Oh, To be Forty Years Older

Father Neuhaus writes today,

Big Bill Jones is dead. Those of us a certain age keep an eye on the leaves hanging on our branch of the tree of life, wondering which will fall next. That’s one of the reasons I hang out with Avery Cardinal Dulles, age 87, who seems to be attached where the sap flows strong.

The Rev. William A. Jones was for more than forty years pastor of Bethany Baptist, a huge church in the Bedford Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, the largest black community in New York. As best I remember, we first met in 1962 in a protest against the exclusion of blacks from major construction unions in the city. We spent the night in jail, and he was excellent company. It would not be our last time to be arrested together.

Bill was a bear of a man, with a musical voice that rumbled a couple of octaves below middle C. He remained very much a man of the conventional left, viewing Rudolph Giuliani as a fascist or worse, and given to elegantly outrageous homiletical riffs on Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush as Pharaohs.

Martin King at his very best may have been the greatest master of black preaching I have ever heard. For steady greatness, nobody was more reliable than Gardner Taylor of Concord Baptist in Brooklyn. Bill Jones was in their class, as those who knew him from “Bethany Hour,” broadcast in hundreds of cities, can testify. He was big and ebullient. He didn’t have a theological bone in his body but he loved Jesus. More precisely, I think he loved the Bible stories of which Jesus was the hero.

I regret that we lost touch in recent years. There was a roughness about him. I once called him “God’s gangster,” and he wore the title with pride. But I suppose I remember him chiefly as a man greatly amused by the ways of the world, and by his place in it. William A. Jones. Requiescat in pace.