There is wonder-working pow’r in the blood...

It began with a word, and the word was “Come.”

All Jesse did was speak that word as he turned to extend a hand toward Cholly Sinclair – Ol’ Cholly, folks called him – brown and dusty as the earth itself, sitting in a metal folding chair in the Sunday school classroom off the front of the auditorium like he always did for morning worship, the door between the rooms cracked just enough so he could hear the service but not be seen, not be out sitting with the white folks in the cinderblock sanctuary, because that was just not done in Smallwood, Alabama. Not yet anyway. But Jesse beckoned to him, and that was that. Even had it stopped there, enough trouble was wrought.

But then Cholly actually came when Jesse summoned, actually hoisted himself out of that creaking chair, eased the door wider, and trudged straightway to Jesse as if in a trance, as if drawn by an invisible thread of trust. He wore his usual Sunday outfit, and though it wasn’t fine, it was his best: dark, second-hand blazer of indeterminate fabric and a yellowed dress shirt that nevertheless was neatly pressed. Around his neck he wore a raggedy red polyester necktie. His trousers were grey work pants, plain. He was a man of middling build, stooped some, and not likely as old as he seemed to me at the time, for I thought he was ancient. His thrift shop blazer was too big, too long, hung practically to his knees, swaying with each slow susurration of his brogans along the sanctuary carpet. I remember that whisper – that, and the groan of wooden pews as congregants adjusted for a better view of this new thing, this drama playing out in the slowest of motion before us.

If purpose was hard to read on their faces – Jesse’s and Cholly’s, I mean – the impropriety of the scene was impossible for the faithful to miss: Imagine, a black man participating in the Sunday morning worship services at the Smallwood Church! We looked on, transfixed. Brother JC Naramore, one of our elders – head elder, truth be told – had stepped in from the foyer area where most Sundays during the sermon he stood taking attendance through the squares of glass in the rear doors with Brother Conwell Epperson, who would be chattering far more loudly than he realized, except for those few minutes when he slipped outside for a mid-sermon smoke break. Momma called them the "foyer church" and urged Pop to have a word with them about it, but he never would. On this morning, though, Brother JC sensed something afoot and was standing, arms crossed, against the back wall of the sanctuary. He was glaring at Jesse through eyeglass lenses that looked like the bottoms of Grapico bottles, but Jesse paid him no mind.

Jesse guided Cholly to the front pew, onto which the old man sank with a groan, alone and conspicuous. No one sat on the front pew except folks responding to the invitation, and that didn’t happen too terribly often. When it did happen, it was always at the end of the sermon and not like this, not in the middle. Normally, after delivering his lesson, the preacher would extend the invitation to come forward and be baptized or ask forgiveness for sins, the latter being the more common, and in which case it was more often than not Sister Frances Mahan coming forward to let folks know she’d "said and done things to bring reproach upon the church." My adolescent mind reeled trying to conjure what Sister Frances, humdrum as housework, could possibly have done to shame our congregation, but she always brought forward a note chock full of details – these were alluded to but never shared – and whenever I asked Momma for specifics, she’d shush me and say Sister Frances’ imagination was exceeded only by her craving of attention, and we should take pity and pray for her.

This Sunday, though, was not like that. Jesse Besteman wasn’t a bona fide preacher, for one thing – not in the strictest sense. He was a fill-in provided courtesy of the J. Dan Cooper School of Preaching down in Montgomery, loaned to Smallwood two weeks earlier both to get him some experience in the pulpit and to get us through a rough patch that summer after Brother Don, our former minister, was let go in May. So Jesse was ours for the summer as a preaching intern, living in Ada’s spare bedroom, and just a week into his gig.

Where Brother Don had been a shouter – either possessed of the notion that his flock was hard-of-hearing or that the Good News was more likely to stick if he yelled it – Jesse was of a different sort: younger certainly, but also quieter, gentler, and quite the story-teller. Brother Don could get himself all worked up, sweating and bellowing and spewing spittle in his fervid labors to dissuade us from the path that leads to destruction. But Jesse just talked, and when he talked, I thought he made right good sense.

