The Michael Eric Dyson Reader (38 page)

But their oratory—like that of preacher-politicians from Adam Clayton Powell to William Gray—has been shaped by the peculiar demands of public life and informed by a mission to translate the aspirations of black Americans to the larger secular society. The aims of their public speech have led them to emphasize certain elements of the black preaching and church tradition such as social justice, the institutional nature of sin, and the redistribution of wealth, while leaving aside such others as the cultivation of the spiritual life, the nurturing of church growth, and the development of pastoral theology. Such varying emphases are usually framed as the differences between “prophetic” and “priestly” religion. If the former has been most visible to American society in the guise of churchbased civil rights activists, the latter has been closer to the heart of the religious experience of most black Christians.

Though Taylor has combined both approaches—he was active in the civil rights movement in New York, and was a close friend and preaching idol of Martin Luther King, Jr.—he realizes that his life work has ruled out the kind of visibility
that comes from high-profile activism. “I recognized early that the [kind of] work I do is not attention grabbing. . . . When I came along . . . college presidents were the lords of black America. Later, it became civil rights [leaders]. Still later, it became [holders of] political office.”

Taylor humorously admits that with every attempt he made to “do something else [other than pastor], I got trapped. . . . They put the whole board of education off when I was a member,” he says. “Governor Rockefeller wiped it out.”

As James Massey maintains, “Taylor has stuck with the church. He has been busy handling the themes of the gospel, busy heralding what it was that Jesus came to do. He’s been busy honoring the name of his Lord, shaping a community around that name and seeking to effect society in ways that are consonant with the gospel purpose. This is not newsworthy, like leading a sit-in.”

Don Matthews of Washington’s First Baptist Church, the church of fellow Baptists Bill Clinton and Al Gore, agrees. “We’re in a time when the pulpit and the church in general are not particularly admired by anybody else that isn’t in it. The only place it is perceived as powerful is in the political world. . . . But the people who have the spiritual word to speak aren’t paid much attention by the
New
York Times
or the
Washington Post
.”

William Augustus Jones, noted pastor of Brooklyn’s Bethany Baptist Church, contends that Christians are “resident aliens” who have a radically different perspective on the world than secular citizens. “For a preacher to be regarded as popular means that his faithfulness to the word is not what it ought to be.”

Ironically, Taylor’s most bitter disappointments and defeats have come within the church world to which he has been single-mindedly devoted. Over dinner at Greenwich Village’s popular Spanish restaurant El Charro’s, Taylor, joined by his wife Laura—a shock of healthy black hair loosely pinned atop her hauntingly beautiful ebony face of high cheek bones and deep-set eyes—recalls the 1952 fire that destroyed Concord Church.

“It was devastating. And were it not for this lady I don’t know what I would have done,” Taylor confesses. “She fooled me, innocently. The architect sat in our home, and . . . I asked him how much it was going to cost [to rebuild the church]. He said it would cost a million dollars. My heart went straight down. Black people in Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1952 couldn’t raise a million dollars. But Laura said, ‘Don’t pay any attention to him. It won’t cost a dime over $750,000.”’ Taylor says that he was so anxious to believe her that for a year and a half he “traveled on that delusion.” He laughs heartily as he reports that it cost nearly $2 million. In his view, his wife’s figure turned out to be a “merciful deception.”

Though naysayers said that Concord would never rebuild, the congregation not only erected an edifice on the very grounds of the fire but also added a gymnasium, an educational building, and a full space underneath the sanctuary, doubling the church’s seating capacity.

Less satisfying was the outcome of the bitter 1960 confrontation between Taylor and J. H. Jackson, then president of the National Baptist Convention, USA,
Inc., the nation’s third largest Protestant denomination and the group to which most black Baptists belong. Jackson’s conservative social and political views put him at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and those ministers sympathetic to the cause of civil rights. Because of their disagreements about civil rights, and the issue of incumbency (Jackson had been president of the convention since 1953 and in the process broke convention limits on presidential tenure), Taylor agreed to run for the convention presidency at its annual meeting in Kansas in 1960.

