Have you ever had that conversation with your kids about if you could pick one secret power, what would it be? And everyone in the room says, things like: "Become invisible," or "I wish I could fly," or "I wish I could transform into any form appropriate to the situation - a fly, a giant, Brad Pitt." I, of course, would want to fly but I'm always temped to add another on like an addendum. I want the power to bring back people of import to speak to our time. Movers and shakers of their time: rebels, teachers, philosophers who could point us in the right direction regarding public policy, public trust, community and vision. As we celebrate his legacy tomorrow, one of the characters I'd like to invite back would most definitely be Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. But seeing as they aren't taking any applications to Hogwarts School for wizards and witches to obtain such magical power, I'm left to speculate about what he might say to us now, if he stood here in this pulpit this morning. So for the last month I've gone back and read directly from the source - his writings, lectures, sermons, books and letters - to figure out what Dr. King would have to say to us. It has truly been a great month and a half, and I was spinning right along, until about a week and half ago, when I realized I've been reading his work incorrectly all along.
This realization occurred during the New Hampshire primaries. I was watching the debates on the TV and here are these four men and one gal, giving their positions papers, with their plans for what we need to do with the state of our nation and this is when it hit me. Without knowing it, I've been reading Martin Luther King, Jr. speeches as policy statements, as position papers.
I was saying - yes, yes - when he speaks of non-violent action as the only course for action. And over and over again, I was shook by his ability to connect issues, in simple, yet complex ways.
All great policies. Great programs. Great political strategies to pursue. But what I missed, what I had failed to recognize was that his power rests not in the way he said "Let's go do all of this!" but in the fact that he said "WE MAY NEED TO DIE FOR ALL THIS!"
I think this is easy to forget, because his ideas are so brilliant, his speeches so eloquent, and thus we can get lost in the intellectualism of it all - lost in analyzing his ideas and his vision.and forget the parts where he stressed again and again that these weren't just ideas worth dying for but achieving these ideas would entail a cost! Indeed we can never forget that what we are celebrating today and tomorrow was not just a man with a great vision but a man who was willing to give his life for that great vision.
We have laughed now I think for years at George W. Bush's lack of conversation about sacrifice after the 9/11 attacks and how he encouraged us to go shopping. I know - at least once - I've done that from this pulpit, but honestly, the other side hasn't asked of us anything more either. Liberal leaders also make change seem much easier to obtain than it is. Sacrifice continues to be a FOUR letter word. Maybe, that too, is why it is so easy to overlook that part of Dr. King's message.
It's worth remembering, I think, that Dr. King was a Christian minister. If we truly want to honor him, we've got to remember that. While I am obviously not a Christian, what makes me inspired by that great tradition is the way it boldly and bravely puts the cross at the center of its message-daring us over and over again, to tell the world that new life, a new day, comes only through giving yourself, sacrificing yourself out of great love - for needs greater than your own. Dr. King embraced this and thus to honor Dr. King and to say we are following the way he pointed us - is to embrace this as well. Reading his words again, it has become hard for me to ignore this fact.
I think of his answer to an interviewer who asked him about why he was upset about some white churches that hadn't gotten involved in the movement, for they had stated that the proper role of the church wasn't to "intervene in secular affairs."
He said this: "The essence of the Epistles of Paul is that Christians should rejoice at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believe. The projection of a social gospel, in my opinion, is the true witness of a Christian life. This is the meaning of the true ecclesia - the inner, spiritual church. The church once changed society. It was then a thermostat of society. But today I feel that too much of the church is merely a thermometer, which measures rather than molds popular opinion." [accommodates rather than puts itself at risk.]
So there we have it don't we, sacrifice at the center of his understanding of action, of policy, of living and loving one's values. If we are to call a nation to live up to their better selves, to change unjust laws, to transform society, he believed it must involve sacrifice in some way, in some manner, on some level.
So I went back again, and I re-read his work through this lens, and I realized that the uniqueness of his message isn't just in rightly naming the problem of his time, and applying the correct salve, but it is how he was honest, bold and brave enough to admit that it would take sacrifice on his part and everyone else involved in order to get there.
So I went back to his "I Have a Dream" speech and read it through this new lens. I found the line many folks use at MLK, Jr. events that says: "I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, that one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today." And then we often fail to read the rest of the speech, or maybe we just mentally skip over it because he proposes some hard things.
He says, a couple of paragraphs later, " I have faith that we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together." And there it is, isn't it?! This isn't just a dream of children walking hand in hand; this is a dream of children being able to walk hand in hand TO JAIL, for the sake of what they believe. Realizing this raises the stakes. Changes the question. Forces us to ask. . .when was the last time we acted with such radical commitment that it could have landed us in jail?!
He wasn't saying it would be easy, he wasn't proclaiming a new day in a simple sense. He was, however, pointing out the hard realities of what it would take to get there. The sacrifices that needed to happen to let freedom ring.
I also went back and read excerpts from his book Stride Toward Freedom with new eyes. He talks about the role of white clergymen, of white moderates, of black preachers, of school children and teachers, principals, and administrators. He notes quite clearly, in hard realities, what it really takes to raise the consciousness of a nation. What it takes to break the chains that racism, poverty and militarism impose on all of us. What it takes to make people realize that just because a law is on the books doesn't make the law right, or just. He said this: "American Negroes must come to the point where they can say to their white brothers, paraphrasing the words of Gandhi: 'We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children; send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities and drag us out of some wayside road, beating us and leaving us half dead, and we will still love you. But we will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer.'"
