Last Sunday, on the 65th Anniversary of 2 SGCers being arrested as Freedom Riders, Pastor Jack shared Sermon Excerpts from the Senior Pastor at the Time, Rev Buckner Coe, who preached against racism & segregation on this date 65 years ago.

Buck Coe Writings 1961

May 31, 1961 Newsletter “The Freedom Riders” 

The recent events in Alabama and Mississippi and the participation in these events of the Yale University Chaplain and a Wesleyan faculty member, John Maguire, who was once a member of this parish again [Along With Current Member Rev Gaylord Noyce] brings into sharp focus the question of our racial difficulties and their clear-cut denial of the sincerity of our Christian confession. This was sharpened even more by the outspoken comments by the two young preachers at our Youth Sunday services last Sunday who made plainly evident their disillusionment with the church in general and our church in particular in relation to efforts at resolving racial tensions here in the New Haven area.

The question is what are we going to do about it? What “rides” or “strides” toward freedom can we take here in New Haven where our patterns of discrimination are more subtle and therefore more insidious? Are we going to go on confessing, by our inaction, the church’s impotence here? Your minister freely admits his bafflement and would welcome suggestions from sensitive members of the congregation and who of us os not sensitive to these things.

Sermon June 4, 1961 “A New Creation”

“If any men is in Christ he is a new creation; old things are passed away; behold things are become new. -II Corinthians 5

In a sense this affirmation of St. Paul is the very heart of the Christian Faith. It holds out the promise and assurance of personal renewal. It directs itself to the re-formation of life. But the question may be asked- Do we need this re-formation and personal renewal? I suspect that most of us are not ready to admit this at all – at least not in the terms our fathers understood it. We have little sense of being sinners rotting in hell. We give no appearance of being in desperate need of re-juven-ization. We are responsible, law abiding citizens.

I share this point of view…… I share it despite the fact of our present racial difficulties and their apparent revelation of what Robert Penn Warren has called the “unmitigable ferocity of the self”

– Indeed the recent events in Alabama and Mississippi and the reactions of many other men to the rising tide of racial equality in the North as well as the South, tell us something entirely different about the human condition in America in the 1960’s. They tell us not that we are d ferocious sinners but timid frightened men who are fighting a rear guard action against an assertion of human dignity that we cannot stop. Resistance to integration even in the South (and perhaps first of all there) is crumbling and we all know it. We are going to have integration in our schools.We are going to have integration in our housing. We are going to have integration in our churches – not in the next half century but in this decade. What resistance remains now whether in Montgomery or in Spring Glen consists only of attempt to slow down the inevitable and reveals not so much dark subterranean devils deep in our hearts – though there are doubtless some still there – as a timidity, a lethargy, a fear of change and its inevitable dis-locations.

It is to this man that the message of the new creation must be addressed this fearful man of the mid-twentieth century who hates to be interrupted as he watches the baseball game, who loses himself in the complexities of his job or the endless round of duties that are required of a responsible citizen and family man. It is to his feminine counterpart engrossed in her diaper changing and cooking and housekeep-ing, her bridge playing and book club attending, that the promise of a new creation comes. And it is to their young in their endless activity in youth groups of all shapes and kinds and their frantic scrambling to get into some college that the mess-ago of the new creation is addressed.

And what is the content of this message for those whose lives are so singularly devoid of freshness and vitality, who seek to hide from a world in ferment. It is what it has always been, “If any man be in Christ he is a new creation”. You see to be in Christ is no mystic retreat. To be in Christ is to share a faith that sees the triumphs and disasters of men taking place within the context of an ordering action that is finally God’s. To be in Christ is to share a hope that God’s will will be done through or in spite of us. To be in Christ is to share a love that will not stand idly by while one of God’s children is denied a place in the sun.

Armed with such faith and hope and love the man in Christ does not need to retreat, does not need to be afraid, does not need to shrink back; he can give himself to the life that is his and accept eagerly and help to shape and fashion the changes that are all around him in the confidence that God’s hand is in all of this, that as Emil Brumner has put it “God is shaking this world in order that he might recreate it.””If any man is in Christ he is a new creation. Old things are passed away. Behold all things are become new.” This is the way St. Paul put it. The man who is in Christ, whose outlook on life is fashioned and shaped by the Christian epic looks upon the world around him and sees in its chaos the old and the irrelevant and the decadent passing away and the new coming as a gift and opportunity from the living.

Date??

Reflection on Dixwell Vote

Finally, and perhaps the practical end (though not the ultimate end) of all these endeavors, is the responsibility we have to “advance the cause of Christ”. Part of our effort here is to understand what is meant by the “cause of Christ”, not an easy task. It includes the definition of the purpose of our work both within and outside the Church Community, our tasks as a church and as individuals in society. My concern for us as church is that we not be simply an ecclesiastical machine going through the forms of religion but denying the power of it, that we give not simply the appearance of a “going concern” but that we bear witness to such trust concerning Jesus Christ as we have had occasion, however dimly, to discern. 

Certainly one such truth is that of the unity of men in Christ regardless of race, a truth to which I hoped we could testify in the exchange program with the Dixwell Church voted down last June. And while I accept with great regret the desire of the majority of the congregation not to enter into that particular program, I hope we will recognize that the presence of racial barriers in the church at large is a denial of “the cause of Christ” and continue to seek ways to testify to the power of faith to overcome such barriers.