done.

One of the more vivid examples of misplaced sanctimony took place in Holland in 1569. A Mennonite preacher named Dirk Willems was so sure he was acting Christlike by rejecting the state church that he refused to back down when his Dutch Protestant neighbors jailed him for heresy. When Willems escaped from jail, his Protestant neighbors, in order to be Christlike, hotly pursued him. In the heat of the chase across a frozen pond, one Protestant fell through thin ice and was about to drown. Willems, being Christlike, stopped running and pulled the man to safety. The Protestant, being Christlike, arrested Willems immediately – and burned him at the stake. This must have been why Peter was warning us about suffering for doing good.


It’s no wonder that oppressed religious minorities hopped on the first Mayflower to the new world, where freedom from persecution seemed assured. But freedom didn’t come immediately. The Puritans – one of whom was Oliver Cromwell, infamous for his genocidal murders of Catholics in Ireland – sought religious liberty for themselves but denied it to others. In 1651, the Puritan establishment in Boston arrested and whipped the flesh off the back of Baptist Obadiah Holmes because he held an unauthorized worship service in Lynn, Mass.


Today, of course, Christians are more ecumenical, and in 2011 we find it painful to remember how much our ancestors deviated from the path of the Prince of Peace. Not that we have changed that much. “I like your Christ,” said the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi. “I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”


That has always been the most difficult challenge before us: acting like our Christ. Looking back on our Christian past, we see immediately that our efforts to act like Jesus brought out the worst in us. It’s not surprising that many American Christians have nestled in their beds on Sunday mornings, avoiding their uncomfortable churches and enjoying the security of the sheets. No Christian in the United States is in danger of suffering for the faith, we tell ourselves. No one who wishes to harm us could even get close to us, not in our modern society, complete with window bars, double door locks and ubiquitous security cameras. The dangers of being Christian, we adjure ourselves, are past. We are safe at last, safe at last, thank God almighty, we are safe at last.


But safety is as much an illusion in 2011 as it was in the year 11. And even the religious safety assured by the First Amendment is not entirely guaranteed. In fact, it’s a bit awkward to brag about it when so many of our Christian sisters and brothers around the world do not enjoy religious safety. A quick scan of recent press releases from the National Council of Churches reminds us how unsafe they are:


In 2005, four members of the Christian Peacemakers organization were kidnapped by insurgents in Iraq.


In January 2007, an Armenian Orthodox editor in Instanbul, Hrant Dink, was assassinated following accusations by the Turkish government that his writings about the 1915 genocide of Armenians by Turkish Muslims made Turkey look bad.


In March 2007, a delegation of Filipinos told church leaders in the U.S. that Christians in the Philippines known for their support of the poor were being accused by the Philippine government of being Communist provocateurs and harassed or imprisoned.


In September 2009, the Episcopal bishop of Lahore, Pakistan, told U.S. religious leaders that tensions between Muslims and the Christian minority in Pakistan were high and that Christians were routinely harassed and threatened by religious fanatics “who have a mindset that all Westerners and Christian and all Christians are Westerners.”


In Istanbul, Turkey, the Ecumenical Patriarch – known as the “first among equals” of all Orthodox Christian patriarchs – resides in an isolated compound subject to constant threats from the surrounding community.


Last Easter, Christian Palestinians in the Holy Land were restricted from visiting Christian holy sites by the Israeli government, who considered them to be a threat to its security. The same restrictions often prevent Palestinians from visiting hospitals, grocery stores, their crops and places of employment.


In April 2010, the National Council of Churches asked the secretaries of state and defense to advocate greater security for Christians in Iraq, thousands of whom have fled their homes because of violent attacks.


Last January, New year’s eve worshippers in All Saints Coptic Orthodox Church in Alexandria, Egypt, were bombed and many died.


Last March, Shahbaz Bhatti, the only Christian in Pakistan’s federal cabinet, was assassinated by a Muslim group because he favored easing restrictions on Christians and other non-Muslim groups.


And the threats to Christian minorities are not unique to Muslim countries (where, it should be noted, most Muslims reject the violence of the extremists among them). In Myanmar, the Christian minority – mostly products of the American Baptist Foreign Mission Society – are under constant threat from the military junta.


Nor do you have to step outside the United States to experience the violence. Barely 20 years ago, hundreds of African American churches in the south were targets of mysterious acts of arson. And millions of Christians who happen to be gays and lesbians continue to be targets of taunts and threats from other Christians who regard their behavior as Christlike.


The sad fact of life is clear: it’s dangerous to be a Christian. It’s dangerous to live. True security does not exist. There is simply no way you can step out of your house this morning with the unconditional assurance that you will return safely tonight. The odds are on your side, but life offers no warranties.

Last week, nearly a thousand Christians from around the globe attended the International Ecumenical Peace Convocation in Kingston, Jamaica, to commemorated the close of the World Council of Churches’ Decade to Overcome Violence. Violent behavior, they concluded, is an inevitable byproduct of insecurity.


Dr. Lisa Schirch, professor of peace-building at Eastern Mennonite University in Harrisonburg, Va., told the gathering, “Governments tend to attempt to justify large-scale military action – at its worst, nuclear warfare - in the name of ‘security.’”


But Schirch called into question what security should mean for Christians.


"Jesus doesn't use the word 'security,'” she said. “The language of the church is much more about justice and peace than about security.”


When visiting Iraq in 2005, Schirch worked with Iraqis who were peace-building at a community level. "They told me this: security does not land in a helicopter; it grows from the ground up."


Even so, security founded on justice and peace doesn’t offer any guarantees, either. But perhaps the path to redemption was never intended to be secure. And the epistle writer in I Peter puts it in context:


“For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil,” he writes. “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit.”


That’s the one thing that is guaranteed.


Death, pain and suffering may be our inevitable lot. But in Christ, we are made alive – and then and only then are we surely safe.

