“It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and he cast into the sea, than that he should offend one of these little ones.” Jesus Christ.
Luke 17: 12.
In the “From Where to Eternity?“ episode of “The Sopranos”, Tony Soprano reveals his ideas on who is going to hell to Dr. Melfi, his therapist.
Melfi: “Do you think he’ll go to hell?”
TS: “No. He’s not the type that deserves hell.”
Melfi: “Who do you think does?”
TS: “The worst people … the twisted and demented psychos who kill people for pleasure. The cannibals, the degenerate ____that molest and torture little kids and kill babies. The Hitlers. The Pol Pots. Those are the evil _____s who deserve to die. Not my nephew.”
Melfi: “What about you?”
TS: What? Hell? You been listening to me? No … for the same reasons. We’re soldiers. Soldiers don’t go to hell. It’s war. Soldiers, they kill other soldiers. We’re in a situation where everybody involved knows the stakes … you gotta do certain things. It’s business, we’re soldiers. We follow codes … orders.”
Tony Soprano is a mob boss and a gangster; not a theologian. But he articulates well his worldview - at least as far as the difference between Soldiers and Innocent Bystanders.
He could strangle a man to death with his bare hands yet feel angst and sorrow over an innocent child’s suffering.
Simply, his ethic is this: a gangster knows the risks just like a hockey player knows if he straps on the pads and steps onto the ice he is going to be slammed into the boards. The spectators out in the arena however, are off limits.
“We’re soldiers” … means “while we kill, maim and brutalize other gangsters; our code prevents us from killing innocents - those who have no stake in the battle and cannot fight back.”
We follow codes … we live by a principle.
… thus is the Gospel According to Tony Soprano.
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Murray E. Burr was an “old school” archconservative. To me, he is how Ronald Reagan described Richard Nixon: “a complicated, fascinating man.”
Burr was the catalyst for the Apostolic Ministerial Fellowship; a major split from the United Pentecostal Church - “major” in the caliber of preachers who left if not in the quantity. The battles fought mainly on the Louisiana and Texas gulf coasts over Burr’s expulsion from the organization predated the Tulsa Meeting by 40 years.
Are there lessons the Tulsa Crowd (and all of us) could learn from Burr?
I think so.
Burr, like Tony Soprano, recognized the difference between Soldiers and Innocents.
I find Burr fascinating because he was a man of contradictions. I don’t mean hypocrital ones; Burr was anything but a hypocrite.
He was born in the small village of Merryville; hard by the Sabine River on the Louisiana-Texas border in Beauregard Parish, Louisiana, a small area that produced other giants of oneness Pentecostal history like A. T. Morgan, T. F. Tenney and George Glass, Sr.
I think in his heart-of-hearts that Burr believed the outrageous, outlandish and extra-biblical positions he espoused passionately and many times with a pen dripping with venom.
At the same time; he was an intellectual who quoted Shakespeare and Tennyson from memory. While many Pentecostal preachers of the ultra-con variety would probably be selling shoes or digging ditches were they not behind a pulpit, Burr could have been a Supreme Court justice or President of a major university. He had a powerful mind.
I first heard him preach on the radio around 1982 while on Interstate 10 around Lafayette, La., traveling to another revival. His program’s theme song, “In Times Like These” played and then he began to preach in a deep baritone.
I expected to hear a raving lunatic. After all, I was a young preacher who had been fed a steady diet about how “bitter” Burr was.
But when those twenty minutes had passed, I wished the clock had never been invented so that he could continue on and on and on.
When he wasn’t bashing and slamming, he was one of the most profound preachers in oneness Pentecostal history - a giant of the pulpit.
While his arch-conservative theology was petty and patently ridiculous, he had a deep sense of honor and right and wrong.
He was a man’s man who, when he felt he was wronged and humiliated, was not going to go away meekly like a lamb.
C. G. Weeks in the Louisiana District and V. A. Guidroz in the Texas District ruled their fiefdoms with iron fists in the 1960s.
Burr had two of his own and when he was expelled from the United Pentecostal Church around 1967, he fired salvoes from his pen against the UPC like the battleship Missouri firing a broadside from her sixteen inch guns at full bore.
