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Reflections

 

The new year typically brings a sense of new beginnings, new goals, forward-thinking pursuits designed to enhance and enrich the road that lies ahead.

It’s a time for us faith-seekers, us followers of Jesus, to heed His knock, to open our door a little wider to him.

It’s also a time of taking stock…From whence have we come?  What has occurred that teaches us about life?   Who have been our teachers of ways and means to get our doors cracked more widely open?

Today we celebrate a few of the people who have passed on in this past year, individuals whose lives were fully – meaningfully – lived, enriching our own by the teaching that came through their shining examples.

Let us begin our celebration by remembering our own Jack Waddell.

JACK WADDELL

John Austin Waddell, better known to us all as Jack, was a part of our New Covenant Community for many years. He had a 50-year career spanning the stages of America and Europe, which all started, and ended, here in Bloomington.

Jack graduated from Bloomington High School in 1959, where his talent for singing was recognized to the point of receiving private voice lessons that he couldn’t afford, and were thus worked off through doing chores.

On a scholarship, he attended Illinois Wesleyan where he became involved in various choirs and theater.

After graduation in 1963 as a music voice major, he set his sights on and moved to New York, where colleagues believed his career would be primarily in teaching. When he said that he wished to pursue opera as a career, he received gentle redirection.  Few opera singers were black men.

The inescapable reality of racism was not unknown to Jack. Touring the American south in one of his many choirs, he was once threatened at gunpoint by a state trooper while doing laundry. Jack changed course and set his sights on Europe.  In 1967 he arrived in West Germany.

A quote from Jack at this pivotal point in his life was, “Enter self-determination. Never let anyone define you. Never let anyone tell you what you cannot do.”

Shortly after arriving in Germany Jack was signed up as a soloist and following his debut, continued to sing and perform abroad for the next two decades, always in demand for German theater and TV.

His first show in Germany was a production of Hair with Donna Summer.

The West German government honored Jack by offering him German citizenship and a passport.

Jack became known in the U.S. in 1969 when, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., he put together a television tribute to King featuring classic African American spirituals.

Mark Wyman remembers Jack telling him that when he returned to New York City from Germany he knew it was time to give back and become a teacher. From his studio on 49th Street Jack counted among his students many top, young Broadway performers, including the lead of the well-loved Hamilton production.

He was 83 when he passed 11 short days ago.

Many of us here at NCC have fond memories of Jack.

Russ Rutter remembers Jack by saying…

I have played the piano for almost 75 years, but never did I dream that I would accompany an opera singer as renowned as Jack Waddell. But it happened. Jack came from the great world of international opera to bestow his musical gifts for a time on little NCC. Jack’s transcendent musical talent, but even more his humanity and his smiling and ebullient spirit, shone brightly as we worked through rehearsals to performance, above all his favorite: “Let Us Break Bread Together” in Moses Hogan’s marvelous arrangement for the bass voice.

What I remember most about Jack is that he made me and others around him believe they mattered—and, with the humility that accompanies true greatness of spirit, never cast himself as the star. What I know is that I will not look upon his like—or accompany his like—again. I will treasure memories of time spent with Jack the world-class singer and Jack the world-class man. Wherever Jack is now, there sounds his rolling bass voice, a voice that echoes in my memory.  Brother, and farewell.

In my short tenure here it took no time at all to recognize Jack’s humility and grace and warmth.  My favorite memory is very early on in my time with NCC.  I was torn about doing a two-part reflection on the book Caste, which is a powerfully poignant and personal book about racism.  It seemed a bit risky, perhaps a bit too much for someone who was still had guest speaker status.  I asked Jack about it, and he heartily encouraged me to do it. You all were up to it -of course you were – and Jack knew it.