I Peter 3:13-22 (NRSV)

Now who will harm you if you are eager to do what is good? But even if you do suffer for doing what is right, you are blessed. Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated, but in your hearts sanctify Christ as Lord. Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an account of the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and reverence. Keep your conscience clear, so that, when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God’s will, than to suffer for doing evil. For Christ also suffered* for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight people, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you—not as a removal of dirt from the body, but as an appeal to God for a good conscience, through the resurrection of Jesus Christ, who has gone into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him.

Way

I often wonder what it would have been like to follow Jesus around Palestine and Judea.

It sounds beatific in the NRSV, but I suspect it wasn’t easy: slapping down sandals all day with big, sweaty apostles, flushed by the heat, sneezing the dust, wondering where your next sip of cool water was coming from and keeping an eye out for pissed-off Pharisees carrying rocks. You try to listen to the rabbi in case you’re called upon to write a gospel someday, but your mind wanders. Sweat trickles down your face, you swat at a fly. Suddenly you realize the rabbi has just said, “And you know the way to the place where I am going.”


What?


Thomas tunes in like he’s been on another planet. Imagine the chutzpa it took to interrupt the rabbi’s smooth delivery to tell him you missed something.


“Um. Where are you going?”


Actually, this exchange reveals the fallacy in the question, “What Would Jesus Do – WWJD?” The guys who walked, ate and slept with Jesus rarely had a clue what he was about to do, so it seems unlikely we would be any clearer about it. What would Jesus do? And where is he going? And who knows the way? What?


These are interesting theological metaphors. Any attempt at finding your way in an unmarked desert, and figuring out where to go next, is a theological exercise. That’s how we spend our lives: we wander in uncertainty, we search for the bread crumbs that previous wanderers have left to mark the way, and occasionally we discover a great truth. But mostly we wander.


This passage of scripture makes me think of a man who did a lot of figurative wandering in the intellectual deserts of the sixties, and in 1969 he literally wandered the Dead Sea wilderness, lost his way and died. You could say he was a famous bishop, although the term is oxymoronic for most people these days. You could also say he was media-savvy and had a knack for attracting attention.

James Albert Pike was an agnostic attorney who found God, attended Union Theological Seminary, and served as rector of Christ Church in Poughkeepsie. He then became chaplain at Columbia University and dean of the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in Manhattan. In the fifties he attracted media attention by challenging Senator Joseph McCarthy’s claim that 7,000 U.S. clergy were part of the Kremlin conspiracy. In 1960 as Episcopal Bishop of California, he opposed Catholic Senator John F. Kennedy’s presidential nomination because he thought it threatened the separation of church and state. He marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma. He championed LGBT rights. He wandered so far ahead of his time his followers had trouble spotting him.


But Jim Pike didn’t become famous in the modern media sense until he challenged the basic tenets of the faith, including the virgin birth of Jesus, the doctrine of hell, and the Trinity. All of this was too much for his church and his fellow bishops, and in 1966 he was censured and forced to resign his bishopric.


I met Jim Pike in 1966 when he was on a spiritual retreat in England. I have no idea what the senior USAF chaplain in England – an American Baptist – was thinking when he invited Pike to address the Protestant Men of the Chapel annual banquet at RAF Lakenheath. Probably ninety percent of the people in the room thought Pike was a hell-bound heretic.


I was an Air Force chaplain’s assistant and attended the banquet with my boss, Chaplain Harland Getts.


I thought Pike was quite charming. Wearing thick horn-rimmed glasses and a dark pin-striped suit with a purple Rabat – and reeking of cigarettes – Pike arrived early. He walked up and down the rows of tables, shaking hands and chatting amiably with everyone in the room. I was seated next to Chaplain Getts, a Southern Baptist with conservative views and a baby face. Pike noticed the latter and reached out to muss my boss’s hair and give him a paternal pat on the head. Harland flushed deeply. I turned away and smirked.


Shuffling just behind his dad was Pike’s son, Jim, who was attending college in England. Young Jim wore his hair stylishly long – something you noticed if you were in the Air Force – and sported a mod blazer and faded blue jeans. We were about the same age, so when we shook hands I asked him, “Did your dad make you come?” He smiled and said, “Naw, I came to keep an eye on him.”


Weeks later, in a hotel room in New York, young Jim committed suicide. The rest of the story filled newspapers and television news programs for weeks. The elder Pike began reporting poltergeist phenomena at home: books vanishing and reappearing, clothes in the closet disarranged and rumpled, and safety pins appearing out of nowhere opened to the approximate the time of young Jim’s death.


Convinced his son was trying to get a message to him, Pike consulted spiritualists and clairvoyants. In 1967 he appeared on national television with Arthur Ford, a Disciples of Christ minister who claimed to talk with the dead. Pike was convinced his son had contacted him through Ford. Pike’s former church colleagues were convinced he had finally taken leave of all his senses.


(Parenthetically, I don’t know what to make of clairvoyancy. Like most people, I’ve experienced my share of spooky phenomena – especially when I was stationed in England – but I’m a skeptic. Years ago, when I worked for the Baptists, I drove from Philadelphia to a meeting in Pittsburgh with a friend, a seminary professor. It’s a long drive and after we had exhausted all the gossipy subjects we could think of, my friend surprised me by announcing he knew Arthur Ford. My friend’s wife had died years earlier – by her own hand, I learned later – and my friend had been eager to contact her on the other side. The professor said that in a séance, Ford convinced him he was really talking to his dead wife – all the intimate details were in place, dates and times of key events in their lives, the couple’s private moments, even the minor experiences of their children. But his dead wife, who was supposedly communicating through Ford, got the middle name of their daughter wrong. My friend said he concluded that his wife deliberately gave him wrong information to warn him that further efforts to contact her might jeopardize his soul. We drove several miles in silence and I speculated how much of the private wifely information Ford knew about could have been gotten from newspaper clippings, obituaries, correspondence and other non-spiritual sources. Probably most of it, I concluded – right down to the details of sexual intimacy, which I suspect are common to most couples. As we neared our western Pennsylvania destination, my friend spoke again, softly to himself: “I wonder what that says about the empty tomb.”)


