Sermon: The Sword that Heals

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The Sword that Heals

By Charles Rush

January 18, 2004

e title for this morning's sermon, 'The Sword that Heals' is the title of a chapter from a book that Dr. King published 40 years ago, Why We Can't Wait. He is recalling the words from Jesus who once said, "Think not that I come to bring peace, I bring a sword." He reminds us that Jesus was not only about eternal salvation but also about temporal justice. He was not only priest but also prophet. He came not only to comfort the afflicted. He came also to afflict the comfortable. As Bill Coffin noted recently, "Jesus tells us to love our enemies… He never says don't make any." Like prophets in every age, their peers consider them to be mere rabble rousers and generations later presume they not only would have sided with them in the fray of conflict, they would have been bosom buddies.

Recently, I had a personal reflection on that era, traveling back to Memphis, where Dr. King was shot, in order to bury my grandmother. Memphis today is literally a photo negative of my childhood 40 something years ago. Then mid-town was all white and blacks lived in shanty towns, not much different from South Africa, in the outlying country side, and they took the only transportation to work they could afford, the bus.

Today, mid-town is 95% black and all the white people have fled 10 miles east to a suburb called, appropriately, German town- Europe town- and they have taken with them all corporate office space, the Malls, a bevy of these Christian all-white Academies, and Churches that look like small college campuses.

I sat outside the house my Grandmother lived in when I was a small child, just looking back into the past. They lived in what is today called the 'historic district' though there isn't any restoration going on there just yet.

I had two Grandmother's who were both working-women, and pretty successful at that. The one I came to bury was the Chief Administrator of a Cancer Clinic which was about as high as you could go as a woman in the South in the 40's and 50's. Both of my grandmother's were strong women. I admired them and had great affection for them. The one I came to bury was not exactly the fuzzy, sentimental type. Her house was as efficiently run as her office and very formal.

I am the oldest child, not only in my family, but for the whole generation. I sat there, looking at the house, and the visual imagery of past family gatherings came back vividly. It's funny about your child's perspective on things. I don't actually have an accurate memory of the front of the house, but the back I remembered pretty well. I couldn't really describe the front parlor or the living room but the kitchen I remember in detail. I don't have many warm, fuzzy memories of me cuddled up with my Grandmother reading but I have a lot of warm memories of the maid. It was an era when children only spoke when spoken to.

It was a caste society. Blacks were not only on the bottom of the economic scale, simply not eligible to participate in the largest quadrants of the economy, they were also 'kept in their place', the hold over from slavery which now meant perpetual servitude in either the domestic class or as manual laborers. It was an era in which you were still supposed to know your place but Black people were no longer staying in their place, but neither did they have any real resources to do anything else, short of leaving home, so there was a lot of talking past each other.

White people honestly didn't really understand that anything was wrong, simply because it had always been like this. And black people who couldn't articulate their grievances directly for fear of being fired. Dr. King tells a typical story about this during the Montgomery Bus boycotts. "A white family summoned their Negro cook and asked her if she supported the terrible things the Negroes were doing, boycotting busses and demanding jobs.

"Oh no ma'am, I won't have anything to do with that boycott thing,' the cook said.'I am just going to stay away from the busses as long as that trouble is going on.'"[1] And the white people walked away from those conversations thinking that they had properly submissive hired help.

No, Dr. King used to say that African-Americans were twice burdened people- "they lived at the lowest stratum of society and they were additionally imprisoned by a caste of color."[2] It was that caste system that needed the sword which could heal.

It is important to remember this, perhaps particularly in an era when the doors of economic opportunity are pretty widely open and class system has largely past. In this era, the arguments for 'equality of opportunity' are increasingly persuasive, particularly given the broad influx of immigrants we have had in the past 40 years, from literally all over the world. We are sensitive to removing the stigma of discrimination that all immigrants experience as 'the other' until they are mainstreamed into American culture. It is easier to craft political remedies, particularly in difficult policy areas like Affirmative Action, if you have that immigrant model in the back of your mind and just try to create an environment free of discrimination.

But morally speaking, that is not enough. African-Americans are not like other immigrants. Only they came here on the slave ship. Only they were subject to the physical and psychological torture that was routine plantation life. Only they had their families rent asunder on the trading block. Only they were prevented from education. Only they were prevented from the free exercise of their religion. Only they did we systematically malform. Last year, my wife gave me a copy of the book , a collection of letters from women who had to run the plantation when their husbands were fighting the Civil War. These letters detail the brutality of life day in and day out, the women regularly complaining that they just can't do it. We glossed over all that. We still gloss over it. I watched Gods and Generals last year and Cold Mountain, this year, both about the Civil War. There are no black people in any of these movies, how can that be?

We gloss over this specific history too easily and it is helpful for keeping us from having to deal with some specific redress on a moral level. No one ever got their 40 acres and a mule, much less programs specifically targeted to repair the family which was damaged, much less economic stimulus packages to encourage small businesses and home ownership, much less specific educational opportunities to offset the centuries of academic deprivation. None of this happened. So now, like Hydra, the growth of the monster of underdevelopment has grown complicated, subterranean, diffuse. Its communal effects are indirect and difficult to measure and therefore harder still to address through any meaningful legislative remedies.

There is no question that we have made great strides in race relations in our country in the past 25 years. The caste system is receding like the tide going out and the doors of opportunity economically and socially are more open than any time in American history. The reasons for that growth are many. I only want to lift up one, in many ways the most obvious one, but one that we nevertheless ought to celebrate in our Churches, synagogues, and Mosques across the country this day: non-violent resistance.