A bitter fracas ensued. Hundreds of supporters of each candidate physically struggled and fought, leading to the accidental death of a loyal Jackson supporter and certain defeat for Taylor’s team. The next year Taylor joined with King and other ministers who seceded from the convention to form the Progressive National Baptist Convention, Inc., which currently has a membership of more than 2 million people.

More than 30 years after this painful period, Taylor harbors no animosity toward Jackson, who died in 1991 at eighty-four. “Jackson had an ingenious and peculiar appeal to black people, as Reagan had to white people: J. H. Jackson could weep with the idea . . . that he was being put upon by powerful people . . . who were attacking [him], and he was weak. He had a gift for that.”

Taylor even manages to find humor in illustrating this dimension of Jackson’s appeal, which turned on his great gift of storytelling. H. H. Humes, a childhood friend of Jackson’s, recalls hearing Jackson preach about the hardships that afflicted his parents in attempting to send Jackson to college. “When it looked like he couldn’t go back to college, his mother said, ‘The boy must go.’ And the father said, ‘We don’t have anything but a mule.’ But she said, ‘The boy must go to college.’ And the father said, ‘We won’t have any way to get the crop.’ But the mother said, ‘The boy must go to college,’ and they finally sold the mule. Humes was weeping as he came out of the church. And someone said to him, ‘Well you grew up with him. What did they do for a crop [since] they sold the mule? [Taylor’s voice affects a weepy tone] ‘Oh,’ Humes said, ‘Jack’s people never did own a mule, but I just can’t stand to hear him tell that story.”’ Taylor breaks into laughter, trailing it with “Lord, have mer . . . ” The last syllable of his plea is erased by more laughter.

Taylor’s enormous gift of humor, his ability to acknowledge the humanity of his opponents, gives him the grace to accept and overcome his own failings. When I asked him about the thorny problem confronting the black church in its treatment of women in the ministry, Taylor confessed that he had to grow into his enlightened position.

“As with the white male, an exclusive preserve [of black male power is] under threat of invasion . . . I had to have a conversion myself. I knew theoretically this was wrong, but prejudice is not a rational thing.”

Taylor’s conversion occurred in the late ’60s at Colgate Rochester Divinity School, where he was teaching a class on preaching. There Taylor encountered white female students whose fresh viewpoints helped change his views on women
in the ministry. “As they presented the gospel, I saw a new angle of vision . . . I had an interesting, and to me a humorous, thing happen. The young women of Colgate came to me and said, ‘You know, you’re just like all these other people here. You use all this sexist language.’ Well, I was really stung. Who am I, having suffered from being excluded so long, to [exclude others]? And so I worked on it.”

Taylor reports that after he delivered the Luccock Lectures at Yale Divinity School, a female faculty member thanked him for his inclusive language. Feeling good about the acknowledgment, he went back to Colgate to report this fresh triumph to his female students. “I saw some of the young women in the hall, and I told them what had happened. And I said, ‘You know, I want to thank you girls . . . ’ ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘you don’t say girls. Say women,’ ‘Well,’ I said. ‘It takes a little learning.’”

Since that time, Taylor has developed an acute analysis of gender relations, particularly in black culture. “I was greatly troubled by the Anita Hill-Clarence Thomas situation, and more troubled than almost anything by the attitude of [many] black women. I reached the conclusion that black women have been so put upon that they have developed a kind of psychological scar tissue, so that they’ve learned to take in stride things that ought to outrage them. And that distresses me. I am tired of the way black men misuse black women, and the way black women apologize for and accept what black men do.”

It is above all Taylor’s unsurpassed ability to preach to preachers—his keen sense of the preaching mission and its encumbrances and opportunities, its joyous peaks and its seemingly bottomless sorrows—that make him a popular presence among seminarians and seasoned preachers alike. In his homiletics class at Princeton, Taylor ranges through the history of the English pulpit with formidable ease, sharing stories of history’s great divines. He whips out tattered pieces of newspaper, whose margins are covered with notes drawn from a massive and virtually infallible memory bank of preaching lore and legend.