Both Jim Pike and my friend lost loved ones to suicide, and no doubt both were desperate to know how much they had contributed to their beloved’s final despair. I can understand how an obsession to contact someone on the other side might make you believe you had done it. I don’t judge either man, or jump to the conclusion that their journeys were delusions. But each man was clearly wandering in search of the way. In the midst of their tragic reveries, both men were jarred awake by Jesus’ distant voice: “And you know the place where I am going.” And both men realized they were no longer sure what Jesus was talking about.

Jim Pike’s story ended in the wilderness around the Dead Sea. He and his wife, Diane, who he had met at a clairvoyance convention, rented a car and drove alone into the desert. Jim wanted to experience what Jesus felt when he was tempted in the wilderness for forty days: the scalding sun, the thirst, the hunger. He wanted to know what the voice of God sounded like under the desolate circumstances.


Unguided, the couple turned off the main road and drove toward the Dead Sea until the tires sank beneath the crusty surface of the sand. Spinning the wheels dug them deeper and eventually Jim and Diane decided to retrace their route back to the road on foot. But they got lost, and soon the 56-year-old Jim – an overweight, chain smoking alcoholic – collapsed in exhaustion. He told Diane to go find help. “If I don’t make it by the time you get back,” he told her, “I am at peace.”


It took Diane many hours to stumble onto the main road and a passing motorist picked her up and took her to the police station in Bethlehem. Israeli soldiers launched a massive search for Jim. They found the rental car, which started immediately once they pushed it out of the rut, but found no sign of Pike. The search took several days until his badly decomposed body was found in a box canyon where he had apparently slipped and fallen.


I was a sophomore at Eastern Baptist College when all this took place in September 1969, and I followed media coverage of the missing Bishop with interest. The first report after he was found was that his body was discovered in a kneeling, praying position, but I don’t think that was true. He may have been praying, but he had fallen off a small cliff and was sprawled painfully on the rocks. Jim Pike’s wilderness journey was over.


Having opined that wandering in the wilderness is a theological metaphor, I’m now wondering how to make sense of Jim Pike’s last journey. His critics would say he lost his way decades before his excursion into the Judean desert. He started out as an agnostic and ended up as deluded spiritualist. In between, he abandoned the creeds of Christianity – the virgin birth, the trinity, the doctrine of hell – and finally he was abandoned by his fellow bishops.


No one knows what went through Jim Pike’s mind in September 1969 when he was alone in the same wilderness where Jesus fasted and prayed. No one knows the state of his soul, or what God said to him as he scratched his way through crevices and sun-baked rocks. All we know is what he told his wife: “I am at peace.”


But I would like to think God’s still, small voice would have reminded Pike – a biblical scholar – that the way through the spiritual desert need not be as twisted and torturous as we perceive it.


Two thousand years ago, when the rabbi was addressing his puzzled apostles, he said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.”


And then he said, “And you know the way to the place where I am going.”


That was when Thomas woke up and said, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”


Jesus replied, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.”


Jim Pike was a publicity hound, a drinker, a bounder, a chain smoker, probably a sex addict, a lousy husband (three times), a failed father, and an arrogant doubter of God and the church. Yet his last act on earth was to search the Judean desert for clues to what the historical Jesus experienced when he talked to God.


What God said to Jim Pike on the day of his death must remain a mystery on this side of Jordan. But it could have been this:


“Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”


Our own wanderings may not be as dramatic or as attention-getting as Jim Pike’s. But all of us have periods of wandering. And for each of us, the promise of Jesus remains, clear and unmistakable:


“And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.”

‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way to the place where I am going.’ Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.’

Philip said to him, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and we will be satisfied.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been with you all this time, Philip, and you still do not know me? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; but if you do not, then believe me because of the works themselves. Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it. John 14:1-14

Sell! Sell!

They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved. (Acts 2:42-47)

Where did we go wrong?


We read on good authority that the early Christians "would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need."


If I could speak on behalf of Michele Bachman or Glenn Beck - which I can't, but if I could - I'd grab an existential bullhorn to transcend the tiresome dimensions of time and tell these primitives what us modern Christians think of them.


Morons!


What the hell are you doing, giving away all your stuff? Not only does Luke's subversive prose plant treacherous ideas in modern brains - like, "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need"? - it was inevitable that these early share-the-wealth deals died with the disciples. The history of the last 2,000 years vindicates the Tea Party platform that we all have a God-give right to keep whatever we can get our hands on. The Christian monarchs of Europe, most of whom believed they reigned by divine right, were wealthy beyond our wildest imagination, and most were careful to keep their abundance in the family. Perhaps the closest any of us get to first-century socialism is when our grandmothers invite us to their cluttered parlors and tell us, "If you see anything you like, put your name on it and you can have it after my funeral."


There are, of course, generous Christian philanthropists who endow new church roofs, soup kitchens and ecumenical programs, but none of them give everything they have to the poor. And why would that surprise us? Who expects anyone to give everything to the poor?


Who? Well, that's a bit of an awkward question. Bill Gates doesn't expect anyone to tell him to do that, nor does Warren Buffet. But chances are, neither of them have put the question directly to Jesus: what good deed must I do to have eternal life?


The question leads us to another meddlesome scripture verse in Matthew, chapter 19, verses 16-26.

Then someone came to him and said, ‘Teacher, what good deed must I do to have eternal life?’ And he said to him ... ‘If you wish to enter into life, keep the commandments.’ ... The young man said to him, ‘I have kept all these; what do I still lack?’ Jesus said to him, ‘If you wish to be perfect, go, sell your possessions, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’ When the young man heard this word, he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.

