Pilgrimage of Joy. . . No. 36

LAVA FROM ABOVE
W. Carl Ketcherside

It was John Milton who called death “the golden key that opens the palace of eternity.” As I think of 1959-60 I am impressed with how often that key opened the palace door for older persons whom I loved. Then I recall that I was fifty-two years of age and those of the preceding generation were ripe for the reaper’s scythe. It is not in a morbid spirit but simply to keep the record straight that I mention a few of those whom “the great leveler” called home to be with Christ in this brief period.

There was John Egarian, who died at Riverside, California, at the age of 94. He was born in Betios, Syria, 14 miles from Antioch, on February 22, 1865. He learned to speak Armenian, Turkish and Arabian, but English was too much for him. He became skilled in silkworm culture, and was a consultant on silk production and manufacture while mayor of his city for many years. I baptized him and his good wife, with several others in the Armenian colony in 1939. He was 74 at the time and we had to speak through an interpreter.

On March 14, A. E. McClaflin, an elder at Bickness, Indiana, died of a heart attack. I had stayed in his home many times, and the hours were spent in discussion of the word. His wife, Bessie, was a talented writer. For years she did a column for the Apostolic Review called “Leaves From a Rose Retreat,” as their lovely home was called. Upon two occasions we had stayed up all night long talking about the Bible.

On June 16, J. W. Watts, Nell’s father died. I was very close to him. Born in the Ozark hills he had grown up with little formal schooling. He came to the mining area when it was rough and tough. He was baptized by Daniel Sommer and was thoroughly committed to Christ. Twice he had been elected mayor of the city of Flat River. He was universally respected through the area for his commonsense, fairness and justice. I conducted his funeral service before one of the largest audiences ever to attend such an event. That day we learned what it meant to sorrow not as others which have no hope.

Brother E. M. Zerr was seriously injured near Martinsville, Indiana, October 29. He had celebrated his 82nd birthday two weeks before. He drove his car on to the highway directly in the path of one that was coming. He lingered four months in a coma, never regaining consciousness. He died on February 22, 1960. During his lifetime he conducted 75 protracted studies of the Bible in depth. For years he was the query editor for the Apostolic Review. He was the only man in the restoration movement who had produced a commentary on the entire Bible. A great deal of it was written in our home. I had gone to see him a few months before his accident. He was very cold and formal toward me. He thought I had “left the faith” because I insisted that God’s people were still scattered throughout the sectarian world.

On the same day Brother Zerr died, a mutual friend of ours, James Vermillion, departed this life in Riverside, California. I first met him in Springfield, Missouri, when I arrived there at the age of fourteen to hold a tent meeting on North National Boulevard. I stayed in his home and played with his boys. In later years he got a thrill out of telling how he would have to come out and tell me it was time to come in and get washed up for the meeting.

On January 4, A. W. Harvey, died in Bloomington, Indiana, as the result of a stroke. He had been a friend of the Sommer family for years, although he was not that close to D. Austen Sommer, whom he regarded as extreme. He was widely known because of his authorship of a booklet called “Bible Colleges.”

On February 6, Robert Brumback died of a cardiac condition, in Phoenix, Arizona, where he had gone upon the recommendation of his physician. He was author of two books which I published. One was “History of the Church Through the Ages.” I proofread the 430 pages three times before publication. The other book was “Where Jesus Walked.” It was the story of Brother Brumback’s trip to the holy land.

On March 17, Dewey Copeland died of a heart attack at Valdosta, Georgia. I met him first at the debate with G. K. Wallace, near Paragould, eight years before. During the interval I had been in his home many times. He and his wife and daughter had made a trip with Nell and myself to Banff and Lake Louise in Canada, returning by way of Yellowstone Park and the Black Hills. It seemed incredible that he was gone. Jim Mabery and myself went by train to Georgia to conduct the funeral service. It was a vast crowd we addressed.

On July 5, W. Curtis Porter died in a Memphis Hospital. He had known that he possessed a rare and incurable blood disease since 1942. When he first learned of the proposal of the brethren at Beech Grove to have me come to Arkansas, he bitterly opposed it. He spoke against me publicly and wrote letters trying to get the brethren to cancel my coming. He was the first one I met at my debate with Brother Wallace. Later, the two congregations in Paragould which opposed me so bitterly fell out among themselves. Brother Porter debated Guy N. Woods on institutionalism. It was while sitting in the audience listening to these two “pros” seeking to cut each other down that it dawned upon me how childish were the issues we were debating. I went to see Brother Porter at his home a few months before his final hospitalization. He was courteous and kind. He told me that after seeing some of the actions of the brethren he was inclined to be more favorable to me than to them.

