Letters I Receive

W. Carl Ketcherside

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     It was Voltaire who wrote in his Philosophical Dictionary, back in 1764, that mail is "the consolation of life." It is quite apparent that he did not receive letters like some that come to me. Which reminds me that Sydney Smith said, "Correspondences are like trousers before the invention of suspenders; it is impossible to keep them up." Sometimes I get a hundred letters per week and some of them are not much consolation.

     The ones I get the biggest bang out of, are from brethren who have just read their first issue of the paper. Some thoughtful soul subscribed for them and they start reading out of curiosity. Before they have gone very far they get their dander up and by the time they read the fourth page they are convinced that I am the antichrist because I think there are "Christians in the sects" as Alexander Campbell so aptly stated it. They launch a barrage of three or four pages of single-spaced material pecked out on the trusty Smith Corona, thinking that I will be fried to a crisp when I read the scriptures they quote out of context and misapply, as if that is what God intended. But "none of these things move me and neither count I my life dear unto myself." I have been able to weather the attack of some pretty high-powered brotherhood flame-throwers.

     There's a good old brother down in Texas who would really prefer to like me if he was not afraid he would have to answer for it in the judgment of that great day. He writes about every six months. It takes that long for him to reach the boiling point because he operates on a slow-burning fuse. He reads everything I write and treasures it up against "the day of wrath," but when I say something that falls like a spark in the flash-pan of his old spiritual muzzle-loader he points it in the direction of Saint Louis and lets loose a blast which rattles the windows and is intended to blow me to "kingdom

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come." Like myself, he must have found learning to type a real chore, because he has apparently not learned about the shift keys and writes without ever using a capital letter. He operates solely in lower case. He is also very conservative in his use of paper and when he reaches the bottom of the sheet he keeps turning it back and typing over the last three or four lines. There isn't an inch of wasted space on the entire page. It is completely covered with hieroglyphics interspersed with sundry admonitions and questions written in with a ball-point pen, such as "I dare you to read this!" and "Now, what do you think?"

     Then, there is the leader of a small congregation of saints in the hills of Kentucky. A good many brethren in this generation claim to speak in an unknown tongue but he is the only one I know who writes in an unknown tongue. I always lay his letters back until I can wrestle with them at length since I am not possessed of the gift of interpretation. Ordinarily I can do a fair job deciphering and pretty well get the gist of the epistle so I can answer it, although occasionally I miss it as far as Mom did years ago when she let loose a rock at a stray dog in our backyard and killed our turkey gobbler.

     If you think male critics are "tough cookies" you ought to read the occasional letters I get from some of my sisters in the Lord who think I have lost my spiritual marbles and gone off the deep end. They demonstrate beyond doubt that Rudyard Kipling was right when he wrote, "the female of the species is more deadly than the male." Women have such a subtle and gentle way of taking the hide off of you by saying such things as, "I have been praying that you would regain your mind and return to sanity before it is too late." Nothing bugs such a sister more than to imply that the party with which she is affiliated may not be "the one holy, apostolic and catholic church of God on earth," to the exclusion of all others. It is even worse if she was a Baptist when she married and had to be "converted to the Church of Christ" in order to have any peace here, or hope of glory over there. I have learned never to argue with such a member of the distaff side of the human family by correspondence. You will end up writing a stack of letters a foot high and never make a dent. So I simply write polite acknowledgments and go on loving all of my sisters and turn them over to God who knows what makes them tick!

     I suspect the best thing that ever happened to me was to learn that one does not have to agree with me to be received of God and recognized as a child in the majestic family. Right there and then I saw that I could receive people as God did and recognize them as my brothers and sisters whether they agreed with me or not. We are not brothers because we see everything alike but because we have the same Father. Brotherhood is based upon a common fatherhood. Fellowship results from mutual sonship. I resolved not to make anything a condition of fellowship which God had not made a condition of salvation. If one was good enough for God to save he was not too bad for me to tolerate. I will not put out those whom God has taken in.