It would be on his second Sunday with us, early June, when right in the middle of his sermon Jesse called Ol’ Cholly into the sanctuary, seated him on the front pew, and commenced to enact a scene of Biblical proportion.

Now Jesse stepped back from Cholly and nodded to him reassuringly. Then he slipped off his jacket and rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt, speaking low so that we had to strain to hear him. I almost missed the calling of my name when he looked right at me, sitting rigid in my pew there and, just like that, said “Spit Mullinax, will you come help me here?" I looked down to Pop and Momma for direction but didn’t get much in the way of how to respond to this, the second unorthodox and very public invitation of the morning. Momma only widened her eyes and pursed her lips as if to say beats me what you should do, and Pop wouldn’t meet my eye at all. But Ada, beside me, nudged me in the ribs and whispered, "Go on, son," so I pulled myself up, stumbled into the aisle, and stood there, as awkward as only 15-year-old boy can be, not sure where to put my hands or to look, but at least relieved to know my shirttail was halfway tucked- in so Momma and Ada couldn’t chide me about it later.

"Thank you, buddy." Jesse’s voice was warm as he pointed me toward the open door to the left of the pulpit behind him. "Would you just grab us one of those folding chairs out of the Sunday school room?" I obeyed in a daze and came back with a chair.

“Set it front and center there. That’s fine," he said, and he returned to his preaching, just as though dragging a black man and a folding chair out of the Sunday school room in the middle of services was the most normal thing in the world.

"To be the church," he said. "To be disciples is not so much about what we say as much as it is about what we do. We are to demonstrate our faith through our service to others. Isn’t that what "love thy neighbor" means? Love requires action. It’s something you do more than something you feel. The Apostle Paul tells us that showing love is our highest purpose. He says without it, we’re all talk and no action, nothing but a bunch of clanging bells, worthless noise."

Here he paused, mindful surely of the mounting tension he’d created and now elongating it. Then: "To love is to serve. Who do we serve, you ask? Why, everybody. How do we serve them, you ask? Humbly, graciously, selflessly.”

He re-approached Cholly on the front pew. He reached out and, taking the hand Cholly extended in return, he pulled the older man to his feet. "Mr. Sinclair, would you kindly have a seat in that chair there?" he asked, amiable, unruffled by the unusual alertness of the onlooking church members. Cholly plodded over to the chair and collapsed into it with a plop, and the chair’s metal joints protested with a squawk. He looked wonderingly for an instant at the sea of white faces now staring at him, and then, grasping the gravity of the situation, confidence drained from his face. He searched for Jesse.

Jesse, though, had scooted back up to the pulpit and disappeared behind it, only to reemerge with a towel over his shoulder and an aluminum washbasin in his hands. I recognized the old tub. It was Ada’s, the one she used to look the peas before she put ’em up. When he set the basin on the floor in front of Cholly, we could see it was filled with water.

"Now Mr. Sinclair. I don’t mean to embarrass you. But if you’ll allow it" – Jesse glanced back, I reckon to make sure we were still paying attention, and we were – "Mr. Sinclair, I’d like to wash your feet."

"H’yere, now. What’s this?" came a voice now from the back, nasal and raw, a hammer let loose in a china cabinet. Brother JC Naramore was tearing down the aisle in great clomping strides, wiping his forehead with a hanky as he came. Heads turned to JC and back to Jesse, taking it all in, laying odds on who would prevail in this tug of wills. Jesse was on his knees now, facing Cholly, but he looked back, unperturbed, and put out an arm toward JC, palm facing outward, fingers spread – a gesture pulsing with authority, impossible to misapprehend: Stop, it said.

And strangely, Brother JC did. He halted, just stopped cold, with not so much as a sputter, his bluster fading in the aisle there like heat lightning in a summer night’s sky. Jesse shook his head at him ever-so-slightly, as if to say don’t interfere, don’t spoil the moment, don’t devalue this thing I’m trying to show you. And there Brother JC Naramore stood, stymied by the sheer force of Jesse’s presence, a look of stupification on his face.

