The Line That Got the Applause

I don’t often receive (and never anticipate) applause during a sermon, but it happened last Sunday while I was preaching at St. Luke’s UMC, the congregation we birthed 44 years ago. (You can watch the service here.)

Telling a Story

I was telling the story of James A. “Jim” Dombrowski. He was an honor roll senior at Hillsborough High School, in Tampa in 1915 when L. M. Broyles arrived as pastor at Hyde Park Methodist Episcopal Church. His parents were deceased. He and his sister were living with an aunt and uncle whose home was around the corner from the church. 

Rev. Broyles took a special interest in this obviously talented young man. Dombrowski’s biographer records “he often went fishing and canoeing” with Rev. Broyles and “as his love of physical exertion grew, so, too, did his interest in religion.” It wasn’t long before Rev. Broyles had recruited him to teach Sunday School.

When Dombrowski returned from serving in WWI, he “had it in his mind to do something to help people.” During their fishing trips, Rev. Broyles convinced him to go to the newly established Emory University in Atlanta. From there he went to Union Theological Seminary where he came under the influence of Reinhold Niebuhr and the “social gospel” movement.  

In 1932 Jim Dombrowski was one of the founders of the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee, which became a training center for leaders in the civil rights movement including Martin Luther King, Jr., James Lawson, Andrew Young, and Medger Evers.

In 1955 a young seamstress named Rosa Parks spent a week of her vacation at Highlander where she attended classes taught by Septema Clark, the “Mother of the American Civil Rights Movement.” 

That’s when I said, “And all the rest is history – history we must teach and remember.” I even pounded with my finger on the table when I said it. And that’s when the congregation broke into spontaneous applause.

History We Must Teach and Remember

We are, after all, in Florida, where our part-time Governor and full-time Presidential candidate is working with our solidly right-wing Legislature to ban books and limit teaching the history of slavery and the Civil Rights movement. (You know things are getting bad when they want to remove To Kill a Mockingbird from the library.) Teaching the painful facts of our history might, in their words, make people (i.e. white people) “uncomfortable.” When history gets uncomfortable, they label it “woke” or “liberal ideology.” While they’re at it, they’ve cut funding for DEI programs in our state universities. It’s part of a larger and ongoing effort of “a different kind of segregation — severing his straight, white Christian philosophy from our modern democratic ethos.” (The Orlando Sentinel)

That’s why the congregation applauded. It was their witness of protest against banning books and whitewashing history along with their affirmation of a more inclusive vision for our nation; the vision of our founders for a nation where every person is endowed by the Creator with the rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

The Difference One Person Can Make

The applause came as a surprise because the biblical point of the sermon was the difference each person can make by acting in generous, self-giving ways toward others. Rev. Broyles influence in Jim Dombroski’s life was the example. We choose our actions with little or no control of the consequences.

There might have been a Martin Luther King, Jr., and a Rosa Parks, without Highlander Folk School.  

There might have been Highlander without Jim Dombrowski. 

Jim Dembrowski might have become who he was without a pastor who went canoeing with him on the Hillsborough River.  

God will always find a way to accomplish God’s redemptive purpose in this world. But God used a pastor who went canoeing with a high school student in Tampa as one step in a process that would change the course of our nation’s history.

For Heaven’s Sake!

I’ve never forgotten some lines from For Heaven’s Sake, a play the drama students at Asbury College performed in the ’60’s. Ronald Reagan quoted them a White House Ceremony celebrating the opening of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in 1984. I hope you’ll excuse the exclusively male pronouns, another change along the way toward DEI.

One man awake,
Awakens another.
The second awakens
His next door brother.
The three awake
Can rouse a town
By turning
the whole place
Upside down

The many awake
Can cause such a fuss,
That it finally awakens the rest of us.
One man up,
With dawn in his eyes,
Multiplies.
(Helen Kromer, For Heaven’s Sake, Baker’s Plays, 1963 )

L. M. Broyles may have never known the difference he made in Jim Dombroski’s life. God only knows the difference each of our lives can make for Heaven’s sake!

Grace and peace,

Jim