     I'll never forget the time I was meditating and mulling things over in an American Airlines plane, and the thought hit me that we are all brothers in error. That is the only kind of brothers there are. Not one of us knows it all. We are all ignorant but just about different things. Up to that time I had always regarded those in other factions, segments and splinters of our fragmented movement as brethren in error. If they had something we opposed they were sectarians. If they opposed something we had they were "antis." We were the faithful and loyal brethren, dyed-in-the-wool believers, "the knowing ones." It had been a comforting thought and a nice escape hatch when you wanted to avoid calling upon one from another party to lead in prayer. But when God slammed that mental door shut I had to re-think my relationship with my brothers in the Lord. I dropped the brothers in error fallacy like a hot potato. It was born of

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pride and self-righteouness, so I purged it from my feeble vocabulary. I praise God for the deliverance from that kind of ignorance and arrogance, although I have a whole great big lot to learn yet!

     It's great not to have to get uptight when someone writes and tells you where to get off, or where he thinks you should abandon ship. You don't have to bail out just because someone draws a bead upon you. I never get upset or come unglued because brethren do not agree with my explanation or understanding of this passage, or that. I intend to do my own thinking "without benefit of clergy," and I want them to do the same. I do not intend to impose my thinking upon anyone, and I do not intend to allow anyone to impose his upon me. There are a lot of things I do not know, but there is one thing I do know and that is wherever men are free to think there will be differences. Slavery and chains represent the price we must pay in order to have abject conformity.

     I would not want to be in a fellowship of non-thinkers where you have to check your intellect at the door as you enter and reclaim it on the way out as you leave. A man told me recently that where he attended it was such a tight situation you did not need to take your brain with you to meeting, or if you did, you could unscrew your head and put it under the seat until time for the invitation song. If you are in a fellowship of people who think, all sorts of differences will challenge you. Our unity lies not in seeing everything alike, or in liking everything we see. It simply depends upon everyone being in Christ. He is our unity and our peace. The umbrella of his love is great enough to allow all of us who are God's children to come in out of the rain.

     There are a lot of saints who "take pen in hand" to ask if I've "gone off" with this group or that. Some of them lament that they cannot tell what segment I am with. Praise God! Our brethren have no real concept of being a "Christian only" and they have to categorize every person they meet. This is the result of trying to identity with God through an organization rather than through the indwelling Spirit. They cannot conceive of one being free from all human organizations resulting from the varied patterns which men have read back into the Book. Regardless of how often I say that I belong to no party, sect or faction, but simply to Jesus, it makes no dent in the thinking apparatus of many of our readers. It is like trying to describe an ice cream cone to a Hottentot.

     I am not going anywhere. I do not intend to saddle up and ride off into the gloaming or gathering dusk with any religious posse. I do not belong to any special group of saints because I belong to Jesus, but because I belong to Jesus I belong to all of my brethren. I am still meeting with the same group of brethren with whom I have always met. I hope to continue to do so while I live. If I could not be free with them I could not be free anywhere. If I wanted to be sectarian, and I don't, I could be sectarian where I am. What I intend to do is stay where I am and share with all of God's children who will allow me to do so. I do not intend to impose either my presence or perceptions upon anyone. Neither do I intend to be told by men where I can go and where I cannot go. I recognize but one Lord, and he is at the right hand of God.

     We can whip the problem of division! We can overcome it! But we cannot do so by dividing. The way to unite is to unite! You can talk about it, debate about it, and confer about if but you will never unite until you unite! Then why not start there if that is our goal? We can argue and discuss when we are united. The fact is I am already united with God's children, all of them. When I united with Jesus I united with every person who is in him. My task is not to achieve unity. It is not to attain it. My task is to demonstrate it!

     Let me save you some postage. Some of you will be bound to write and ask how we can be one so long as some have instrumental music and others oppose it, or so long as some have Sunday schools and others oppose them, or so long as

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some have individual cups and others oppose them? That is easy! Quit making tests of fellowship out of them. Quit acting as children and quit yourselves like men. God did not make conditions of salvation out of these things, so quit making them conditions of union and communion. Hold your opinions but do not forge them into dogma. Do not violate your own conscience but do not measure others by it. "Hast thou faith? have it to thyself."

     Of course, on a very pragmatic basis, be careful of the preacher you have to hold your meeting. It was preachers who fragmented us in the first place, and it is to their interest in a lot of cases to keep us apart. Many saints, if they unite at all, will have to do so in spite of the opposition of the preachers in their faction. But if it is a sin to be divided and a blessing to be united, give up your division and unite! There will be problems in unity, as there are in marriage, but there is no problem love cannot solve! As Paul said, "Love outlasts everything else" and that includes our problems!