Poor dude. No one knows what happened to this rich young man or what he thought of Jesus' two-step salvation plan. Maybe he eventually wiped a tear from his eye and gave all his money to the poor, but our instincts make us doubt it. For one thing, there was no tax incentive for that kind of largesse, and for another, none of us know any rich people who would give the idea a second thought. So, good-bye, Jesus.


Each Sunday when I climb the staircase of North Baptist Church in Port Chester, N.Y., I pass a black-and-white print of a painting by Johann Michael Ferdinand Heinrich Hoffman, a German painter in the late 19th and 20th centuries whose paintings depicted the life of Jesus.

The center figure in the picture is Jesus, gesturing with both hands toward a bearded old man who represents the poor and sick. At the right of the painting is a well dressed young man who places his left hand on his hip and turns his sad face away from Jesus. The young man has clearly heard something that appalls him. Daughter Katie, who also passes the picture every Sunday, loves it. She thinks the young man looks like her when she is told something she doesn't like - right down to the hand on the hip and the diverted pout. Katie is almost correct. In fact, the disappointed young man looks like all of us.


The Hoffman painting is "Christ and the Rich Young Ruler." The original can be viewed across the street from the God Box, where Martha and I work, in Riverside Church. Two companion Hoffman works are also there: "Christ in the Temple," and - one of the most reproduced paintings in the world - "Christ in Gethsemane."


The paintings were purchased and given to the church by the same man whose fortune endowed its construction: John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Rockefeller - known as St. John the Divine among American Baptists who benefitted from his generosity over many years, including those of us who enjoy the fruits of the ABC Ministers and Missionaries Benefit Board. Junior was by all reports a good man. The turning point of his life may have been in April 1914 when a riot occurred at a coal-mining company where Junior owned a controlling interest and served as an absentee director. Twenty men, women and children died in the incident and Junior was called to testify in January 1915. He encountered the charismatic union organizer, Mary Harris "Mother" Jones, and in his testimony admitted fault. Some historians say his courage restored the family's reputation; others say his honesty introduced a new era of union relations in the United States. At the end of his life, there were few parallels to the sheer volume of philanthropy he initiated.


But, as we strict biblical constructionists are bound to point out, he didn't give away all that he had to the poor. His sons and their heirs sit on a leftover bundle that makes Scrooge McDuck's money bin look like chump change.


Martha and I met Steven Rockefeller, professor emeritus of religion at Middlebury College, at last year's rededication of The Interchurch Center where we work. Steven, son of Nelson, was there to represent his grandfather, the late Junior, without whose generosity the God Box would still be a series of breezy tennis courts on the Hudson. Tall and bald, as if he emerged from the Daddy Warbucks school of central casting, Steven's dignified demeanor makes you forget his youthful escapade in which he married one of the family's downstairs maids. He's a respected theologian and academician, with the minor caveat that when you're a Rockefeller, people tend to think every mumble and belch that comes out of your mouth is deep. When I shook Steven's hand, Jesus' admonishment to the rich young ruler crossed my mind. I might have asked him if he had plans to give all his money to the poor, but I'm not as dim as I look. I smiled and thanked him for his brilliant - brilliant - speech.


So, what about Jesus' message to the rich young ruler? Was Jesus baiting the poor dude, just to see how far his crest would fall? Or was the young man asking for it, ingratiating himself with the famous rabbi, and arrogantly limiting the price of admission to heaven to one "good deed"?


No doubt it has been argued by thousands of ecclesiastical lawyers that Jesus is not really setting an impossibly high bar to heaven. Initially, the young man asked how to win eternal life, and Jesus told him to obey the commandments, which the young man said he did. Score. Then Jesus said, if you want to be perfect, give away all you have to the poor and follow me. Ah, there's the catch. You don't have to be perfect to get into heaven. If you did, heaven would be as empty as a hotel bar during an American Baptist biennial meeting.


The gospel writer took pains to record the scene when the disconsolate young man slouched away from Jesus. You can almost hear Jesus sigh as he comments: "Truly, I tell you, it will be hard for a rich person to get into the kingdom of heaven." He adds the famous line that Elton Trueblood believed was a messianic wisecrack: "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." (Matthew 19:23)


But the apostles didn't laugh. They choked on their matzos and shouted, "Jesus Christ! Then who can be saved?" Jesus stared into their eyes and said, "For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible." (25-26)


The rich young man should have stayed to listen. Heaven is not a meritocracy. Good deeds won't get you there, and you can't buy your admission by bartering everything you own. As Jesus perseverated throughout his ministry, it's faith, not fortune, that opens those doors. Faith first - then good works.


The farther back in Christian history you go, the more likely you are to find Christians who got it right. The church in Acts was an example - symbolically enduring but historically fleeting. "All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need."


As the years passed, the disappearance of this utopian community was sudden and heart breaking. A few centuries later, Christians were gathering opposing armies, burning each other at stakes and beheading the apostates.


Some church historians blame the decline of the church on the end of the Sunday school movement, or the rise of liberalism, or the ecumenical movement, or - probably more to the point - the rise of Sunday morning athletic events and the end of Sunday evening prayer services that conflicted with the Ed Sullivan show. But it may well be that church decline began the first time a medieval bishop or monarch heard a sermon they didn't like, and ordered the preacher burned or beheaded.


We don't know a lot about the first century church described in Acts, and a lot of modern bishops and monarchs fret that the second chapter of Acts bears the seeds of the Communist manifesto. Down with the rich. Down with the upper classes. Up with the workers. Up with the same standard of living for everyone.


Too bad. Those early Christians were on to something. And while they were living a life style of equal sharing, they were never more popular. "Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple," Luke writes, "they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the goodwill of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved."


What a great period in history. These were not perfect people, nor were they devoid of comfort or home or food or goodwill. But their faith taught them that was all they needed. And each day, more people joined their little group to share the experience.