He bloodied up a lot of men, proved the old adage about the pen being mightier than the sword, and was one of the most polarizing figures in oneness Pentecostal history.
The most fascinating dichotomy and contrast in the life and ministry of Murray E. Burr is that while he was relentless and brutal in going after his perceived enemies in the ministry, Burr recognized the difference between Soldiers and Innocents, much more than many far lesser men.
A young minister from the church Burr pastored in Port Arthur, Texas married the daughter of a longtime presbyter in the Texas District UPC. The couple was kin to me by marriage.
Burr loved the young minister and took part in the wedding along with UPC ministers.
In 1991, the minister’s wife was killed in a car accident. The funeral was held in Newton, Texas, where the couple had pastored.
Burr was there taking part in the funeral, preaching to a predominantly UPC congregation including E. L. Holley, then the Texas District Superintendent and many other district officials, pastors, lay members and non-Pentecostals from the community.
I was in the congregation.
He could have used the occasion to “take shots.” He could have used the pulpit to berate the organization and Holley, among those Burr felt had wronged him.
I’ll remember until I die his gentle words of comfort, exhorting that UPC church to “use this tragedy for good; to have revival.” He was gracious and kind. There was not even a hint of the viciousness and ruthlessness he used when he fought.
I believe Burr knew the congregation was filled not only with the grief-stricken, but with “saints” - laymen who had no knowledge of nor interest in the battles he fought with preachers who could ably fight back with pen and word.
He fought like a tiger in the arena but knew the harm he could cause to The Innocent outside the arena.
Had I known to ask him why on that spring day in 1991, he might have said like Tony Soprano: “We’re soldiers … we kill each other but we don’t harm the innocents who have no stake in the battle.”
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For those of you old-timers reading this who remember the AMF battles; I’m not so naïve as to assert that no laymen at all were aware of the titanic battles between preachers and organizations.
Yes, I remember hearing about some preachers wives declaring the young ladies in their churches should not date “Laodecian boys” in UPC churches. But for the most part, the advice was ignored and marriages across AMF-UPC lines were common. The battle was left to the preachers because from Burr’s example, the preachers did not stray from the combat zone.
I contrast this with 2008; with a predominance of pettiness - with preachers seeming to use their saints as human shields in their battles against television, “liberalism” and what they perceive as “worldliness.”
In contrast to fighting with honor and leaving laymen out of things, church members are ordered not to speak to members of a neighboring church deemed more “liberal” or “worldly” by petty and insecure pastors.
In 2008, is the Tulsa crowd “fighting with honor” by using bait-and-switch tactics - by asserting “we are not an organization - just a fellowship” and then lo and behold - a complete, bloated organizational structure is already in place?
Burr might have had a pen dripping with poison, he might have been brutal and ruthless … but he would NEVER have talked out of both sides of his mouth and used bait and switch tactics like a shyster salesman to get men to join a fellwoship for his own political gain.
He was a man of conviction. In my opinion many of his convictions were wrong, misguided and ridiculous - but he fought for them with passion and honor.
Men don’t fight with swords anymore.
When nuclear bombs can incinerate millions, Generals use cold-blooded terms like “Residual Casualties” to describe civilians killed. Mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, human beings who live, laugh and love - much easier to kill and mangle them through a bomb sight than to stick a sword through them.
In the oneness Pentecostal world in 2008, ministers coldly calculate “residual casualties.” If some innocent “saints” are damaged by “Tulsa at any cost” then so be it; seems to be the mindset.
Perhaps Johnny Godair, Kenny Godair, Crawford Coon and others need to listen to a fictional gangster and to a voice from the grave.
Murray Burr lived in a time now bygone.
Burr fought face-to-face and man-to-man.
Murray Burr’s archconservative and extra-biblical positions violated more than one sound Bible interpretation.
But on one scriptural principle he was right on the money; like Tony Soprano, he knew how to be a soldier and not harm the innocents.
Murray Burr is dead now.
And I am nostalgic for the era in oneness Pentecostalism that seems to have died with him - an era when soldiers fought with honor.
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