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A faithful presence of love in the absences of our city.

The Burning Church

burning church

The movie Selma begins with a powerful scene.  We are brought into the 16th St. Baptist church of Birmingham, Alabama on a Sunday morning.  The families are participating in the normal rhythms and routines of a Sunday.  Rhythms like we do.  They are getting ready, grabbing breakfast on the go, combing their hair, brushing teeth, putting on their “Sunday best.”  At church there is worship practice, Sunday school, a deacon meeting.   The sermon this particular morning of September 1963 was to be called — “The Lord Who Forgives.”  A sermon delivered following a summer full of racial tension in the city of Birmingham. 

Across town another order of things was happening.  A white car was driving to a home to pick up 3 men.  One of these men was nicknamed Dynamite Bob.  This car then drove to the 16th St. Baptist Church, and Bob ran to the front stairwell of the church and placed a box under those stairs, and he then ran back to the car and the car drove away.  The box contained 122 sticks of dynamite. 

The film Selma opens at that fateful moment — 10:22 am that morning.  There were 26 kids going down that same stairwell to the basement for their Sunday school class.  At 10:22, the box that Dynamite Bob placed at the stair well exploded.  The doors of the building blew off, and brick, mortar, iron became a mangles mess.  And then there was silence.  Witnesses described it as a terrible silence.  And following the silence came the screams. 

Twenty-two children were injured in the blast, and 4 little girls who were playing in bathroom near that stairwell were killed.  A grandfather became an enduring image from the blast that day.  He sat across the street from the 16th St. Baptist Church, blood dripping from his ear.  In his hand he held a shoe, and the words that he voiced over and over and over again were, “they got my baby, they got my baby, they got my baby.” 

The news media came, and the 16th St. Baptist Church became a foundational event in the battled for Civil Rights in the Jim Crow South.  This is why the movie Selma begins rehearsing the scene. 

The thing is this wasn’t the first bombing of a church, and it wouldn’t be the last.  Church bombing and churches on fire became a regular phenomenon during the years 1955-1968.  In Mississippi, 70 churches burned.  In 1964, churches were burned at a rate of 1 per week. 

And the question that emerges, “why the burning church?”  Why did black churches become the target of such violence? 

Greg Thompson says the following, “these churches were burned, because they were places of Christian worship.”  These men, women and children were learning the truth of God’s ordering of the world, his order of love.  And in so doing they were learning to protest all other orders. 

So in their worship, this people who were silenced by the wider culture of America, found their voices.  When their stories were choked out, in worship they found their story again.  They became according to Thompson, “the burning church.” Bombed and set ablaze because by participating in God’s order of the world, in his redeeming love, they protested what James Davidson Hunter calls the present disorder of the world. 

This burning church had an inner fire that undid the violence being done to them in the world.  And this inner fire meant they would be burned by lesser fires. 

Worship is participation in the order of God’s redeeming love.  Each week we gather and participate in this story of love.  We are formed and shaped by it individually and communally.  We are told about it.  We sing about.  We taste it, see it, hear it, feel it, smell it.  Our bodies are reanimated by this love. 

Worship is also protest of all other orders that are aiming at our loves.  Our participation in the very liturgies of our worship, the order — the call to worship; the singing of songs, hymns and spiritual songs; the confession of sin and assurance of pardon; the corporate readings of creeds, prayers and Scripture; the passing of the peace; the giving of tithes and offerings;  the prayers of the saints; the preaching of the Word; the sacraments of communion and baptism; the commission and benediction; the church calendar; the very space we meet in — all of this protest other orders. 

The orders of racism and white supremacy in the Jim Crow south were being protested by the order of love found in the worship of the black churches in that same Jim Crow South.  And this fire was extinguishing all those lesser fires, even as those lesser fires burned the buildings down.  This is the flame that burns in Christian worship.  We too are a burning church, being burned by different fires and yet in our very meeting and participating, we are protesting a world ordered by false stories, false gospels, false ends, false hopes. 

The week following the blast, the people of the 16th Street Baptist Church did what they always did.  They grabbed their Bibles, and they went to church.  They filled into churches on multiple nights in multiple churches.  Sometimes they even gathered in secret.  They worshipped.  They participated in God’s order of love and protested the racial disorder of our world, and they as Thompsons says, “became children of fire.”

~ Rev. Justin Edgar

*This article almost entirely is taken from Dr. Greg Thompson and his sermon entitled “The Burning Church.”