Tuesday, May 24, 2022

Remembering a Student ‘Dialogue Sermon’ from 1969


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Black and white photograph of Thomas Redmon in 1969 dressed in suit and tie
Thomas Redmon in 1969

As a senior at Duke in 1969, Thomas Redmon, T ’69, received a surprising invitation to participate in a “dialogue sermon” in a Duke Chapel service with fellow undergraduate Reed Kramer and the Rev. Dr. Howard Wilkinson, then chaplain to the university. A member of the campus Wesley Fellowship and active in the ecumenical student group University Christian Movement, Redmon (who then had the last name Raper) agreed to the endeavor. “I remember it being exhilarating,” Redmon said in a recent phone interview. “It was a relatively new idea  at Duke Chapel.”

In the three-way sermon preached on May 4, 1969, Chaplain Wilkinson began by putting forward different ideas about the mission and identity of the church. Then, the two students and Wilkerson rotated in giving their views. According to a transcript of the sermon, Redmon says at one point:

[The individual] acknowledges that only in being in a relationship with others can he find himself—and in that process of true self-identity, he allows the church to become—he makes possible the church, that community which gives up its life for the risk and possibility of finding new life. 

Looking back on the experience, Redmon sees the sermon in the context of the times. “One of the most important things for me is that I felt like many of the fairly progressive, even radical ideas that were beginning to surface…—it was an opportunity to get those thoughts into the mainstream of religious thinking at Duke,” he said. After graduating from Duke, Redmon went to seminary at Boston University and became ordained in the United Methodist Church. He then earned a doctorate in public policy and made his career in education administration. 

Listen to the full sermon, titled The Identity Crisis of the Church: A Three-Way Dialogue Sermon, or read a transcript of the sermon in the Duke Chapel Recordings digital archive on the Duke Libraries website.

Originally published in the Spring 2022 Chapel View magazine.