Street of Angels

by Joe Derkacht

  Robertson, Davis, and Cooper turned the pages of their Bibles. Alarm was in their postures, if not written on their faces. They stared at the passage in question, seemingly dumbstruck.

  “Sounds pretty colorful to me!” Tyler said happily. “He’s got you there, Roberts.”

  “Says he looks like stones,” Robertson drawled out. “It don’t say he’s colored.”

  “Very colorful stones,” Jamieson remarked. “He’s definitely in the right, Roberts.

  “Looks like you won, Reverend Champion.”

  “I don’t know,” Rev. Willimon mused aloud. “It’s a colorful picture of God, but I wouldn’t say that means colored.”

  “That’s right, he’s right!” Davis crowed in triumph.

  Cedric couldn’t believe his ears. He had obviously proved God was not white like they all thought, and here, once again, he felt the church slipping through his fingers.

  Jamieson tilted his bald head in his pastor’s direction. “Exactly what do you think the word colorful means?”

  Willimon compressed his lips in thought for a moment. “Ah, I see--full of color.” Index finger on the offending passage, he read it again, mumbling quietly to himself, before he said, “And there’s red and green, and yellow and brown in there, I think, if I remember these rightly, Roberts.”

  “The man knows whereof he speaks.”

  Everyone looked in astonishment at Avery, who they knew had been a rock hound since his early boyhood. Anybody visiting his house was shown buckets of polished stones and dozens of display cases, and could tell you he was plumb crazy about them. The man grinned from ear to ear.

  Robertson shook his head and sucked his teeth. Davis and Cooper waited anxiously for his verdict. In a less tolerant era, say any time up to the summer of ’68, he might have gone home for an axe handle or maybe even a sheet and cross. But times were different, this being 1970, and he had made a wager.

  “Fair is fair,” he admitted. He stared at the floor, refusing to look in Cedric’s direction. “I think I’ll push on home, now.”

  “Yeah, me too,” Davis said. “Yeah,” Cooper agreed.

  Avery Wills watched the three defeated men saunter from the room. “Not bad at all, not bad at all,” he said. “Turned out a whole lot more interestin’ than I thought.

  “We shoulda put money on it though, Rev.,” he whispered, as he shook hands with Cedric and shot a grin in Willimon’s direction.

  Both Ernest Tyler and Frank Jamieson enthusiastically pumped Cedric’s hand in congratulations.

  “Anything you and your people need, we’ll be glad to help,” Tyler said to him. “Ain’t that so, Frank?”

  “Isn’t, Ernest, not ain’t,” Frank corrected him. “And of course we’ll be glad to do anything we can.”

  Afterwards, when the two ministers sat alone, drinking the last of the coffee, a grin spread slowly over Rev. Willimon’s face.

  “So those jokers are your deacons, John,” Cedric observed, anticipating the other man’s comments.

  Willimon lowered his paper coffee cup but not soon enough. Laughter exploded from him, blowing coffee over his desk and both men’s Bibles like it was shot from a cannon. They laughed together, one howling with glee and the other booming out his guffaws as they scrambled to wipe off the leather covers of their Bibles.

  “S-s-sorry. Sorry you h-had to go through that,” Willimon said, barely able to speak.

  “D-d-don’t, no m-more!” Cedric begged him, holding his aching sides. He couldn’t remember ever laughing so hard in all his life.

  Both men wiped tears from their eyes.

  “M-must have been the tension,” Cedric remarked, finally regaining control of himself.

  “I should have warned you what to expect,” Willimon said.

  “No, no,” he answered. “I expected as much. Believe me, I’ve dealt with worse foolishness, but somehow, you always figure it will be different among people who claim to be Christians.”

  Momentarily the picture of sobriety, they sat a while longer, neither one saying anything. Finally, Cedric looked questioningly at Willimon.

  “What was that about not catching my allusion to God’s color?”

  “Oh, that?” Willimon responded. “If I’d dead on said to Roberts that he was wrong, we’d still be arguing. Of course, you would be long gone, but we’d be here, me and my six deacons.”

  “And you put up with ’em.”