I sometimes wonder if the rich young man who walked away from Jesus ever discovered this Christian community. In their midst, would he have found it easier to sell all he had and give it to the poor? Or would he, like so many of us, stand like reeking camels before the eyes of impossibly tiny needles?


For us, and perhaps for the rich young ruler, entrance into the kingdom would be impossible. But for God, all things are possible. And in that grace lies our salvation.

Who was that masked man?

Recently I've been thinking about that passage in Luke (24:13-25) in which two travelers encountered the resurrected Jesus on the road and didn't recognize him.

Puzzling, is it not? These two walkers (one of whom doesn't get a name, which leads some scholars to think that Luke either had a lousy copy editor or the unnamed person was a woman) had known Jesus for years and should have remembered what he looked like. But they were clueless.

I can understand that. For one thing, Jesus probably looked a lot better than he did the last time they saw him, scourged raw, his face twisted in the agony of crucifixion. For another, Jesus may have been wearing a keffiyeh, the traditional Arab head dress that could hide his face. Many artists and cartoonists, themselves puzzled as to why Jesus was unrecognizable, have drawn a keffiyeh into the picture when they portray this scene on the road to Emmaus. Works for me.

But I think the traumatic events of the past several days also played a role. Death is disorienting. When I was 15, my mother's 32-year-old brother, my Uncle Maurice, died after a painful bout with cancer. At his funeral, I noticed my mother and other family members watched me intently as I approached the open casket to pay my respects. I learned later that everyone thought he looked exactly like me – straight brown hair, high forehead, black horn rimmed glasses, pursed lips. They thought I was going to see myself in the box and freak. But under circumstances like these, people may not see what others expect them to see. I looked at my uncle sadly and thought, "Damn, he was a good looking guy."

We'll never really know why the two travelers – Cleopas and what's-her-name - didn't recognize Jesus. Not only didn't they recognize him, they actually seemed to feel superior to this stranger they encountered on the road. "What's up?" Jesus asked, all friendly-like, and they snapped at him. "You don't know, man?" they said, or as the New Revised Standard bible puts it, "Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem who does not know the things that have taken place there in these days?" And Jesus – who could resist many temptations but not the urge to bait his friends – said, "What things?" So Cleopas and what's-her-name immediately begin to proclaim the gospel story of Jesus' resurrection, which is ironic when you think about it, because their first efforts at evangelical witness were to grab Jesus by the robe and tell him to believe.

At the end of the story, Luke reports that "their eyes were opened" and they recognized Jesus. As soon as they did Jesus, apparently still playing them, abruptly disappeared.

The story, known as the Emmaus Road Encounter, is uncomfortable territory for those of us who have trouble recognizing Jesus when we see him. We don't, of course, know exactly what he looked like. Two thousand years of art have rendered millions of iconic faces, Renaissance portraits and pre-Raphaelite paintings of Jesus, all of them remarkably different. The Jesus I would recognize on the road would have to look like Sallman's head of Christ, first sketched in charcoal by Warner Elias Sallman in 1924 and rendered in oil in 1935. The portrait, first titled "Son of Man," has been reproduced more than 500 million times. My Sunday school teachers at the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y., gave us baseball card size versions of it at Christmas so we could memorize the face. When I think of Jesus, I think of Sallman's head of Christ.

Is the portrait an accurate representation of the face of Jesus, shown with straight, light brown hair, aquiline nose, and white skin? No. But the image is certainly imbedded in our culture. Most of the Jesi of cinema look like Sallman's image: The Greatest Story Ever Told, King of Kings, The Passion of the Christ, The Last Temptation of Christ. Perhaps the blondest Jesus of all appeared in Gospel Road, the film produced in 1973 by my idol, Johnny Cash.

Anthropologists are clear that, unless he was a genetic freak, a man born a Jew in Bethlehem two millennia ago would have black hair, dark skin, and would likely brandish uncut payots, or sideburns, mandated by Leviticus 19.27. Not the kind of Jesus who could have hidden in a crowd where I grew up.

Theologically, of course, the race and ethnicity of the incarnate God is irrelevant and artists have portrayed Jesus as African, Asian and European. Whatever works.

Besides, it's not a good idea to get obsessed about what he really looked like. In 2002, the Washington Post published a feature, "The Face of Christ," that included a face described by readers as a brutish-looking man in a police mug shot. The face was created by forensic experts who based it on a half dozen 2000-year-old skulls found in Jerusalem. Readers were told that the latest tools of science were used to get a clearer idea what Jesus really looked like. (See above).

As our friends on the Emmaus road demonstrated, it's not easy to recognize Jesus in our midst at any time in history, whether we know what he looks like or not. But one thing is sure: if we're going to pick out Jesus in a crowd, we'll have to ditch the Sallman image – and we'll have to ditch our own presuppositions, the "my Jesus" that limits him to our personal biases, and makes him hard to spot.

A pastor friend of mine once told the story of having a late-night visitor at the Manse. The visitor was a homeless woman who obviously hadn't bathed in weeks. "Please, Reverend," she said. "I hate to bother you but I'm living in my car and I haven't eaten in days. I'm not a druggy, Reverend. I need food."

Pastors hear stories like this all the time. But it was late at night and my friend was tired, so he went to a box in his office where he kept "The Deacon's Fund" – ready cash for emergencies. The only cash in the box was a $20 bill – far too much for a meal. But he sighed, and handed it to the woman.

The woman gasped at his unanticipated generosity and grabbed my friend's hands.

"The hands of Jesus," she said. "The hands of Jesus."

Embarrassed, my friend freed his hands and sent the woman on her way. But as he lay awake in bed, he had a sudden thought. "She wasn't talking about my hands," he exclaimed.