We all miss you, Jack.   Let’s take a moment to see some images of our Jack.

~~~~~~

We are also celebrating the lives of two James Earls today. You might think, “Oh yes, James Earl Jones,” and you would be correct.  The other is James Earl Carter, better known to the world as Jimmy Carter.

JIMMY CARTER  Much can and should be said about this great man…so much so that we will soon devote an entire service to the inspiration of his life.

 For now, though, our own Jean and Given Harper had the pleasure of meeting him at his church.  Jean shares, “I remember this overwhelming feeling that I had been in the midst of greatness. Every Sunday that he taught, if you stayed through church he and Rosalynn would stay after to allow photos. His theme was love that Sunday and he borrowed reading glasses from someone in the congregation to read the scripture.”

President Carter was 100.

James Earl Jones

Our second James Earl is James Earl Jones, who was a pioneer for black actors in the entertainment industry.  While he was best known for being the voice of Darth Vadar, he was also a humanitarian, living that out with grace as he challenged racial status quo in his industry.

Film critic Peter Bradshaw wrote, “Like Sidney Poitier or Harry Belafonte or Paul Robeson, he was an African American actor with a beautiful voice which was the key to his dignity and self-respect as a performer; it was how his characters rose above racism and cruelty.”  James was 93.

 

Kris Kristofferson It is not widely known that this singer-songwriter was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford who came from a military family that disowned him when he went into music.  Kris tells of a profound religious experience during a revival that was happening at a local church in a town where he had a gig.  One of the other musicians brought him to the church, and everyone had been invited down to the front to kneel and raise their hand if they wanted to accept Jesus.  

Kris recalls, “I don’t go to church a lot and the notion of raising my hand was out of the question and I thought, ‘I can’t imagine who’s doing this.’ And all of a sudden I felt my hand going up and I was hoping nobody else was looking because everybody had their head bent over praying.   Then the preacher said something to me like, ‘Are you ready to accept Jesus Christ in your life?’ And I said: ‘I don’t know.’ I didn’t know what I was doing there.  I can’t even remember what he was saying but, whatever it was, was such a release for me that I found myself weeping in public and I felt this forgiveness that I didn’t know I even needed.”

Out of that life-altering experience came the very personal and spiritual hit song entitled Why Me, Lord? Kris was 88.

You’ve heard the names of those just celebrated.  They reached that worldly and some would say successful threshold of fame.  “
These next individuals were not so well-known, not to the world anyway.  Certainly they were known and cherished by The Creator because of how they strived to live into who and what they were created to be.

Faith Ringgold Faith Ringgold was a champion of Black artists, exploring themes of race, gender, class, family and community through a vast array of media. She was a longtime advocate of bringing the work of Black people and women into major American museums, spending more than five decades blending inspirational narrative and subtle (or not so subtle) fury about racial and sexual inequality.  She died at age 93.

Nikki Giovanni  American poet, editor, and scholar, Nikki Giovanni was a prominent African-American writer nicknamed the Princess of Black Poetry, who rose to prominence for her involvement in the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s and for being an activist of the American civil rights movement. In her poem “Mercy,” she writes of the spiritual activism she embraced when she writes about why she doesn’t kill a spider.

She asked me to kill the spider
Instead, I got the most peaceful weapons I can find

I take a cup and a napkin.
I catch the spider, put it outside and allow it to walk away

If I am ever caught in the wrong place at the wrong place, just being alive and not bothering anyone,

I hope I am greeted
with the same kind of mercy.

Nikki was 81.

Cecil Williams The Rev. Cecil was a charismatic minister who turned a Glide Memorial Church, a fading church in the gritty Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco into a vibrant hub of worship, activism and social services over the course of 60 years as its spiritual leader.

Mr. Williams preached the need to be “radically inclusive,” and created a community to alleviate suffering and break the cycle of poverty.

His open door policy extended those with drug addictions, the unhoused, and the L.G.B.T.Q. community. He performed same-sex weddings decades before it was legal to do so in the United States.  He was 94.

Eddie Canales Eddie Canales was a human rights advocate who fought to save migrants trekking across the harsh terrain of South Texas.  Mr. Canales successfully placed more than 170 water stations across seven counties, and led a campaign to recover and ensure proper burials for the migrants’ remains.  He often slept on a mst bed in the tiny red-brick building that is the headquarters of the South Texas Human Rights Center in Falfurrias, Texas, which he founded.  He was 76.

Sheila Jackson Lee  Ms. Jackson Lee, another Texan, was the lead Congressional sponsor of the legislation in 2021 that established Juneteenth — commemorating the day in 1865 when the last enslaved people in Texas finally learned of their freedom.

In 2022 she said about the creation of the holiday, “I thought it was extremely important to pass a federal holiday that would give America a moment to be able to reflect not just on the jubilation of freedom, but also the brutality of slavery and what it meant to human beings.”  She was 74.

Gustavo Gutiérrez  Father Gustavo Gutiérrez, a Dominican priest, was best known as the author of “A Theology of Liberation,” first published in 1971.  In that book, he asserted that the God of Judeo-Christian traditions is especially committed to the poor.  The book helped usher movements in the United States to establish housing and health care as basic human rights, and it continues to be taught in seminaries and universities.  He was 96.

George M. Woodwell  George Woodwell was a renowned ecologist whose research shaped how the United States controls toxic substances and how the world confronted climate change.  Dr. Woodwell founded the Woods Hole Research Center in 1985 to study global climate change. During his career he repeatedly showed how technologies devised to increase efficiency had endangered natural systems. He was 95.

The stories we’ve heard today are but the tip of the iceberg.  In an age when there is much darkness to grieve in our world, these souls have been beacons.  And thus we pause to celebrate them.

But, beyond legacy, their lights have dimmed, as the torch has been extended to us, or more specifically, to you.  This reminds me of the poem we recently heard entitled “Now the Work of Christmas Begins.”

The crux of our celebration of amazing, the-world’s-a-better-place-because-of-them people comes in our emulation of them, just as they emulated Jesus.

And so I ask you…where do you see yourself, your life and your way of being in the world, in the lives of these people…

…these people who literally gave drink to the thirsty, uplifted the poor,                                                                                                    were stewards of creation, brought attention to the marginalized, actually opened their doors to the outcast?

As a faith community with our own doors, as individuals who internally seek to follow and embody Jesus here and now, the work begins anew to follow these stars…THE star.

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