  “Oh, you know, some of them may be fools,” he said, “but they’re my fools, as the saying goes. The church hasn’t elected new deacons for years, not since long before I arrived here.

  “I suppose,” he said, hands spread in an expansive gesture, “they were good for something at one time.”

  Cedric shook his head, not willing to bet on that statement. “After tonight,” he said, “they might think seriously about whether they want to continue or not.”

  “Doesn’t matter, really. There’d be several of them wanting to quit soon anyhow, I expect.”

  “How’s that?” Cedric asked. Willimon’s grin communicated he had a surprise in store for someone.

  “I don’t know about your church, but in ours, as I recently discovered in reading the bylaws, the deacons are required to tithe,” he said. “A couple of them haven’t tithed in years. I checked.”

  “The ones you don’t want, I hope.”

  Willimon nodded happily, at which Cedric rose to leave.

  “Can I call you tomorrow about how we may best share facilities, John?”

  “Tomorrow’s good. What are you thinking about Wednesday evenings, by the way?”

  “Tuesdays or Thursdays will do fine for us,” he answered. “It’ll be a departure from the traditional, but I’m sure my people won’t mind.”

  “I know you were worried about tonight,” Willimon said, rising to shake hands with him. “But I just had a feeling God would work everything out.”

  “He did that. For a while there, I wasn’t sure, but He sure did at that.”

  Still gripping his hand, Rev. Willimon said, “I want to thank you again, Cedric, for Saturday night. Sister McIlhenny was awfully grateful to you, and I know my wife was grateful, too, you showing up out of the blue like that.”

  Pleasure spread across Cedric’s face. “It’s funny,” he said, withdrawing his hand from the other’s grasp. “We don’t always know why God allows certain things, but then he has us in the right place at just the right time to help out.”

  “Amen, brother,” he agreed. “Why don’t we walk out together?”

  As he locked the church’s front doors, he asked Cedric to wait. Bibles in hand, they descended the steps together.

  Cedric’s Cadillac was parked at the curb. “Need a ride home?” He asked, knowing full well that he would say no to a ride just around the corner.

  “No,” Willimon said. “I just wanted you to know what you said about being in the right place at just the right time is exactly how I feel.”

  “Huh,” he grunted, confident he knew precisely what Willimon meant. A warm glow spread across his features. “I appreciate that, John.”

  “As awful, as ironic, as it sounds, Cedric, I’m glad I could be here, I’m glad Flowers Baptist could be here, when you had your fire. I can’t say I know why it happened, but for sure I believe that what the devil meant for evil, God will turn into good.”

  Cedric took a deep breath and glanced at the stars above their heads. The universe might be vast beyond imagining, but in this moment God felt very close. “I guess you never read the one sermon I’m famous for, John.”

  “No, what’s that?” He asked sheepishly.

  “It’s about the Israelites and the ’gyptians, how the devil meant to do evil to the Israelites, but God meant it for good.”

  A thrill went down Rev. Willimon’s spine. It remained after Cedric drove away in his Cadillac, and it continued as Willimon walked up the flagstone path to his house and opened the fro
nt door. God is good, God is good, he thought, in the good times and in trials, God is good.

  He called out his wife Carol’s name and heard her sweet voice answer from the baby’s room. God was good and it was good to be where God wanted him, and it was fine with him if God wanted him to remain in Calneh for the rest of his life.

  ****

  Chapter 25

  Why do people sing? Why is it that on some Sundays you sit in church and feel like dozing off, while on other Sundays you burst into praise and worship as if it’s bubbling up out of your soul like champagne from a bottle? That champagne feeling was what a lot of people had as they started out for church the next Sunday. For blocks around Flowers Avenue, on the south side of the street, as people began their usual Sunday morning stroll, the bubbly just began to flow, and they didn’t feel one bit self-conscious about it either. You should have seen it, you should have seen the faces of the “big church” as those who walk the narrow path went on by, many of them twirling and dancing, and singing their hearts out.

  Were these people crazy? What did they have to be so dadgummed happy about, when their precious Alliance Baptist was a pile of ashes?

  I don’t care is about all the answer the Alliance Baptist folks could have given them that day. All they knew was the bubbling forth, that the spirit of joy had fallen upon them as soon as they stepped from the doorways of their homes.

