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By Sam Hodges
United Methodist News Service

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Many, if not most, sermons fade from memory by Sunday lunch, but people in Dallas still talk about one the Rev. William Holmes gave there 50 years ago, just after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

While he didn’t blame Dallas for the crime itself, Holmes unflinchingly described the city as an incubator for political extremism and incivility, the kind of place where many worried an assassination might occur.

The sermon made the CBS News anchored by Walter Cronkite and brought the young Methodist pastor death threats, forcing him and his family to go into hiding under police protection.

In short, all hell broke loose because of the tough love Holmes preached in Dallas two days after Kennedy’s killing there in November 1963.

Holmes is 84 now, retired in Maryland after a long, accomplished ministry career. He’s hard of hearing and walks with a cane; but he’s written books in recent years, and for the 50th anniversary of the JFK assassination he updated an 8,000-word memoir of the sermon controversy that he wrote for his grandchildren.

“It’s always been an important memory for me,” he said.

Others, such as historian Stephen Fagin, call what happened with Holmes one of the more emotional and compelling subplots of the frenzied assassination aftermath.

“Dallas was blamed by many after the assassination for being a toxic environment, and Rev. Holmes really hit on that in his sermon,” said Fagin, associate curator of Dallas’ Sixth Floor Museum, which commemorates the JFK assassination story. “The fact that it achieved international notoriety … is something Holmes clearly didn’t ask for.”

On Nov. 22, 1963, Holmes, then 32, and his wife, Nancy, had joined the crowd at the Dallas Trade Mart, awaiting a luncheon with President Kennedy and the First Lady, Jacqueline Kennedy.

His joyful expectation turned to shock when they learned Kennedy had been shot as his motorcade passed through downtown Dallas. Driving home, they heard by radio bulletin that Kennedy had died at Parkland Hospital.

That same afternoon Holmes began working on the sermon he would give on Sunday, Nov. 24, at Northaven Methodist Church in the Dallas suburbs.

In his 14-minute sermon, titled “One Thing Worse Than This,” he argued that Dallas couldn’t wash its hands, Pontius Pilate-like, of the tragedy that had occurred in its midst. Good people of Dallas had for too long, he said, stood by silently, giving free reign to political extremists.

His indictment culminated with Holmes describing how children in a fourth-grade classroom in North Dallas had cheered the news of Kennedy’s assassination.

“In the name of God, what kind of city have we become?” he said.

Holmes devoted the balance of the sermon to challenging Dallas residents to stand up to extremists, on the right and left, and create a more wholesome atmosphere for politics and governing.

“If Dallas rises from this monstrous moment in her history, a new city where different political opinions and the people who hold them are respected, then John Kennedy will not have died in vain,” Holmes said. “But that remains to be seen. Until then, the one thing worse than this assassination in our midst, is that we, the citizens of Dallas, should wash our hands and say, ‘We take no responsibility for this man’s death.’”

Holmes was hardly the only Dallas preacher to hold up a mirror to the city that Sunday. Given that he was a young pastor in a small church, his sermon might well have had no life beyond his congregation.

But CBS television had aired a post-assassination report featuring Dallas officials who offered an upbeat, Chamber of Commerce assessment of the city. The network got complaints that the report was a whitewash and went looking for a balancing view from within Dallas.

On Tuesday evening, the network broadcast included Holmes reading a lengthy portion of the sermon, including the part about the cheering schoolchildren.

The New York Times covered the death threats against Holmes and noted other reports of local children cheering at news of the assassination. Meanwhile, Holmes received strong backing from most in his congregation, as well as public statements of support from the Perkins faculty and “The Dirty Dozen,” a study group of young, somewhat rebellious Methodist pastors to which he belonged.

Hundreds of letters, hostile or supportive, arrived and are now collected at the Sixth Floor Museum. Encouraging notes came from former classmates Paul Tillich as well as from Hugh Brannun, a Methodist minister’s son better known as “Mr. Green Jeans” on the popular children’s network TV program “Captain Kangaroo.”

Holmes recalls sleeping little in the first days after the broadcast, given the disruption and tension. But there were humorous moments.

During his stay at a friend’s house, Holmes was visited by Harvey and Schubert Ogden of the Perkins faculty. As they were talking, Harvey saw through the window that Bishop W.C. Martin was approaching the front door. Harvey sounded an alert, and Holmes began frantically extinguishing the pipe he was smoking, since Methodists officially disapproved of tobacco use.

In his memoir, Holmes wrote, “I jumped up to stash my smoking materials in another room, when I heard Schubert exclaim, ‘There goes our fearless prophet!’”

Holmes added that Martin could no doubt smell the pipe smoke, but overlooked it and provided steadfast support.

The Holmes family soon would come out of hiding, and Holmes credits his wife – usually cautious on every matter regarding family health and safety – with insisting he preach at Northaven the following Sunday.

“She had utter clarity about the importance of not allowing Dallas to drive me from my pulpit,” Holmes said in a 2007 oral history interview with Fagin. “She put that clarity above all of her anxieties and usual precautions.”

Holmes would stay at Northaven through 1965, eventually assuming the high-profile pulpit of Metropolitan Memorial UMC in Washington, D.C. He was there for 24 years, preaching to a congregation that included members of Congress and the U.S. Supreme Court.

But the Dallas controversy stayed with him.

“Undoubtedly, there were other times I chose to be passive and sided with the status quo — even when I knew a prophetic word was needed,” he wrote.

“But in such moments, for all my rationalizations, I have never been entirely able to shut out the radical reminder of my ordination: ‘Take authority as an Elder in the Church to preach the Word of God.’ Against this awesome privilege and its imperative, and ever conscious of ‘Dallas memories,’ which remain as fresh with me as the day they happened, I have struggled throughout my ministry with what it means to cry, ‘Thus saith the Lord.’”