In that same church there was a regular worshipper named Dick Jalopy – not his real name, but it rhymes with the mocking moniker his friends called him when he was in high school: Sloppy Jalopy. Dick was a recovering addict and not a little strange. He believed too much of the national budget was being spent on the Vietnam War and too little on services to the poor, and he carried his protest to political meetings dressed in a false white beard, red cap, red jacket, Bermuda shorts and decaying high tops. He called himself "Santa Cause." And even without the costume, he looked creepy with his pock-marked skin, long snarly hair and bandy legs. He also smoked constantly, explaining with a cough, "A lot of addicts beat the drugs but never the cancer sticks."

I used to watch Dick come into church on Sunday mornings. He had his preferred pew (as most Baptists do) and members of the congregation knew to sit far away from him. But he was tolerated because that's what Baptist do, or try to do. I don't think he ever joined the church, but he never missed a Sunday.

One Sunday during the organ prelude, I stared at the back of Dick's head. What's up with you, Dick? I mused to myself. Sure, you love God and you love people and your faith keeps you clean. But you're strange, smelly and you make people uncomfortable. And no one knows where you live.

Suddenly the organ swelled with the strains of, "Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus," and in the process of standing I was so surprised I lost my balance.

My God, Dick, I thought. Are you Jesus, man?

Sloppy Jalopy? Jesus?

It's the kind of thought one has when one misses the morning coffee, and I quickly dismissed it. But for years, every time I saw Dick, I'd think: that's exactly what Jesus would look like to us. Strange. Eccentric. And he would make us uncomfortable.

Okay, probably Dick Jalopy was not Jesus. But that's also true of the Jesi we carry in our hearts, white and blonde and holy like Sallman's head, or glowing and red-bearded like the Holman Hunt figure standing at our door and knocking. These images don't make us think of the Jesus who violated religious traditions by healing the sick on the Sabbath, or by declaring to his followers that none of this is about you, but about the poor, the imprisoned, the disabled, the oppressed and those drowning in economic injustice.

No wonder Cleopas and what's-her-name didn't quite grasp who Jesus was when they fixed their gaze upon him.

"Oh, how foolish you are, and how slow of heart to believe all that the prophets declared," Jesus told the couple, and they still didn't recognize him. "Was it not necessary that the Messiah should suffer these things and then enter into his glory?"

In a strange way, Jesus was more Santa Cause than Sallman's head. His defiance of tradition and convention made people uncomfortable, and they turned away from him.

That's why the Emmaus Road story can be disturbing. And I've got to wonder. Would I recognize Jesus if he joined me on a stroll up Broadway? Or would I dismiss him as a strange and eccentric figure who doesn't meet my expectations. Would my heart burn within me as he talked, or would my mind wander because he was saying things I didn't understand?

And when he went on his way, would I go with him to the judgment? Or would I be like the sheriff and prospector in the old movies who stayed behind and watched the good guy ride away, and ask myself:

Who was that masked man?

