Sermon: Dignity and Deformation

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Dignity and Deformation

By Charles Rush

January 16, 2005

is being an election year, I've received quite a number of e-mails on politics as have most of you, particularly from my gloating Republican friends. Here is one typical from early December. "What is the difference between a bleeding heart left winger and a puppy? Answer: A puppy stops whining after it grows up."

Or this one recently, the 2005 slate for our country's most annoying liberals. Who made the list, among others? "Ed Asner, Amiri Baraka, Sean Penn, Woody Harrelson, Norman Mailer, Michael Moore, Gore Vidal, Barbara Striesand, Alec Baldwin, and Al Sharpton." With the L word being defined by spokesmen such as these, the younger generation would be forgiven for assuming that liberals are simply the punch line to the joke.

That was not always been the case as I have been reminded lately. Rest easy, I am not here to talk politics, but the fact of the matter is there were two profound voices that gave the word Liberal a noble timbre. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. PBS has done documentaries on both of them. I've seen each 3 or 4 times and they are still very moving. Senator Kennedy and Dr. King were not perfect men. The Kennedy family has skeletons that are well known. Dr. King had his own personal demons. But one thing that comes through in these documentaries, particularly the personal footage that is out of the public eye. Both of these men were changed by the circumstances of their life. Bobby was apparently profoundly changed after the death of his brother. Dr. King became changed by the Civil Rights movement itself. Both of them give every appearance of being caught up in a cause, going with a movement, and being changed by it. I recognize that we live in a cynical world and that it is hard for us to believe that grown men with public persona's can actually be motivated by something other than power, fame, and wealth. But I want to remind you that it is possible to have a spiritual conversion as an adult. It is possible to be set in a new direction and to be motivated by something intrinsically worthwhile. That does happen.

You know, when both of them died, they were doing something quite similar in different ways. This was 1967. There is a scene in the documentary about King where a reporter tells him that White America is growing weary of the Civil Rights movement, the implication being that the significant issues of race have been constructively addressed and now it is time to move on. 38 years later, that question seems naïve and silly doesn't it? Already, the Civil Rights leaders were starting to broaden the movement; they were starting a new project, the Poor People's Campaign. They were going around the country, interviewing poor people about their life. They were down in the Delta in Mississippi listening to the wife of a sharecropper tell us what she lived on, how her week went, how she provided for her family, what her landlord was like to deal with. The project was never completed but just watching it, the moving spiritual creativity of it, was a reminder of how important this would be to finish.

Dr. King never finished that project because-in the midst of the poor people's campaign- he was asked to go support a garbage worker's strike in Memphis, Tennessee. It is interesting watching that strike as an adult. I don't have any distinct memory of it as a child, but my grandparents lived in Memphis and I very much remember the garbage workers. I remember the rags they wore. I remember their smell. I remember them jumping to safety over the fences into the alley ways just ahead of the bared teeth of the dogs in the neighborhood. Even the dogs appeared to be racist in Memphis. They barked at white people but they weren't menacing in the same way. I was profoundly aware as a child, in ways that I could not articulate, that the daily exercise of labor for these men was degrading and deforming of their egos.

I remember Mayor Loeb blocking their attempt to strike for minimum wage. I remember that one of his principal arguments against a raise at the time was that they had a special perq on their jobs as garbage men of being able to go through cast off clothing and used kitchen items that they could take home and use. It is embarrassing now that we could routinely tolerate that kind of degradation and our public officials could say those things without even a hint of shame. We were so ingrained to believe that there was a double standard in our world, one for whites and another for blacks. In 1967 that underlying, implicit assumption had not seriously been called into question by Mayor Loeb or most of us in the South.

Dr. King came to support the garbage workers strike. They were all gathered for the evening in a large auditorium and they wanted him to speak. He gets up in front of them and he says, "All work has dignity." All workers have dignity. There is something spiritually powerful about seeing dignity restored to a room full of men that have lived through generations of deformation. There is something humanizing for the oppressor and the oppressed to be reminded full face that we are all children of God.

In our scripture this morning, the blind, the mute, those not of right mind, the sick, the lepers, the prostitutes, they all come seeking to be healed, seeking the simple ordinary humanity that God intends for them from birth but which they have neither claimed, nor known. The scripture says that Jesus had compassion on them because they were harassed and helpless, like sheep without a protective shepherd."

Last week I asked our teenagers to speak to the High School youth group about going to Nicaragua. Part of what we do on that trip is to assist a ministry to the children that live on the street in Managua. These children range in age from 2 to 20. They have been abandoned or they have run away from situations of abuse and they live together in the park or in run down unoccupied buildings. Many of them are addicted to a glue that is used for making shoes because the narcotic affect of the glue dulls hunger pains. It also causes permanent brain damage. Regularly, some of the children get caught up in prostitution, preyed upon by unscrupulous adults.

We asked our teenagers what it was like to visit these street children. It was hard for them to put that experience into words. But they said that "the kids just wanted to be with us. It wasn't the food or the medicine that was important to them. They wanted us to touch them… It was like, if we were with them, then they had some validation… it was like then they really existed."

This is the healing that Jesus talked about… the dignity that heals deformation…

In the last few years of Bobby Kennedy's life, apparently he was a changed man. Apparently he had always been his older brother's younger brother. He was shier, without the same ambition or charisma and when Jack was assassinated, it was a pain in his soul that not only never went away, it was the actual motivation in his life. Some of you who have lost people you loved know exactly what he went through. Other people, people not close to you, might think that you are motivated the same old things but internally you are changed. Bobby found himself drawn, in ways he probably wasn't even aware of, to people in pain. He could hear them. He wanted to hear them.