On one of the days I attend his class, Taylor produces a snatch of paper ripped from the previous Sunday’s
New York Times Book Review,
which he reads religiously, along with the
New Republic
(“I despise almost every word in it, but it gives me good targets to shoot at”), the
New York Review of Books,
and the daily
New York
Times
and
Newsday.
Taylor reads a review describing the ingredients of a great novel—from its descriptive power to its presentation of a wide view of humanity without losing its link to individual characters. He reminds them that great preaching contains the same elements.

His desire to help other preachers has endeared Taylor to audiences across the nation. It has made his sermons to ministers legendary. Black preachers, especially, collect sermons with the zeal of avid fans of baseball cards. At conventions of black denominations, the tapes of famous ministers sell briskly. These tapes are especially circulated and reproduced among younger preachers, serving as models of preaching excellence and training in the high art of sacred speech. Some even preach the sermons to their own congregations, trying out fresh ideas and
new words they have gleaned from master storytellers. Frederick Sampson’s “Dwelling on the Outskirts of Devastation,” Jeremiah Wright’s “Prophets or Puppets,” Charles Adams’s “Sermons in Flesh,” William Jones’s “The Low Way Up,” and Caesar Clark’s “Elijah Is Us,” have all acquired canonical status in a genre of religious address that treats the plight of the preacher. Several of Taylor’s own sermons, including “Seeing Our Hurts with God’s Eyes,” and “A Wide Vision Through a Narrow Window,” neither of which appear in his books of published sermons, are classics of the genre. They amply illustrate the astonishing range of his pulpit gifts.

In “A Wide Vision Through a Narrow Window,” Taylor, speaking on a text from Job, details for his audience of preachers at Bishop College’s L. K. Williams Institute in 1980, the price of authentic preaching. In an arresting metaphor he reminds us that for
eighteen chapters
Job’s friends had turned against him, “driving cold steel into his already bleeding spirit.” The
nineteenth chapter
—the chapter containing Taylor’s text—is Job’s “reply to their gloomy countenances, and their long, bitter indictment of his calamity, as they sit around the pallet of his misery.”

Taylor employs and repeats the sermon’s theme to sharpen his portrayal of Job’s predicament, a condition where “the window has narrowed out of which he looks upon the landscape of life. Once there had been the homes of children, and fruitful fields, and lowing cattle and bleating sheep. But now, the window has narrowed.” As if being forsaken by earthly friends were not enough, Job faces, as do all ministers, the prospect of feeling forsaken by God. Speaking through the voice of Job, Taylor says that “it seems that God has overthrown me. Now here is where the window does narrow to a slit. If God be for us, then what difference does it make, who is against us? . . . But, my father, if G-a-w-w-d be against us, what else is there left? I don’t know why, in the solemn appointments of God, that there are times when it does indeed seem as if we’ve got not a friend in earth—or in heaven!” Taylor thunders. And then he emphatically completes the sentence, with a staccato verbal surge, “left!”

Taylor eloquently rephrases the theme of his sermon in question form. “And my brother preachers, you say that you want great power to move among men’s heartstrings?” Taylor incants in almost mournful tones. “You cannot have that, without great sorrow. G-a-w-w-d can fill only the places that have been emptied of the joys of this life.” He then challenges them with examples drawn from the lives of other suffering servants. “Dale of Carr’s Lane in Birmingham [England] had particularly toward the end a terribly lonely existence. Charles Spurgeon in the Metropolitan Tabernacle [London] had rheumatism and gout that made life unbearable for him. Frederick W. Robertson of Brighton [England] was so sensitive that the least thing shattered him like the piercing of an eye. George Truett, who charmed the American South in the first four decades of this century lived in the after-memory of a hunting accident in which a friend was killed by his own gun.”

Taylor restates his theme later in the sermon. He then implores his congregation of preachers to look beyond the peripheral signs of preaching greatness to the
real source of pastoral insight—the common bond with one’s hearers provided by suffering. “Now you may tickle people’s fancies, but you will never preach to their hearts, until at some place, some solemn appointment has fallen upon your own life, and you have wept bitter tears, and gone to your own Gethsemane and climbed your own Calvary. That’s where power is!”