Doubting it

    This week President Obama released the long form of his birth certificate. As all but a handful of disingenuous propagandists have known all along, it proves that he was born August 4, 1961 at 7:24 p.m. in Honolulu.
    That's interesting but it won't satisfy "birthers" who have their own reasons for defying fact and logic. But even if their straw-grasping efforts to undermine the president continue, I hope we can dispense with the temptation to call them "doubting Thomases." Thomas the Doubter may have been a lot of things, but he was not a crazy opportunist.
    The anecdote that made Thomas famous will be read in thousands of Christian churches this week. It's from John 20:24-25, one of the accounts of Jesus' appearances after his resurrection.
    "But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples told him, ‘We have seen the Lord.’ But he said to them, ‘Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.’" (NRSV)
    So Thomas didn't believe dead people get up and walk. That's not a hard position to defend. It's impossible to believe.
    A lot of things are impossible to believe. Thomas would have been appalled by the approach conceived 1800 years later by Lewis Carroll in Alice in Wonderland.
    "Sometimes," Alice says after interacting comfortably with a talking white rabbit, a disappearing cat and a mad hatter, "I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."
    What an admirable trait: establishing a quota for the number of impossible things you will believe. I don't know where Baptists would be without it – and how American it is. We all know people who can believe just about anything. What a blessing that is. Doubt is so dark and lonely, while belief is so comforting, so blissful.
     What's your personal record for believing impossible things?
    If you haven't eaten breakfast yet, here are some impossible things that thousands of people devoutly believe and insist on convincing their family and friends.
    One, NASA scientists have discovered a "missing day" in time which corresponds to biblical accounts of the sun standing still for a day.
    (Actually, the "missing day" discovery goes back to a book written by Harry Rimmer in 1890, titled, The Harmony of Science and Scripture. The discovery has been particularly popular since at least 1936, when it began to be reported by radio preachers. I can't begin to understand the math that would reveal a missing day in history, but perhaps that is not important.
    Second, Scientists drilling in Siberia went too far and ended up punching a hole through to Hell, where the screams of the damned drifted up to them.
    Accompanying this report are possibly contradictory, possibly plausible stories that the scientists (a) ran screaming from the hole, shouting, "I can't listen to the agony," or (b) promptly accepted Jesus Christ as their personal savior, or (c) both.
    Third, a group known as "The Second Coming Project" is seeking to clone Jesus from the DNA of holy relics, such as the Shroud of Turin.
    It's hard to tell from these reports whether the project was inspired by Jurassic Park, the novel and movie in which long extinct dinosaurs are cloned when scientists retrieve their DNA from mosquitoes trapped in prehistoric tree sap, or whether the scientists knew that carbon dating of the Shroud of Turin reveals it to be 1500 years too young to have been Jesus' burial garment. The curious thing is that no one from the Second Coming Project has been interviewed by Fox News.
    Fourth, airlines will not pair Christian pilots and co-pilots out of fear that the rapture will snatch away both crew members capable of landing the flight.
     I can't remember when I first heard this report, and there are several versions of it. It may be the reason the Wright brothers didn't fly together at Kitty Hawk in 1903.
    Fifth, a Christian woman dies leaping through her car's sunroof when events convince her that Jesus has returned.
    The rest of this story involves 13 people being injured in a 20-car pile-up that occurred when drivers on an interstate swerved their cars to miss the woman, who had jumped out of her car screaming, "He's back, he's back." She got this impression when 12 life-sized helium-filled human sex dolls escaped from a delivery truck and floated sublimely into the air. This story was later used in a script written for an HBO series about funeral directors, Six Feet Under.
    Finally, sixth, and one of my favorites, atheist Madalyn Murray O'Hare is circulating a petition to the FCC to have religious programming banned from broadcasting.
    O'Hare, as you may recall, is best known for the Murray v. Curlett lawsuit, which led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling ending government sponsored prayer in U.S. public schools. O'Hair later founded American Atheists and became so controversial that in 1964 Life magazine referred to her as "the most hated woman in America.
    All of these six impossible things to believe have one thing in common: none of them are true. All of them have been debunked by reputable journalists, and you can read the truth about them at snopes.com, a website that debunks urban legends. (Just be cautious if you use Snopes to prove to people that their dumb ass ideas have no basis in reality. I've learned on several occasions that people are happiest when left alone with their delusions.)
    The O'Hare legend is one I encountered frequently when I worked for American Baptist communications. Thousands of well-intentioned American Baptists called upon their denominational leaders to publically disavow O'Hare's petition to end religious programming on television. Literally millions wrote to the Federal Communication Commission demanding that the O'Hare petition be summarily rejected. The FCC, despite being a federal bureaucracy, did not have the means of telling everyone that there was no such petition, so the rumor persisted for years. Although it has slowed down some, it still pops up in the email and telephone voicemail of church communicators - despite the fact that Madalyn Murray O'Hare died in 1995 when she was kidnapped and murdered, along with her son and granddaughter, by a member of her organization. (That was a shock because one expects better from atheists.)
    So chalk up all these impossible things to believe as belonging in the same category as
    Barack Obama was born in Kenya or Indonesia or some place outside of the United States,
    and, perhaps most implausible of all,
   Jesus Christ was raised from the dead.
    Thomas will be remembered as "Thomas the Doubter" until the end of time, and many Christians reserve a special place of scorn for him. How, we ask ourselves, could this ingrate doubt that his Lord has been raised from the dead?
    Despite our derision, it seems likely that we would have been in the same place as Thomas. If there is one thing we have learned about life, one thing we have seen with our own eyes, one thing we have experienced as irrefutable and irreversible truth, it is that death is the end.
    The dead do not rise.
    As soon as life leaves the body, the body's inner parasites multiply exponentially and the body begins its inevitable return to dust. "I will not believe," Thomas says. And when you come right down to it: why would he? Would you?
    Let's give Thomas credit: he says what he means and he isn't trying to deceive anybody. You don't often encounter that kind of integrity in the church.
    I have a social media friend who tells about an experience she had while visiting a church. The pastor – no doubt one of those chubby guys who brandishes his broadly beaming mug on his webpage and on Facebook – told the congregation: "If you don't have a smile on your face, you shouldn't be here. Christianity is a religion of joy."
    The woman, whose daughter is seriously ill, fled the service in tears. She did not come to church to smile. She was looking for comfort and she was told that God dismissed her because she was not smiling.
    When Jesus appeared to his disciples, they were in no mood to smile, either. They had every reason to expect that their fate would be the same as Jesus' fate – in fact, Jesus had predicted that would come to pass. In days following Jesus' arrest and crucifixion, they had abandoned him and hid themselves in shame, tortured by a gnawing sense of failure. But when Jesus found them in hiding, all he said was, "Peace be with you."
    Thomas, as we all know, responded to the offering of peace with an unequivocal declaration: "My Lord, and my God."
    Thomas was a doubter and he said so. What a great model he was for the rest of us doubters. We may come under some social pressure to falsify our testimony, and we may be told we are Judases if every day with Jesus is not sweeter than the day before. But Jesus never wears a happy face, and I suspect he doesn't expect us to wear one, either.
    As many people know, Thomas was very busy following his final appearances in scripture. After he had embraced Jesus as "my Lord and my God," he embarked on a missionary journey that rivaled Paul's. He traveled thousands of miles to South Asia, and founded two of the world's oldest Christian churches - the Malankara Orthodox Syrian Church and the Mar Thoma Church of India. The testimony of these two churches thrives today, and their message is the same Jesus brought to the disciples, and the same we are compelled to bring to our neighbors everywhere: Peace be with you.
   

Curt and me

With thanks to certain writers -- you know who you are -- for liberating autobiography from the harsh restraints of truth.


I was probably the best Latrine Queen in the Air Force.


Anyway, that's what Curt LeMay said. Just ask him.


Oh, right. He's dead.


But you can believe me.


It all began in October 1964. I was in basic training at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas, struggling to find my niche in the military hegemony. I got a nearly perfect score in the Air Force aptitude test in mechanics, achieved by guessing my way through several pages of multiple choice questions, and I tested high in typing. Early on, it looked like I'd be spending four years repairing jets or typing supply requisitions. Neither possibility seemed heroic (although as I think about, it's improbable that jets maintained by me would stay in the air long enough to liberate the Mekong Delta). I began to question whether volunteering for military service had been such a good idea.


Then one morning Sergeant Ellefson, our barracks chief, said he detected stubble on my face. This was likely a ruse because, at 18, I had never shaved a day in my life, but sergeants had a highly personalized view of reality and it was rarely a good idea to challenge it. So I checked an impulse to stroke my fuzz-free cheeks and said, "Yes, Sergeant."


"And this is what I'm gonna do about it," Ellefson said. He led me into the barracks latrine -- a room equipped with an open-bay shower, 12 sinks and two rows of redolent commodes facing each other -- and said the words that would change my life.