"Have mercy," breathed Sister Bunny Thacker, clearly vexed, from her pew right behind us. We all knew Sister Bunny to be a mite self-righteous and a busy-body to boot. Ada liked to say that if Bunny Thacker ever decided to drink alcohol in the same measure she judged other people, they’d have to put her in a 12-step program. To Bunny’s point, though: Having mercy seemed to be precisely what Jesse was trying to do, but that irony was apparently lost on her, and she commenced to fanning herself with a fury.

Cholly responded softly, "Naw sir. Naw sir, ain’t no need of that. You a good young fella. I enjoy sitting back yonder and hearing what you says, but...but my feets, they’s just fine.” He paused here for breath and took stock of the faces riveted on him: “Come on, now. These peoples don’t need see you on your knees like this. I just go on back to my little room." He began the slow effort of raising himself up from the chair.

"Please, Mr. Sinclair, it’s important," said Jesse, standing, laying a hand on the old man’s shoulder, settling him back on his fundaments.

Cholly sighed. “That be as it may, but it ain’t proper. Naw sir.” Cholly was clearly rattled now, torn, I saw, between a desire to accommodate to this strange young man and his own recognition that such accommodation was not likely to go over well with this crowd of white folk. He sat there staring at his shoes, his socks, the hem of his pants. His brow was wrinkled, his lips moved silently as he wrestled with his better judgment.

Jesse turned on his knees to face the congregation.

"It’s humbling, it’n it? Mr. Sinclair here is a good soul, and I’ve put him in a difficult spot. I know I have, and I’m sorry, Mr. Sinclair." He patted Cholly’s knee sympathetically and continued: "Reminds me of the story of another man who protested when a brother tried to wash his feet."

"’Brother’..." whispered Cholly, and a grim chuckle escaped him as he weighed the term, rolling it around in his mouth like a tooth come loose.

Jesse continued: "After supper one night, Jesus gets up from the table. He takes off his cloak, he wraps a towel around his waist, and he commences right there to wash folks’ feet. Can you imagine that? Well Peter – he won’t stand for this: the teacher he thinks may be the promised Messiah, come to save people from oppression, on his knees like some lowly house slave, washing fishermen feet? Well, it wasn’t proper! So Peter raises cain and begins to protest, sort of like – and I mean no offense, Mr. Sinclair, you’re in good company with the Apostle Peter – sort of like Mr. Sinclair here. Peter forgot, I reckon, what Jesus said about his only doing what he saw the Father doing. Jesus is saying to Peter that this is what God himself is like: He’ll stoop to wash our feet.

Silence.

"Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not comparing myself to Jesus in this story. But I do want to suggest to you that being like him ought to be our aim. And if we aim to be like Jesus, we have to forget ourselves. We have to take the form of a servant. Not just a servant to our family or our friends or people like us, but a servant to all."

He said this with conviction. I swiveled my head around to get a fix on how his words were received, but it seemed to me that just about every eye was looking down now, abashed. Brother JC remained stock-still about a third of the way down the aisle, his look fixed on that tub of water, eyes unreadable behind those glasses. That’s all I took in before Ada placed a hand on the back of my neck and reoriented me.

Jesse turned back to Cholly. "Now sir, I ask you again: Will you let me wash your feet?"

Cholly paused only a moment, then nodded and leaned forward with a groan to untie his brogans.

"Here," said Jesse. "Let me." He slowly untied one and then the other and loosened the laces. He lifted up each foot, pulled, and a heavy shoe fell free. Cholly wiggled his toes in his socks, staring at them, content for the moment to have them free of the confines of his shoes. Jesse rolled up one of the old man’s trouser legs a turn or two, and then the other. Gently, he slid down Cholly’s socks. He set them to the side, revealing the man’s feet, puffy, yellow and cracked.

Then with Jesse’s help, Cholly Sinclair placed his tired old feet in the tub of water, and Jesse began gently to massage them with a sopping washrag, liquid sloshing onto the rolled-up sleeves of his Sunday shirt.

And that’s when we saw it: The water in the tub was turning red – just as red as the shed blood of Christ.

Copyright 2021 Scott Brunner