Sermon: The Inclusive Community

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The Inclusive Community

By Charles Rush

January 16, 2011

[ Audio (mp3, 5.7Mb) ]

the parable in our scripture this morning, all the cool people, all the normal people, begged off the wedding feast, an event that took weeks to plan and had days worth of banquet feasts ready to go. So the owner said, “Go to the highways and byways, and invite the poor, the boneheaded, those who don't know enough to come in out of the rain -- that my table might be full with feasting and good fellowship.” So that, in other words, even your Uncle Bob and your useless cousin Lily might find a place. It is a wonderful, hopeful image, that we all have a place.

Relatively soon, there will be no one left alive who will have personal recollections of Dr. King or the world that he changed. I have these moments, like visiting my children when they were at Business School at Tuck, meeting their friends from literally all over the globe. This future is so promising. I suppose that for all of us, what will really matter spiritually in the end is how we have changed.

Though I can no longer remember it exactly, my first spiritual awakening happened as a small child of 5 or 6, the very early 60's in Little Rock, Arkansas. It was listening to adults speak as racists since children back then were invisible in a way that would be difficult for our 30 year olds to even imagine, the way we dote over children today. It was seeing Black men come asking for a fair days wage for doing lawn service, only to be bargained down to Colored level wages by the ladies on our block. It was hearing the not so subtle way that African-Americans were relegated to perpetual duty in the service sector of society. It was the many social encounters between Whites and Blacks in which Blacks had to acknowledge a not so subtle deference to White authority and White power.

I believe that I had the first Black teacher in an all white school district in 4th grade, Mrs. Fowler. Some of the neighbors thought the world had gone to hell in a handbag. I remember Mrs. Fowler being on stage. Like so many of her generation, she was overeducated, perfect diction and grammar, eloquent handwriting, overly-professional in every way. I'm sure she felt she had to earn every grudging point of respect that she got to the point that she did not feel she could have ordinary human faults. She just wanted to be given a' chance to prove she could be excellent and, for the record, she was. It was painful for all of us but it had to be done- for the great contradiction at the heart of Southern society to be exposed in all of its puss -- its violence, its meanness.

Every white person I knew had some story about some Black person they had such a deep relationship with, that meant so much to them. At the same time, the majority of us were just mean when it came to issues of justice or issues of fairness.

But that was changing. Attitudes were changing. You heard Christians at church struggling in Sunday School with texts about treating your neighbor as yourself. Because Dr. King and many, many others raised these questions so articulately, people were starting to wrestle with them and grow.

Looking back it seemed like such a simple thing. Really White folks and Black folks had so very much in common. All the White people in Arkansas were either Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal, or 'Reprobate'. All the African-Americans were either Methodist, Baptist, Pentecostal, or 'Beyond the Pale'. It seemed like all we had to do was just read our bibles and talk to each other.

More than that, we were the only people in our country that could actually understand what each other was saying. That was something to build on right there. We were the only people in the country who actually ate grits, who fried catfish or thought lima beans were tasty.

We all had the same simple American dreams for our families. It seemed like all we had to do was shut up the racists, integrate our neighborhoods, integrate our police force, integrate our political system, educate our children, open the doors of opportunity in higher education and jobs, and things would just work out.

I don't want to diminish for a minute the very important progress that has taken place in the last forty years. It has been profound and important. Racism is in the closet. It hasn't gone away but it's like smoking ... you have to go outside to do it, and, by and large, that crowd gets smaller every year. And the positive contributions that have been made by the flowering of African-American achievement in all aspects of American culture has been profound.

But that first round of Civil Rights was simpler. Just dealing with the legacy of slavery, just up-ending the embarrassing history of Jim Crow laws that made discrimination legal in our country -- that seemed like enough.

Before we could even get through a thorough job of atonement there, we began to realize that there were other issues we needed to attend to also- the embarrassing legacy of Native Americans in our country, the narrowly circumscribed social reins on Jewish neighbors, the half-legitimate citizenship of our Mexican migrant workers, and a richly developing tapestry of different immigrant Latino cultures that you couldn't reduce to one Hispanic monolith. The breadth and the shape of the inclusive community got way more complex- more ethnic groups, different religious traditions, more different cultural values and mores. This became very complex quickly.

And in the last two decades, since the downfall of the Iron Curtain, the political boundaries that limited the purview of our spiritual imagination have fallen too. The tape on human development has fast-forwarded towards a genuine global consciousness for the first time in our collective history. The intimacy of our global village has descended upon us far faster than our ability to assimilate to our new neighbors.

