One of the lesser known 20th century Christian saints was a man named Clarence Jordan. Clarence was born in 1912 in the heart of Georgia. As a child he learned the familiar song “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so …”
But the words, “red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight” rang hollow for him. Those words were in stark contrast to the racial discrimination he saw rooted in his own community, and especially in local churches, where people of color were strictly segregated in worship.
After graduating high school, Mr. Jordan earned a degree in agriculture. He later went on to earn a Ph.D. in New Testament Studies. He then combined his passions for agriculture and the gospel by founding Koinonia Farms, where people of all races worked the land and studied scripture together as a family.
As you might expect, his vision of racial equality didn’t go over so well with the locals. The KKK made regular visits to the farm to threaten him. But Dr. Jordan knew all about their kind of racial intolerance and he stood up to their threats of violence. He’d often tell them that they had a clear choice to make. They needed to decide if they were going to follow their granddaddy, or follow Jesus. Koinonia Farms eventually gave birth to Habitat for Humanity International. Dr. Jordan died in 1969, shortly after the first Habitat for Humanity home was built.
Before he died, he wrote, “The proof that God raised Jesus from the dead is not the empty tomb, but the full hearts of his transformed disciples. The crowning evidence that he lives is not a vacant grave, but rather, a spirit-filled fellowship. Not a rolled-away stone, but a carried-away church.”
Clarence Jordan understood something that is found at the very heart of our faith. We are called to live the promise of the resurrection each and every day of our lives. We are called to be disciples, people who actively live out the promise of abundant life that is shared through the resurrected Christ.
Living the resurrection, as Dr. Jordan did, means living a new kind of life altogether; a life that does not acknowledge death as the last word. It means loving others as we have been loved, and not just the others whom we would choose to love, but also those who have been marginalized by this world. We are to love the unlovable and to touch the untouchable. We are to feed the hungry without asking why. We are to proclaim peace when all we can see around us is war. We are to forgive those who seek to harm us even as we are forgiven.
Resurrection is now our story. Perhaps we will never know just what resurrection looked like in that tomb outside of Jerusalem some 2,000 years ago, but we can see resurrection at work in our lives today. All we have to do is to look around and ask, “Where does the risen Christ meet us?” Is there a part of us that has died, maybe because of the sudden loss of a loved one, or because of a medical diagnosis, or through abuse, or through the loneliness of dementia, or in the hopelessness of a prison sentence? Is there a place where death has permeated into our lives so deeply and so permanently that it is impossible to imagine that a life worth living can ever come back?
These are exactly the places where our resurrected Christ enters into us. These are the very places where God enters into our community and offers forgiveness, hope and healing. These are the very places that God enters into us in order to transform death into life.
We are now the story of the resurrection. We are the proof of how fear and even death can be turned into forgiveness and new life through the power of God’s love for us. We are the living, and the breathing, and the ongoing resurrection story.
Each month a member of the Cook County Ministerium will offer Spiritual Reflections. This month’s contributor is Tom Murray of the Lutsen and Zion Lutheran Churches.
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