M.L. King Jr. Sunday, 2003
By Charles Rush
January 19, 2003
Isaiah 2: 2-5 and Jer. 31: 31-34 and Joel 2: 28
The Things that Make for Peace (Isa. 2:2-5)
ery year, when I reread some aspect of the Civil Rights movement, I find one or two items that are new to me. One of them this year, I share right up front. Just before Rosa Parks sat down and the whole world stood up, there was one group that was already organized for political reform in Montgomery, Alabama- The Women's Council. It was a group of Church ladies, probably drawn from the Black Baptist Churches in the area, that were ready to do something.
It is
not surprising on two fronts. One, when I was a child in the South, it was safe
to say that in all of our churches, men had the official positions of
leadership and women actually ingested what they heard on Sunday and ran the
Church. That is changing for both genders, but it is still largely true across
our country.
The
other front is difficult for me to understand from our vantage point today…
that is the factor of fear. One of the reasons that the African-American women
took it upon themselves to organize is that their pastors were largely quiet
about the whole issue from the pulpit. Likewise, in the South, even in the
sixties in white churches, you never heard a sermon in a white church on race
issues, even from progressive Ministers, and the reason was a palpable fear.
The
fifties were the tail end of an unbroken reign of terror in the South that only
lessened by degree from slavery to Jim Crow. In those days, the
African-American community was subject to marches through their neighborhoods
from the Ku Klux Klan. Periodically, young men were lynched, often for no other
reason than their race. Leaders were subject to threats at night in an era
before phone taps. Molotov cocktails were thrown at homes, at businesses. If
you have seen Mississippi Burning or that strange little quirky movie Monster's
Ball, a whole lot of White people from that era were mean, violently mean.
They were filled with a subterranean lava flow of anger that too often found a
convenient scapegoat in black people for a seemingly endless multitude of
reasons. And some of them assumed the self-appointed task of simply instilling
fear in the black community or spreading hate, as their parents and
grandparents had taught them for the last 5 generations. I mention that to
remind us, and it is important to remember, that it was not at all clear that
White people in South Alabama were capable of ever transcending that ethos of
hate and violence.
It is
important to remember because it underscores the Spiritual power that Dr. King
and the other leaders of the Civil Rights movement harnessed and then released
in non-violent resistance. They took the teachings of Jesus on love and
suffering and applied them in a novel, social way.
Dr.
King, and many others of that generation, learned this from Mohandas Gandhi,
who said he learned it from reading the New Testament at Oxford. Dr. King read
many of Gandhi's books and books about him and he went to India just after the
Bus Boycotts.
Shortly
after the beginning of the Bus Boycotts, Dr. King quoted Gandhi at a seminar
that he held on Nonviolence and Social change. This was a guiding idea for the
movement. Gandhi said, “Things of fundamental importance to people are not
secured by reason alone, but have to be purchased with their suffering… The
appeal of reason is to move the head, but the penetration of the heart comes
from suffering. It opens up the inner understanding in man.”[1]
King
understood that where the end of violence was tragedy and bitterness, the end
of nonviolence could lead to redemption and reconciliation, as he would say the
creation of the Beloved Community. Looking back, we can see what an enormously
important spiritual breakthrough was made with the practice of non-violence. It
brought dignity to the marchers. The response of oppression with firehoses,
police dogs, police batons, and jail time laid the moral case before the
conscience of our nation and the world. And it made a way for the meanness and
violence of white people to become healed. And make no mistake, despite how far
we still might have to go, a profound healing has taken place in our lifetimes.
Living
non-violence was not easy. The T.V. cameras didn't cover the days of training
that the boycott marchers went through. The cameras didn't cover the several
hour long worship service before they set out, the prayer time, the spiritual
focus. It does not come naturally.
And
it was not apparent that it would be effective at the time. People in the
movement complained that they had never seen such anger and hatred in the faces
of people as when they were being shouted at or beaten in the marching. Quite a
few people of substantial character, like Thurgood Marshall, who would later
become a Supreme Court Justice, didn't think they could do it if something
terrible happened to the movement.
Terrible
things did happen. Dr. King was personally put to the test more than once. In
the early 50's his house was firebombed when only his wife and child were home,
after weeks of death threats late at night on the phone. They survived
unharmed. But you can imagine the full range of emotion that ran through his
soul when he got home to survey the damage.
Outside
his house there were lots of his neighbors with guns, ready to revenge somehow.
Dr. King told them, “If you have weapons, take them home. We must meet violence
with non-violence. Remember the words of Jesus: ‘He who lives by the sword will
die by the sword.'” He had to consciously stick to a new spiritual path. He had
to recommit himself, every time he was stabbed, jailed, attacked as
disingenuous.
It
was the fullness of time, and a new way was brought forth. A spiritual
breakthrough that broke through an impasse and collectively we all grew as
humans. One of the leaders of the movement, thinking of the social/spiritual
breakthrough of nonviolence as an agent of social change, quoted I Corinthinans
to sum up the spiritual evolution that they lived through. “When I was a child,
I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I
grew up, I put away childish things… and now abideth faith, hope and love, but
the greatest of these is love.”
