Discovering Mississipi - Again
By Joey Sherrard
M.Div. 2007
June 27, 2005
My return to Mississippi has been both a powerful relearning of the Christ-haunted history of my home state and a schooling in the rhythms of the Kingdom. I grew up in Mississippi, but it had been six years since I had spent significant time in the state.
The distance of those years has granted me new perspective, and, like a novel that becomes more and more profound with each reading, the state has revealed a history darker and richer than I had imagined in my youth.
Court Street United Methodist Church in Hattiesburg, MS |
As I arrived, the names of towns were pregnant with new meaning: Philadelphia, once the site of the Neshoba County Fair, now where Chaney, Schwerner and Goodman were murdered; Laurel, where I once went on a youth trip with friends, now the setting of Charles Marsh’s beautiful and wrenching memoir The Last Days; Hattiesburg, where I played in soccer tournaments, now the place of Vernon Dahmer’s murder and the location of my placement for the summer, Court Street United Methodist, as well.
That history reveals to me a place of unbelievable injustice yet incredible, courageous hope. The temptation is to imagine myself as inhabiting the same social and temporal landscape—to imagine myself running a Freedom School in 1964. But the summer of ’64 and the summer of ’05 are not the same. To believe that this is so is to commit one of the most heinous sins of a seminary student: bad exegesis.
And so I find myself learning the rhythms of the Kingdom and the empowering Spirit in a time and a place different from the dramatic steps of the Civil Rights Era.
The Church no longer stares at the specter of segregation; indeed, at the wonderful congregation of Court Street, black and white may be found together in worship on Sunday mornings. Yet the beloved community and the shalom of the Kingdom is easily counterfeited.
The Gospel of St. Luke is my guide—written for those who realized they were settling in for the long haul of the life of the Kingdom. Though Christ may return at any moment, we must be wise and discerning in our ministry and plan for work that requires patience, discipline, and perhaps even subversion. It is a work that, though it is urgent and intimidating, requires contemplative listening, faithful prayer, and parables.
How else will we discern who we are traveling with on the Emmaus road?