"You're gonna be my Latrine Queen," Ellefson said. "And every morning I wanna see these commodes so clean General LeMay can eat breakfast out of 'em."


Ellefson didn't seem like the kind of guy who used hyperbole, so I said, "How does he like his eggs?"


"You'll find out," he said, and left me alone in the Latrine.


At first I was stunned, alone with so much stained porcelain. But I had grown up in a household where clean toilets and godliness were theologically fused and I knew exactly what to do. I armed myself with sponges, scowering powder and cans of pungent disinfectant and set to work. By the end of the day, my nose smarted with lingering fumes of ammonia. More to the point, the harsh glare of white porcelain that glowed like our transfigured Lord, brought tears to my eyes.


"God DAMN," the sergeant said, inspecting my work. "God DAMN." He stroked the silvery faucet of one of the sinks, and admired his unblemished reflection in one of the mirrors. He stepped back to view the full pristine panorama and he began to smile. "God DAMN."


Sergeant Ellefson placed me on full-time latrine duty, which was fine with me because it replaced the more onerous trials of boot camp, like precision drilling and olfactory comparison drills to prove you could tell the difference between tear gas and human pheromones. Latrine Queen also proved to be an extremely powerful position because it gave me the authority to develop such time-saving measures as requiring my barracks mates to use the mess hall latrines and shower in the rain. But as the eight weeks of basic training neared at end, I began to worry what the next four years might hold. There were no medals for exceptional commode cleansing, nor did a four year career of urinal polishing seem like it could generate diverting tales to spin in American Legion bars.


Then one day as I was using a cotton swab to clear calcium deposits from the shower heads, I heard a commotion in the barracks. A high-pitched voice yelled, "Ten HUT," followed by a thunderous rumble as fifty guys leaped off their bunks and slammed their brogues on the linoleum floor.


"Where's the latrine?" a gravely voice shouted with urgency. "Gotta crap." This was not an unusual occurrence in San Antonio where northeastern stomachs were unused to Tex-Mex burritos. After lunch, stricken officers often found it necessary to pop into the first barracks they passed.


"This way, Sir." Ellefson's muffled voice sounded uncharacteristically polite.


"Outa my way, goddam it."


The latrine door sprung open and in marched a scowling officer clenching in his teeth a huge Cuban Cohiba -- unusual even in the earliest days of the Cuban economic boycott. The officer was barrel-chested with thick steel-gray hair and there were four twinkling silver stars on each of his shoulders.


Before I could exclaim, "General LeMay, Sir," he pushed me out of his way and moved earnestly toward the bank of sparkling commodes. But the unblemished souls of his spit-shined low-quarter shoes were too new to resist the polished tiles of the cleanest latrine in the Air Force. Down went the general.


I watched with considerable interest as the general's feet rose and his posterior descended in a fluidly graceful motion, and his arms shot out like a uniformed cruciform. Abruptly, he was on his back with his limbs fully extended like DaVinci's Vitruvian man. His wide body spun in a clockwise motion on the shiny floor.


The general's gabardine uniform offered little resistance to the polished tiles, but when he stopped revolving he surrendered the back of his head to the hard floor. He appeared to be carefully assessing his situation, like the great tactician he was.


I could think of no chapter in the USAF Customs and Courtesies manual that addressed this particular situation. I stood cautiously over the general and leaned forward to make eye contact with him. He scowled upwards at me, furiously chewing the Cohiba.


"General LeMay," I ventured.


The general narrowed his eyes menacingly. I think he said, "Grempf," but he might have been swallowing a piece of tobacco.


"How do you like your eggs?"


He briefly appeared to think about it, but then he spat the wetly chewed cigar out of his mouth so forcefully that it smacked against a urinal on the far side of the room.
 "Help me up, goddam it. Gotta crap."


I placed my hands under his arms and pulled him to his feet. As soon as he was erect, he shoved me aside and skidded toward the commodes. He dropped his gabardine drawers and plopped down on the seat. I had gotten used to seeing young basic-trainees seated in the humiliating ritual of exposed collective crapping, but the Air Force chief of staff seemed incongruous in the room. The general carried it off with dignity but never stopped scowling at me. I wasn't sure what the rules called for, but I assumed it had something to do with standing at strict attention. I refrained from saluting.


Soon (and I spare the reader the auditory and olfactory details of the scene) the general was finished. He stood and tightened his belt.


General LeMay walked to one of the sinks. As he washed his hands he looked around the cleanest latrine in the Air Force.


"Goddam," he said. "This must be the cleanest latrine in the Air Force."


Now seemed like an appropriate time to salute. I snapped my right hand rigidly to my forehead, and he responded a more casual gesture that looked as if he were shooing a fly from his face.


Without another word, the general pulled a neatly folded towel from the shelf and dried his hands. When he walked out, I picked up the disgusting cigar butt and threw it away.


General LeMay retired from active duty early in my Air Force career, but I saw him a few times after that. Most of these encounters took place when the chief of staff was called to accompany President Lyndon B. Johnson on his visits to military installations. For the remainder of the general's career, whenever word came down that LBJ was planning to visit the base, I got a call from a chief master sergeant the chief's Pentagon office.


"The old man wants the President to have access to the cleanest latrine in the Air Force," the sergeant would say. "You're on."


On such occasions I would spend a week getting the presidential latrine in shape for presidential elimination, whichever form it might take. On occasion, General LeMay would invite me outside to shake hands with the president.


"Goddam," LBJ would say. "That must have the cleanest latrine in the Air Force," as General LeMay nodded happily. And I would stand modestly between the two men, trying not to reveal the pride that was swelling in my chest.


I was probably the best Latrine Queen in the Air Force.


Anyway, that's what Curt LeMay said. Just ask him.


Oh, right. He's dead.


But you can believe me.