Memorials like this can easily slide into trumpeted flourish or flashy cliché about the deceased. Our ordinary temptation to slip into anthropocentric eulogy rather than Christocentric doxology is stemmed when the funeral service itself gives praise to God. Such was the case at resurrection masses I attended for John Tietjen in Fort Worth, Texas (February 2004) and Richard John Neuhaus in New York City (January 2009). Such again was the case when adoration to God flowed for the life of a third man whose ministry reshaped twentieth century Lutheranism, the funeral celebration for the Rev. Dr. Richard Charles Dickinson held on 23 April 2010 at Grace Lutheran Church of Pagedale (St. Louis) Missouri.

Rising from conditions of extreme economic poverty in rural Alabama, born less than two months before Malcolm X, Richard was wealthy with resilient faith in Jesus Christ. He walked with personal integrity and humility in service to God’s mission of justice, mercy and justification by grace.  

In a time when clergy are often viewed as the “problem” and hardly helpful to what afflicts the visible church, Dickinson regarded pastoral recruitment as antidotal to slow growth in black ministry among Lutherans. During the 1977 centennial year of The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod’s ministry among blacks, he resolved to recruit 150 African American men for ministry in the LCMS. Pastoral leadership was, in his strategy, integral to Christian mission: “So that we may obtain this faith, the ministry of teaching the gospel and administering the sacraments was instituted” (AC V). That truth and that goal remain. Now, in his memory a scholarship fund is being established to help support an augment to the number of active African American clergy on the LCMS roster, now down to 43.

In a time when higher education and genuine spirituality are often viewed as polarities, as antithetical strivings, Dickinson personally pursued an academic trek that took him from a one-room schoolhouse in rural Alabama to a baccalaureate degree at the historically black Barber-Scotia College. After preparing for pastoral ministry at the now-closed “colored” seminary, Immanuel in Greensboro, North Carolina, Dickinson gained a second master’s degree and then a doctor of ministry from Chicago Theological Seminary.

From the 1960s through the 1980s, Dr. Dickinson’s vocational project was to challenge the church with bold speech, with parrhesia,  ἡ παῤῥησία —which in the New Testament can mean both candid rhetoric and cheerful fearlessness. Dickinson possessed both. His favorite topic was the church’s intractable legacy of racism, its acquiescence to cultural systems of structural sin that grossly compromise our evangelical witness and undermine the baptismal promises that unite the body of Christ. To their credit, many in the LCMS took note. 

“Black Named,” the news release headline announced as Dickinson became “the first Black person ever to hold a top staff position with Synod” in 1977. Thirty years later, my own appointment in 2007 to the top executive position at Lutheran World Relief cannot be untied from the pioneering path Dickinson chartered within institutional Lutheranism. In fact, I am a pastor today, in part, because a bulletin insert supplied by his Black Ministry Commission in St. Louis which was shown to me by the Rev. Edward J. Koehler at Pilgrim Lutheran Church in Hamilton, Ontario.  Its prodding was one step toward making tangible the sense of calling I was sensing.

Innumerable stories of remembrance mixed with much laughter and testimonies of respect echoed at the funeral home during the family visitation on Thursday evening and at Friday’s funeral. Blanche, his wife of 57 years, greeted guests with grace. LCMS President, the Rev. Dr. Gerald B. Kieschnick, in attendance with his wife Terry, offered sincere evangelical succor as well as official remarks. First Vice-President Dr. Bill Dieklemann was there as was Rev. Ray Mirly, the Missouri District President. There were, conservatively estimating, fifty clergy in attendance over the two days.

The Rev. Dr. Kermitt Ratcliffe, the only surviving member of the Black Mission Models Task Force from the mid-1970s, drew our attention to Dr. Dickinson’s witness as a leader’s leader, concluding with words from Daniel 12: “Many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt. Those who are wise shall shine like the brightness of the sky, and those who lead many to righteousness, like the stars for ever and ever.”