  One thing for sure, after the depressing gloom of the previous Sunday, it made chills run up and down Rev. Champion’s spine, waiting for his flock to come to him. He heard them long before he saw them. And then people were streaming onto Flowers Avenue from its side streets and filling the sidewalk in front of the charcoal remains of their church like it was a palace of gold.

  Cedric had never in his life been one of those preachers who find it a struggle to preach. You may as well look for a fish who feels it’s hard work to swim. No matter how well, if not exactly smoothly, things had worked out at his meeting with Rev. Willimon and his deacon board, he had still harbored at least a few reservations, a few doubts, about using Flowers Baptist’s facilities. The singing, the obvious joy in his people’s faces, was like a miracle, certainly a sign, from God, allaying his fears. He felt incredibly energized, like those ads claim for this or that tonic or other vitamin preparation. He leaped up the concrete steps of his church to the landing and led the singing himself for the next 45 minutes. They were havin’ church, they were praising and adoring God at the foot of those stairs like they were the stairs that lead to the throne of God. All the while, the reservoir of his soul was filling up with the word of the Lord.

  “Forgiveness is a mighty peculiar thing!” He cried out.

  “Mighty peculiar!” The crowd answered. “Amen!”

  With rubble for his backdrop, he cast his gaze over the crowd, most of them standing on the street, while a smattering of the elderly sat on nylon-webbed aluminum patio chairs, all of them eagerly craning their necks at him.

  “Do I need to say that again?” He shouted, his basso profundo, unamplified voice carrying easily to every ear.

  “Amen!” The crowd roared.

  “Forgiveness is a peculiar thing, a mighty peculiar thing! When you’ve been hurt, when your best friend has betrayed you, when devastation has come and set up house at your place, what’s the first thing you want to do? Don’t tell me your first thought isn’t to strike back, to retaliate in like measure, and then some, in return! That’s why we know forgiveness is born in the heart of God--it’s different, it’s foreign, it just ain’t the way you and I are used to doin’ things.

  “God sent Jesus as the gift of forgiveness to the whole world while we were still his enemies, unrepentant sinners going our own road.”

  That’s how he began his sermon, on the second Sunday after the burning of Alliance Baptist Church. Their hearts had been wounded, their faith shocked, by the attack of an enemy working under the inspiration of the enemy of God, but God Himself had come to their rescue and carried them on the wings of the eagle. It didn’t matter whether it was in ancient Rome or here in Calneh on March 1st in 1970. Persecution of the believer was persecution, fiery trial was fiery trial, and from all of them, the believer’s faith comes forth as pure gold.

  Could they forgive, though? Could they forgive even as Jesus asked His Father to forgive those who crucified Him on Mt. Calvary? Could they forgive as the Father Himself commanded, that they might be like their Father in Heaven?

  Could they really forgive their enemy and pray for the enemy’s salvation? That was the question he presented to them, pouring out heart and soul to his people that morning, and that was the question he spoke into his wife’s heart, and her brother’s as well, as they stood near the foot of the stairs, gazing upward, over his head, it seemed, looking into heaven for an answer to their own sense of guilt.

  He didn’t tell them who it seemed had burned the church down or provide them with so much as the smallest of clues. He had wrestled with his own shock and sense of betrayal, taking it all to the throne of grace, as he would have put it, and asked for an outpouring of grace to forgive and to see what transformation God wanted to do in his own life through this tragedy. Now he wanted his people to wrestle with the hatred and anger and shock in the same way, for them to move on as a church and see what God would do.

  Hadn’t God delivered the children of Israel from Egypt? Hadn’t God brought good out of what the devil had meant for evil? Wouldn’t God, who changed not, do the same for them? Wouldn’t He also lift them up like the slaves returned from Egypt? Wouldn’t He promote them over their enemies and give back double for what the devil had stolen? Wouldn’t Jesus call them to the head of the table even though some people didn’t like them at the table at all? Wasn’t it better for God to lift them up, if their brother wouldn’t do it?