I also re-read the pieces that pointed out his everyday reality: "In the course of his civil rights work he has been jailed fourteen times and stabbed once in the chest; his home has been bombed three times; and his daily mail brings a steady flow of death treats and obscenities. Undeterred, he works twenty hours a day, travels 325,000 miles and makes 450 speeches a year throughout the country on behalf of the cause. He is inundated by calls, callers and correspondence at his SCLC office in Atlanta, he also finds time somehow to preach, visit the sick and help the poor among his congregation at the city's Ebenezer Baptist church, of which he and his father are the pastors."
With this new lens, I'll just be honest, by now I was hyperventilating. I know you are worrying I'm headed in the direction of finger wagging, but that's not it at all. It didn't make me feel like wagging fingers at you but more like needing to stick my fingers in my ears. Because, sacrifice, come on, who wants to hear about sacrifice? I surely don't. Heck yes, I'd rather go to the mall to do my duty for my country, buy a new dress or get a new TV in order to bolster the economy rather than have to give something up, take on something hard, miss seeing my kids, get positive affirmation from people rather than hate mail because I am putting something in their face that they don't want to have to deal with or look at or address. Heck yes! Do I really want to put before someone something that might make them have to change their behavior, or give something up?
This month our worship theme is saints and sinners. We are getting, of course, this month to all the ways we look at sin and sainthood, and it would be remiss of us not to mention a big category that historically Unitarian Universalists have rejected. The concept of original sin. For us, there was never a stain on human kind, some irredeemable stain on the individual, for us we've most often looked at sin as a relational and social category, not a personal or ontological one. For us sin isn't a stain on an individual but instead sin becomes all the social and relational dynamics which serve to separate and divide us as human beings.
As I've reflected on MLK, Jr. themes and work this last month, I've thought a lot about the great sin that is happening to us today as a culture. It is a complex one because I believe there are many forces in society that serve to separate us from one another. Many things that make it easy for some portions of our society to not even be aware of the pain and suffering of others, pervasive poverty, the growing income divide, a war we spend billions upon billions of dollars on that is thousands of miles away, deteriorating schools, languishing living wage jobs, the suburban/urban divide - to name just a few.
In the aftermath of Katrina, this gap between the comfort of the haves and the desperation of the have-nots was clear. So people organized, they got themselves down South to work for a week, kids ran car washes and had bake sales to send money, corporations had means to get us to contribute in check out lines, on line, or through matching funds. The feeling of we are all in this together swept the nation. But, now more than two years have passed, and time has marched on. And New Orleans and the Gulf coast are largely forgotten.
This, too, Dr King would lift up. Not just sacrifice but also this sin of separation.
I'm thinking today that he wouldn't just highlight these two topics, I think he would connect the two of them. I think he would remind us that they are intricately bound, tied up together. I think he would remind us that it is through sacrifice that the sin of separation is healed. There is a sports metaphor that some of you know that gets to this. You are only really considered totally committed, totally engaged, invested in the game, if you've got "skin in the game." People know you aren't really invested, until you are willing to put yourself at risk, if you're willing to get yourself bruised, beat up, look a little dented after the game. Which for us in our lives means not just giving lip service to our values and beliefs, or showing compassion, but losing some of our "suburbanite" skin.
Let me explain what I mean.
When you start not paying your federal taxes to protest the fact that 51% of our taxes go to pay for Pentagon expenditures and the war in Iraq then I guarantee you that the emotional gap between you and our soldiers in Iraq, as well as, the Iraqi people will begin to close. You put skin in the game and suddenly you're invested and connected in a way that reading an Atlantic Monthly article about the plight of the Iraqi people will never accomplish!
If you start to express your anger that the government is investing in the war, rather than the war on poverty, and you give 10-15% to this church that is doing work with the disenfranchised and forgotten, and you can't go on vacation. . .I would bet you would feel less separate and more connected. Yes, you may not be impoverished, but suddenly you're invested in that fight in a deeper way than a simple intellectual assent. You'd have some skin in the game.
Dr King talked often about the students who took a year off of college to work on the fight for civil rights. I can't get that out of my head, because this kind of work is getting skin in the game.
So what we are left with, I believe, is not just a message about sacrifice, but a much more complex message - that it is through sacrifice that our separation is healed. But also something more.
Community is also woven all through Dr. King's words. He said he couldn't have gone on without it. None of the sacrifices would have been possible. None of the resistance. None of the boldness. None of the bravery.
So when I get paralyzed by the call to sacrifice, I think of this. His needing community helps clarify my need for it as well. Simply put healing what divides us does not occur without sacrifice. Sacrifice does not occur without community.
Dr. King's call is intimidating for any of us. You realize immediately that you can't and don't want to do it alone. So I end today not with the message of it's time to finally do it, but it's time for US to finally do it. Time, friends, to create that beloved community he so often called everyone toward.
Scott and I were at a new member dessert the other day, where once again, people got to express their vision, their hopes for this community, for this place of "We." And it struck me as we were driving home in the car - that these new members indeed hold daring, bold vision for who it is that we are and who they hope we can become together. But it also reminded me that these new folks among us are not afraid of getting "skin in the game." They don't see that as an issue. They know that in order to be bold, determined, to be in a place that offers life altering opportunity not only to ourselves but to the larger community, we've got to have some sacrifice. They instinctively understand on some level that healing what divides us does not occur without sacrifice. And sacrifice does not occur without community. Once we get that, like the new members in our midst, I believe we will have listened to and read Martin correctly. And then maybe we'll not only see the possibility of the Promised Land. . .but will be able to achieve it as well.
Amen.
return to main page