Richard’s longtime friend, the Rev. Dr. Frazier N. Odom—they married sisters and were brothers-in-law and colleagues for nearly six decades—found his words through his tears, delivering a statuesque sermon. Faced with such personal loss, some clergy attempt the professionalized severity of being a self-regulating, priestly performer, cloaking awkwardly their pain of loss, wearing a mask like an undersized bit of gauze tremblingly covering an active wound. Pastor Odom, instead, wore out-loud and with dignity his mantle of heartbrokenness. Sometimes whispering, other times rising to a roar, Odom offered his whole self at the point of proclamation. First, the recollection of sixty years of friendship embedded in the raw reality of four hundred years of often unfriendly African American experience the United States. And, second, without the reckless bludgeoning characteristic of some so-called theological conservatives, he targeted his talk with astonishing directness—strikingly unusual nowadays in light of the politically tempered tones and oblique psychologizing that too often happen in the place of preaching. More parrhesia.

Odom’s homily was embraced with affirmative amens and unobtrusive, often supportive, responsory—as in the best of the tradition of black preaching. He began by addressing the causes of death—yes, two—medically, it was cancer, but theologically, Richard knew he was dying from a deeper malady, Dr. Odom intoned. “This is more serious than any pathology. He has suffered it from conception. It’s called sin.” To punctuate this proclamation, Odom cited by heart significant portions of Scripture and the Confessions; “When we speak the Creed,” he charged, “we are not reading it, reciting it or repeating it. We are confessing what we believe. It’s a matter of life and death. We boldly claim with Martin Luther what we confess with our dear departed friend, Richard, ‘I believe that I cannot by own reason or strength believe in the Jesus Christ, my Lord, or come to him; but the Holy Ghost has called me by the Gospel.’” Odom continued, “He knew he was a ‘lost and condemned creature,’ that all his exemplary accomplishments were like ‘filthy rages’ (Isaiah 64:6).” Lifting higher and higher into a sense of futility for those seeking to satisfy God’s law, we were then transported to a celebration of what only God’s love has already done for us through the cross of Jesus Christ which gets applied to us, via the media of the Spirit, Word and Sacraments. Odom’s energetic Confessionalism was as uniquely refreshing as it was inspiring.

 Ravaged by sin, literally since before birth, Dickinson’s gravely ill mother, Alice, was advised by doctors to abort him in order to save her own life. She decided to let God decide and ended up herself living to103 years of age. Christ was her life and Richard’s hope, as sure as the on-going resurrection party we celebrate this Easter season

Celebration suffused the day, especially through the main musical idiom for this funeral—the soulfully classic African American Gospel tradition. Dickinson was a frequent advocate for liturgical contextualization, parrhesia again. In his retirement in the 1990s, I served with him in developing This Far by Faith, an inter-Lutheran worship resource. In spite of its failure to be endorsed fully by the LCMS, it set the text of the western liturgical rite in jazz-based and Gospel-music based settings and captured hymns already in use in most black Lutheran churches in the United States and the Caribbean. I recall Dr. Dickinson’s hope that the entire church might try it, singing and praying together, countering doxologically our revolting legacy of racism. As he commented in his book Roses and Thorns, a paradoxical title describing the complex exclusion experienced by many non-whites in the Lutheran church:

“I want to be a part of this ministry of reconciliation. I will therefore continue my quest for full participation for all races and nationalities in this glorious ministry. May God speed the day when race and nationality are meaningless and faith in our Savior Jesus Christ is all in all.”[1]

The Rev. John Arthur Nunes is President & CEO of Lutheran World Relief and a Ph.D. candidate at the Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago

25 April 2010, St. Mark the Evangelist

[1] Richard C. Dickinson, Roses and Thorns: The Centennial Edition of Black Lutheran Mission and Ministry in The Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod (St. Louis: Concordia, 1977): 196.