The saddest loss of all was that of my mother. She suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage at Topeka, Kansas, on Lord’s Day morning, August 21. She was 77 years old. All the way from Saint Louis to Topeka I caught myself thinking of bygone days. I recalled how, when we were little, Mom used to sing us Danish lullabies as she rocked us. I remembered teaching her to read English. And I lived again the days of poverty. Her children had been her whole life.

She had known hardship, toil and pain, but now it was all over. Gone were the lonely nights when my father was away preaching and she was home worrying about sick children. My brother Paul and I conducted the memorial service. When I said the final benediction and turned away from the grave where her body would return to dust beside that of my father to whom she had always been true, I suddenly realized that our children had no grandparents left.

Not everything was death, of course. There was renewed life on many fronts. Brother Garrett and I continued our Saturday sessions at Hartford, Illinois. We met one Saturday per month for six consecutive months in the fall and winter. The subjects were weighty but timely. Each of us spoke an hour in the morning. At noon the sisters served an excellent meal and we all ate together. In the afternoon we took questions from the audience for two hours. We did not always agree but we loved one another and all of us learned. Out of these meetings grew the Hartford Forum, now the Saint Louis Forum. It has been one of the greatest influences in creating respect across party lines.

It was early in 1959 that we set up luncheon meetings at a restaurant in Springfield, Illinois, once per month. We met to discuss the implementation of God’s will. The first one found 35 brethren from Churches of Christ and Christian Churches together. Brother Garrett presided. The theme was “How Can We Work Together For the Cause of Christ?” We met as friends and not as enemies. The next month more than 40 were present. It was a kind of daring experiment in those days. Now it is routine in our area.

In the March issue of the American Christian Review appeared an article over my signature entitled “A Statement of Fact.” It was an apology for my actions in elevating “the Rough Draft,” written in 1932, to a test of fellowship. I had reached the conclusion there was but one creed, the Lord Jesus Christ. To elevate an editorial statement of opinion into a test of union or communion was as absurd as it was wrong. I was particularly disturbed by the fact that we had summoned brethren from various sections of the country to a meeting in Kansas City, to take a stand on the issue. Such mass pressure seemed to me in retrospect to be sectarian. It smacked too much of church councils in history, all of which ended up producing a new creed.

I began the series of articles on “Covenants of God.” I had become convinced that God had revealed Himself as a covenant-making God. He made covenants with Noah, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Later He made a covenant with Israel at Mount Sinai. They broke His covenant and He promised to make a new one. In it the motives and rules of action would be engraved upon the hearts of men. It became obvious that we were no longer under a written code. The new testament was not composed of twenty-seven books. The new covenant was a person. The apostolic epistles were not a code of jurisprudence. They were a collection of love letters written to believers in Jesus who were having difficulty imitating the Master.

My whole life was altered. Always before I had been laying down the law instead of living up to love. I had become a good lawyer and a poor lover. Now passages seemed to leap from the pages into my heart. “The law was a custodian to bring us to Christ, but after faith is come, we are no longer under a custodian.” Later this became the basis of my book “The Death of the Custodian.” Now I had to wrestle with the fact that faith had come. We were no longer under a written code. Everything took on a new perspective. I began to understand the grace of God. I began to see that love was the fulfillment of law. And I began to really walk in the Spirit.

I doubt that any other concept I have ever had since I accepted the invitation of Jesus and opened the door of my heart to let Him come in and sup with me, has had the profound effect upon me that the thought of a personal covenant with God has had. The church, redemption, reconciliation, worship, and all other facets of the life of faith took on new depths. Above all else it placed scripture in a completely new and proper context. It became a loving guideline along the road of life.

I began to read the Bible with new eyes. I began to meditate upon it with a new heart. What a blessing it was to realize that the verbal revelation of God was suspended from love for God and one’s fellows. “On these two hang all the law and the prophets.” I could see that what we called the church was simply the called and gathered. It was a universal community of the reconciled. It was the kingdom of heaven doing the will of God on earth as it is in heaven.

It was still several years before I fully realized that the kingdom was alive and energetic. It was flowing relentlessly like lava from above. There had been no previous trough constructed. Its form was determined by the contour of the terrain. It was mind-boggling for a former legalist to realize the pattern was not determined by a book containing a written code but by the world itself. The kingdom must be flexible enough to move upon that world. The means, machinery and modes of service were dictated by raw human needs.