Our Common Humanity (Jer. 31:31-34)
I'm showing my age… but the
most moving photograph of my generation was probably generated by NASA. It was
a picture of the Earth taken from the Moon, full of rich blues and whites,
accented by green and brown. And it was so moving because right after
mid-century, right about the time that photograph was taken, we reached a point
in our social evolution as a species, where we all became connected around the
globe. That photograph of our beautiful earth matched the fact that we were all
global neighbors, whether or not we want to be, we just are.
It was a
moment filled with irony because it happened right around the same time we
developed weapons of mass destruction that were capable of destroying the
entire population of the earth.
We are at
the front end of that new consciousness and it will take many centuries, maybe
a millennia before we really grow into what that holds for us. And the
introduction to the global village has not been all sweet, gushy butter has it?
We were
pretty sure that the Russians had some genetic/ideological defect and the Chinese
were a world unto themselves. Even the worldly Europeans, who pride themselves
on their intercultural sophistication can't seem to live with the Turks or
North Africans next door. Right now, non-African Muslims, African Christians,
and African Animists are fighting a Civil War in the Ivory Coast that is
something of a metaphor of our age, with religion no small part of the force
that divides us from our common humanity, not that which brings us together.
All across Europe, Russia, and the United States people are having serious
discussions as to whether Islam and Arab culture are assimilable in any way
shape or form with Western cultural values. They are big questions and they
will continue to be posed in different guises for centuries to come.
Meanwhile,
we are all one people now and that will only grow in depth. Dr. King could lift
that up with such moral and spiritual force because we live under a
constitution that has bound us to that common quest for human community across
racial, ethnic, and religious lines. Slavery, Jim Crow, institutional and
structural discrimination were a stain on the conscience of the American
Constitution. It was a gaping hypocrisy in our collective life.
But what a
powerful idea, that we are all children of God and that no matter how different
we might be, what binds us together in our common humanity far exceeds those
differences. Unity in diversity… what an elevated idea.
How
important it will become in the next generations. For we will have to establish
common bonds of humanity when we are not bound by a Constitution that enjoins
these ideals upon all of us as a social goal and we are not bound by the common
spiritual syntax of a Judeo-Christian heritage that teaches that we are all
created in the image of God. The challenge is more daunting, more necessary
given our density of proximity, and it will be more profound, engulfing the
whole planet. And it will come… one day… with set backs and struggles, it will
come.
The Dream (Joel 2:28)
Over the
holidays, I dropped in a video arcade in a Mall, waiting for a shopper. It is
an amazing array of new equipment. Outstanding screens, larger, better
pictures, more realistic people to shoot and kill. Bells, whistles. It was
loud. It was almost as loud and annoying as the slot machine rooms at Atlantic
City. Both places have one thing in common, they are amusing diversions, one
for very young people, the other for very old people. As a culture, we do
amusing diversions very well.
I mention
that because, without being a moral scold or a pastoral prig, it is true that
diversions are a spiritual climate that makes it difficult to concentrate. To
more than a little degree, they stand in apposition to dreams.
Dreams, as
the Bible continually points out, are borne out of destitution, want,
deprivation. It is the war torn that dream of living a peaceful life in the
country, enjoying the simple pleasures of picking your own garden and grilling
with your family and friends on a warm evening with easy conversation. It is
the dysfunctional that dream of being part of a normal family that care for
each other, support each other unconditionally, where everyone has a place. It
is those who have been humiliated and enslaved that dream of a world where
everyone is judged on the merits of their character and not the genetic
accidents of history. Dreams are not diversions and they are not false hopes.
They are the faint beacon on the edge of the horizon that guides your frail
boat through daunting currents filled with rocks and holds you to the stern in
bad weather when ordinary people would reverse course and head for a safe
harbor. Dreams are spiritually empowering. They make our character stronger.
But
profound spiritual dreams, like the ones that Joel refers to, do not come
without deprivation and suffering. Dr. King discovered this in the going of the
movement. At the beginning of the bus boycotts, as one of the leaders, he
insisted on being arrested with everyone else and being treated like everyone
else. Trust me, when he was in seminary, he didn't look forward to the day when
he could spend some time in Jail but once the movement started, he realized
that he had to walk the walk and he did. At first, he really hated jail, he
resented the tedium, the boredom, wasting time when there was so much to
organize, so much work to be done.
But over
time, it grew on him because he realized the spiritual significance of jail
time for a worthy cause. When he went to India, he met people that had been in
jail for 10 years and he came to view them for their non-violent resistance and
he came to view them in a different light than he had before. He realized that
this was all part of solidifying the dream and though you don't go out of your
way to find it, when it happens to you, when suffering finds you in the pursuit
of a noble cause, the dream comes and with it the courage.
We need the
dream. We need the courage. May God deny us diversions but grant us real
dreams.
Amen.
[1] My thanks to
Frankie Shaner for passing on Harris Wofford's record of the era Of Kennedys
and Kings: Making Sense of the Sixties (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux,
1980), pp. 118 ff.
© 2003 .
All rights reserved