Dr. King was a student not only of Mahatma Gandhi but also Reinhold Niebuhr. He learned from Niebuhr that the redress of grievance from injustice is never voluntarily given by the oppressor, it must always be demanded by the oppressed. Niebuhr was very realistic about these matters socially.

And yet, Dr. King and the other leaders of the Civil Rights movement also knew that "it is an axiom of social change that no revolution can take place without a methodology suited to the circumstances of the period."[3] Some had advocated revolutionary violence. Some had advocated riots and revenge. Some had advocated a complete withdrawal from Whites. All of them understandable arguments, given the repressed anger and rage of their people.

The spiritual breakthrough, and I really think it was a spiritual break through of monumental social proportions, was the decision to harness all of that anger and energy and shape it into a moral force. That was very creative. Gandhi had already indicated the general outlines of what that should look like in South African and then in India. We don't always have to re-invent the wheel on the spiritual level. But they organized here, using our Christian values, using the Churches, and appealing to a guiding Judeo-Christian moral sensibility that our nation still understands collectively. And they trained and trained and organized and organized. And they created a movement. It was a brilliant spiritual break through.

This is what Dr. King said then. "There is a powerful motivation when a suppressed people enlist in an army that marches under the banner of nonviolence. A nonviolent army has a magnificent universal quality. To join an army that trains its adherent in the methods of violence, you must be of a certain age. But in Birmingham, some of the most valued foot soldiers were youngsters ranging from elementary pupils to teen-age high school and college students. For acceptance in the armies that maim and kill, one must be physically sound, possessed of straight limbs and accurate vision. But in Birmingham, the lame and the halt and the crippled could and did join up. Al Hibbler, the sightless singer, would never have been accepted in the United States Army or the army of any other nation, but he held a commanding position in our ranks.

"In the armies of violence, there is a caste of rank. In Birmingham, outside of the few generals and lieutenants who necessarily directed and coordinated operations, the regiments of the demonstrators marched in democratic phalanx. Doctors marched with window cleaners. Lawyers demonstrated with laundry workers. Ph.D.'s and no-D's were treated with perfect equality by the registrars of the nonviolence movement.

"As the broadcasting profession will confirm, no television shows are so successful as those which allow for audience participation. In order to be somebody, people must feel themselves part of something. In the nonviolent army, there is room for everyone who wants to join up. There is no color distinction. There is no examination, no pledge, except that, as a soldier in the armies of violence, you are expected to inspect your carbine and keep it clean. Non violent soldiers are called upon to examine and burnish their greatest weapons- their heart, their conscience, their courage and their sense of justice.

"Non-violent resistance paralyzed and confused the powerful structures against which it was directed. The brutality with which officials would have quelled the black individual became impotent when it could not be pursued with stealth and remain unobserved. It was caught- as a fugitive from a penitentiary is often caught- in the gigantic circling spotlight. It was imprisoned in a luminous glare revealing the naked truth to the whole world. It is true that some demonstrators suffered violence, and that a few paid the extreme penalty of death. They were the martyrs of last summer who laid down their lives to put an end to the brutalizing of thousands who had been beaten and bruised and killed in dark streets and back rooms of sheriff's offices, day in an day out, in hundred's of summers past.

"The striking thing about eh non-violent crusade of 1963 was that so few felt the sting of bullets or the clubbing of billies and nightsticks. Looking back, It become obvious that the oppressors were retrained no only because the world was looking but also because, standing before them, were hundreds, sometime thousand of negroes who for the first time dared to look back at a white man, eye, to eye. Whether through a decision to exercise wise restraint to the operation of a guilty conscience, many a hand was stayed on a police club… That the revolution was a comparatively bloodless one is explained by the fact that the Negro did not merely give lip service to nonviolence…

"Nonviolence had tremendous psychological. We had to win and to vindicate our dignity in order to merit and enjoy our self-esteem. We had to let white people know that the picture of us as a clown-irresponsible, resigned and believe in our own inferiority- was a stereotype with no validity. This method was grasped by the Negro masses because it embodied the dignity of the struggle, of moral conviction and self-sacrifice. The Negro was able to face his adversary, to concede to him a physical advantage and to defeat him because the superior force of the oppressor had become powerless.

"… I am convinced that the courage and the discipline with which Negro thousands accepted nonviolence healed the internal wounds of Negro millions… to restore to them some of the pride and honor which had been stripped from them over the centuries."[4]

Although Dr. King didn't mention it, the movement also restored to White people some of the humanity that they had lost during slavery, reconstruction and Jim Crow. Ultimately, it ennobled us all, refocusing our gaze on the high ideals of liberty and justice for all that are enshrined in the Declaration of Independence. It was the sword that pierced the boil of institutional hypocrisy which infected our nation and it began some healing. We are still in our early years of healing, but we are healing.

But if I may close on the value of non-violent resistance, one of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was his very first national speech, the evening that the Montgomery boycotts began and the evening news covered him live in December, 1955. He described why they were protesting, what they hoped to achieve. And he closed saying this. "If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historian will have to pause and say, 'There lived a great people- a black people- who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.' This is our challenge and our overwhelming responsibility.'"[5]

[1] King, Martin Luther. Why We Can't Wait (New York: Mentor, 1963), p. 29.

[2] Ibid. p. 33.

[3] Ibid. p.34.

[4] ibid., p. 38-40

[5] King, Martin Luther. Strides towards Freedom (San Francisco: Harper's, 1958), p. 63.