  Looking out upon the crowd, he saw that there was still bewilderment there, probably not unlike that which John the Baptist’s followers had known upon discovering he had been beheaded to suit the whim of a dancing girl. Or maybe like those followers brave enough to look on as the Savior was crucified?

  “Your church hasn’t been destroyed,” he said, repeating what he had delivered to them last week. But last week, under a chill rain, the words had rung hollow even to his ears. He spread out his hands to them, shouting, “Everyone of you lives! Glorify God under the temple of his skies!”

  If they had harbored doubts, had thought that maybe a fire would defeat and devastate their pastor, they were delivered from such notions. They had heard him preach under the unction, as they called it, within the four walls of Alliance, and now they were hearing him preach under the open sky with that same unction, and knew he was a man who would never give up.

  They shouted with the same enthusiasm they began with that morning, and sang even louder in response, though the piano and organ were gone, burned to ash or melted into plastic puddles. Reverend Champion knew his people would come through, all right.

  “I’ve finished with one sermon today,” he said, rejoicing over his people. “But there’s another still to preach. Do you all know where I’m off to, and you’re invited to come along?”

  A hush fell upon the crowd. Among them, the church’s dozen elders and equal number of deaconesses beamed in anticipation of the forthcoming announcement.

  “Now, you won’t pass out will you, when I tell you? You won’t desert me in my hour of need?”

  “Where we goin’, Reverend?” A handful of people shouted in unison, ignorant of the coming bombshell.

  “Did you pray for the Lord to provide?” He answered back. “Did you tell Him we needed us a building until we could rebuild our own?”

  “Thass right!” A woman shouted, her voice suspiciously similar to Ioletta Brown’s, except that Ioletta, standing on the sidewalk at the far edge of the crowd, was sunk in thought, tears running down her cheeks, the sermon on forgiveness still ringing in her ears.

  “Whe
re to?” More people cried.

  “Can I lead you there?” He asked. “Can I ask you to follow me? Can I expect you to treat the house of the Lord like our own house of the Lord?”

  “Yehss!”

  Without a further word, he descended from the landing and took his wife by the arm. The crowd separated for them, as he took the lead and crossed Flowers Avenue to the north side of the street. Smiling down at his wife, he made the turn toward Flowers Avenue Baptist Church. As he knew they would, people gaped, but not for long. Quickly, they followed the Champions and their elders and deaconesses, who followed right behind, and joined in the spirit of the moment by singing the old hymn, Marching To Zion.

  Calneh had never seen a day like that Sunday and perhaps never would again. What would happen when they reached the doors of Flowers Avenue Baptist? Many had fleeting visions of white-sheeted ghouls barring the way, axe handles and baseball bats in hand. Others wondered if the Calneh police would be there to keep them out. Some cringed at the thought of a crowd of their white neighbors meeting them with taunts and curses.

  But when the doors flew open with Rev. Johnny, as many of them knew him, to welcome them, and people like Stella Jo McIlhenny and Ernest Tyler and Frank Jamieson, along with their families, their fears were quickly assuaged. If God was for them, who could be against them?

  Except for those folks just mentioned, the church was empty. Rev. Johnny had completed the task of reading out his sermon from the pulpit and most of his congregation had departed for home. The Alliance Baptist crowd marched in and took their seats in the pews. Rev. Champion was welcomed into the pulpit by the white minister, whose face beamed like the face of Moses after he had spoken with God on the mountain. Miss Frenchie Leone, organist from Alliance Baptist, took her place, and Red Sampson, the pianist, took his at the piano.

  The people gazed in wonderment at the sanctuary, different yet so similar to their own, and felt like they had entered the promised Canaan land.

  #

  “Where on earth is Ioletta?” Stella mumbled to herself, as the last stragglers disappeared inside the doors. She had expected her to be among the first to arrive, and here she wasn’t anywhere in evidence at all. It worried her because she just didn’t think Ioletta would want to miss the occasion for anything in the world. Of course, hardly anyone had known ahead of time about Flowers Avenue Baptist and Alliance Baptist joining together to share facilities, leastwise until Pastor Willimon announced the news to his church at the tail end of the service that morning and Rev. Champion had made the announcement to his church in his own way.