He ran for the Senate in New York and won on the celebrity of his family name but he spent an inordinate amount of his time learning about poverty and listening to poor people once he got elected. He had that simple awareness that as the son of a millionaire that had gone to prep school and Harvard and vacationed his whole life sailing off Cape Cod that he didn't really know much about the lives of millions of Americans.

He visited the poor in Harlem and the Bronx, in rural New York. He wanted to hear their story of their lives. Apparently, they told him. There is a fair amount of footage of the senator listening to an animated deli owner and his staff all restless, ready to move on.

When he was in California, he took a detour off the campaign trail, to listen to the issues in a migrant workers strike. In the deep South, he spent way too much time listening to farm workers and the rural poor, again to the irritation of his staff. One time, after his staff had been urging him to leave and stay on track with the important dynamics of the election, he turned to them as he got back on the bus and said, "these are my people." His staff certainly thought that comment was indicative of who he had become.

Both Dr. King and Senator Kennedy were on a mission when they died to lift up the plight of the overlooked poor in our midst. Perhaps because of the stunning character of their assassinations, their missions were for the most part dropped after their deaths and never taken up again in any serious way.

This weekend, as we collectively take a moment and assess where we are on racial relations, we would do well to remember the two visions of our country that have been with us from the beginning.

One we know well. We are taught about it in school. It is an inspiring story of the Declaration of Independence, new freedom in a new land, where 'We declare these truths to be self evident that all men and women were created equal and endowed with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.' This story is guided so movingly by Lady Liberty in our harbor who beckons people from all over the world “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free. The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest tossed, to me”.

The other story is our lived economic history that was also here from the beginning, the plantation that we have been working to transcend for two hundred years. It is important to remember that 6 of the first 7 Presidents of our country either owned slaves themselves or came from states whose economy was dominated by the Plantation economy. I only mention the way that power follows money to remind us of how we were inextricably bound up and defined by that economy as a nation.

It is important to remember just how much meanness was demanded of slave owners in order to keep that economy running and how deforming it was for slaves. I'm quite sure that this story has not yet been adequately told for all of us to understand. But it is instructive to read the letters and diaries of women that were left to run the plantation during the Civil War. Writing to their husbands, who were off fighting the war, so many of them explain that they simply could not bring themselves to inflict the violent brutality that was required week in and week out. The real story was a far cry from Scarlet O'Hara running around after Ashley in "Gone with the Wind".

I know that for my relatives and ancestors in the South, we all had too much memory of how well mannered we were. I think it is important to watch the documentaries of the early Civil Rights marches to remember just how mean we were too. It is important to remember just how Jim Crow laws that segregated our country systematically made us mean and ugly.

I watched the "60 Minutes" piece last fall by our own Michael Radutzky that chronicled the unsolved murder of Emmet Till in 1955. Emmet was a young teenager from Chicago that went to visit his grandfather in Mississippi in the summer and with a friend of his whistled at a white woman. She told her husband about it and that night a group of men, probably drunk, walked into Emmet Till's grandfather's house, pulled the boy from bed and carried him off, his grandfather degraded, humiliated, helpless.

They beat the boy so badly and left him to die… just a stunning savagery. His mother came down to get her son's body and in a moment of spiritual awakening decided that she would not let this be covered up and had a funeral with an open casket. The network news covered it and it galvanized a moral consensus in our country that, with several other such incidents, really started the Civil Rights movement as it came to be.

It is important to remember how mean we were. And it is important to celebrate those remarkable Americans that transcended our lower vision in favor of our higher vision.

We love to tell the stories about immigrants that came to our country from abroad and overcame perilous hardship to live out the American dream. But just as important are the people in our own country who overcame perilous hardship right here and lived the noble vision of the American dream.

There will be a show on PBS tomorrow night about the boxer Jack Johnson. Here was a man that overcame incredible discrimination, poverty, and outright hatred to become the heavy weight boxing champion of the world in 1910 after knocking out Tommy Burns in Australia and Jim Jefferies in Las Vegas. During the race riots that followed, Johnson was run out of the country. He was persecuted, suffered quite a lot of hardship, but he refused to be imprisoned by the unjust social constrictions of his era and in that sense he became a free man and lived out the American dream.

I think of Althea Gibson born in Silver, South Carolina in 1927. The child could hit a tennis ball like nobody's business. But as a teenager, tennis was an all white sport everywhere. Some prominent African-American physicians took notice of her and the World Welter weight champion Sugar Ray Robinson encouraged her and eventually she was given a chance to play on the top tour. She became a great competitor right out of the gate and in 1956 won the French Open on the Clay Courts in Paris. In 1957 she won the U.S. Open and Wimbeldon. Even during the time she was at world championship level, there were some clubs that would not admit her to the Clubhouse because she was black, some hotels refused her a room and one restaurant refused to book a celebration after a major championship victory. I'm sure that was an enormous burden for her to carry around. But she would not let the narrow constrictions of her day define who she was or what she was capable of achieving. That humiliation did not distract her from the concentration that is necessary to win at the most competitive levels. In her soul, she was free and she lived out the American dream.

We have so many American heros from different fields: Sojourner Truth, George Washington Carver, Bessie Smith, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Barbara Jordan, Fannie Lou Hammer, Richard Wright, Evelyn Ashford, Cassius Clay, Billy Holiday, Julian Bond, Pearl Bailey, John Lewis, Shirley Chisolm, Dr. Charles Drew, Maya Angelou, Harriet Tubman… it is a long list. They transcended the expectations their culture put on them at the time. In spite of hostility and resentment, they did it anyway. They found a freedom inside themselves and helped us all transcend the lower vision of America and live out the noble hope of the American dream. Because of them our world is a better place and more and more of us can get in on a piece of the dream. They showed us the face of dignity in the midst of deformation. Amen.