I dare say that ten years could name three cities in Iraq or Afghanistan. None of us could speak for 2 minutes on anything intelligent about Islam- that bet probably still stands; none of us could speak for 1 minute on Militant Islam.

I remember in 2002 watching a reporter talking to an ordinary peasant in the countryside of Afghanistan, about the World Trade Towers. He had never heard of them ... never heard of any plane hitting them. The countryside in the distance was being bombed v by American planes. He had no idea why. He'd probably only seen a T. V. a few times in his life.

We haven't yet caught up to our global village. Every week, when I'm reading The Economist, I'm struck by how every terrorist act in Yemen, every warlord gone berserk in Somalia or Khartoum, has implications that impact the rest of the world. And we all know about it too.

We haven't yet caught up to our global village.

"Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: "A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together." This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great "world house" in which we have to live together-black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu-a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace".[i] The spiritual vision isn't gone, it is just much bigger than we originally conceived it.

We lift up Dr. King because of the mature leadership that brought about change, principally two things. The first is prayer. Our generation will be one remembered for its prayer for a genuine world community that we will evolve into in the fullness of time. We will be the people that see the future, that pray for the vision, and that is important.

I had coffee with a Lutheran pastor from Leipzig Germany. He was my age, grew up in Communist East Germany. He had never been to the U.S. but his daughter is an au pair for one of the families in our church and his daughter connected us.

When I was child, we had just passed through the Cuban missile crisis, the Communist world and the Free world were probably as far apart and as tense as they would get. I used to pray as a child for an end to the impasse. We prayed about that through all of my youth. I prayed about that after college, got involved in some groups, went to Washington several times. I shared this with the pastor. You know what he said? He said, “I was praying too. We all were praying for a peaceful resolution to the impasse.”

For years, it seemed like nothing was changing during the Cold War. For years and years, it seemed like we were destined to live in a divided world for our lifetime. I asked him how the change happened. And this gets me to the second thing that we learned from Dr. King, in addition to prayer.

He said that tensions were mounting in Eastern Germany focused on a protest over the Berlin Wall. All manner of different groups suddenly blossomed to demand it be tom down. Even though the Church was weak in Eastern Germany under Communism, the pastors ended up playing a critical role of organizing all these disparate groups because they were the only people that everyone trusted.

Meanwhile the Stasi, the Communist secret police, were gearing up to handle this protest, quell a great riot and re-establish order after it was over. The ministers met, concerned over the potential violence that could happen. They implemented something that they learned from Dr. King. They handed out candles to all the protesters for an evening vigil. They spoke to the people before the protest about the importance of remaining calm and non-violent. Then they walked. They walked towards the Berlin wall. They walked right up to the police that were standing in a line in front of the Wall. And they walked right through.

Later, when they asked the Stasi why they let them pass, do you know what they said? They said, “We were prepared for 10 different scenarios. But Ministers leading the people with candles was not one of them.”

We pray, we pray, and one day, in the fullness of time, things come together and the whole world changes. God is still in the business of change.

Dr. King, Mohandas Gandhi, and all the early protestors in the Civil Rights movement, made a creative spiritual leap forward. They had the teachings of Jesus to point them in a direction, but they took those teachings and creatively showed us another way forward, a guide for our future. They showed us the way of non-violent resistance. One thing they don't teach the kids in school is just how important the Church was in developing non-violent resistance. It did not come naturally. It was a disposition that was very difficult to maintain in the midst of fire hoses, dogs, and racists screaming obscenities.

What the schools neglect to tell the children is that before those marches took place, the people involved in them went to church services that lasted a long time. They went to many lectures bracing the people for what they would endure, training them how to respond, how to maintain their spiritual discipline, their spiritual composure. They were very clear about the high personal costs. They were trained, schooled in the Church.

It will be the way forward. Terrorism won't work. It won't win any gains for long term settlement. But I read an article written by an Israeli journalist on a small, fledgling peace movement in the West Bank. It described non-violent protest that was broken up by the Israeli army. The author said this. The Israeli Army is far more afraid of these protestors than they are of terrorists because they know that these protestors will win eventually. As long as it is a contest of arms, the Israelis have the upper hand. Nonviolent protest puts matters before the Court of World Opinion. It lays a moral claim on our conscience. And a just claim of conscience erodes the will to oppression. The long arc of human history bends toward justice. It is not inevitable but God is pulling us in that direction. Sometimes because of ourselves, sometimes in spite of ourselves, sometimes because there is no other option, we will eventually become the inclusive community, the just community. Let us so pray and act that we might be part of the solution rather than a drag on the future. Amen.

[i] See the resource at http://forusa.org/nonviolence/images/world%20house%20essay.htm