SERMON: "Living As Love Demands: What Martin Luther King Jr Said"
Rev. Paul Beedle
January 13, 2008
CONVERSATION WITH CHILDREN AND YOUTH
I thought it would be a good idea to remember Martin Luther King Jr a week before the holiday, because – probably some of you will have a lesson about him in school, or there will be things to watch about him on television – sometimes when you've thought about something ahead of time, then you find you can listen better and get more out of a lesson or a program that happens on the holiday. So I want to talk a little about what Martin Luther King Jr himself said about the work he did for civil rights. He said it was like the story of Rip Van Winkle:
"One thing that we usually remember about the story of Rip Van Winkle is that he slept twenty years. But there is another point in that story which is almost always completely overlooked: it is the sign on the inn of the little town on the Hudson from which Rip went up into the mountains for his long sleep. When he went up, the sign had a picture of King George III of England. When he came down, the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first President of the United States. When Rip Van Winkle looked up at the picture of George Washington he was amazed, he was completely lost. He knew not who he was. This incident reveals to us that the most striking thing about the story of Rip Van Winkle is not merely that he slept twenty years, but that he slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountains a revolution was taking place in the world, that would alter the face of human history. Yet Rip knew nothing about it; he was asleep. One of the great misfortunes of history is that all too many individuals and institutions find themselves in a great period of change and yet fail to achieve the new attitudes and outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution." [Ware Lecture, 1966]
And I also wanted to share with you how he described the changes in society that he was working for. Here's how he described life in Birmingham AL before he did his work there for civil rights:
"If you had visited Birmingham before the third of April [, 1963,] in the one hundredth-anniversary year of [President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation], you might have come to a startling conclusion. You might have concluded that here was a city which had been trapped for decades in a Rip Van Winkle slumber; a city whose fathers had apparently never heard of Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, the Bill of Rights, the Preamble to the Constitution, The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, or the 1954 decision of the United States Supreme Court outlawing segregation in the public schools.
If your powers of imagination are great enough to enable you to place yourself in the position of a [black] baby born and brought up ... in Birmingham, you would picture your life in the following manner:
[Everything was segregated: for anything you wanted to do, there was a place for white people to do it and another place for black people to do it.] You would be born in a [blacks-only] hospital to parents who probably lived in a ghetto. You would attend a [blacks-only] school. You would spend your childhood playing mainly in the streets because the "[black people's]" parks were [really really bad]. When a federal court order banned park segregation, you would find that Birmingham closed down its parks and gave up its baseball team rather than integrate them.
If you went shopping with your mother or father, you would trudge along as they purchased at every counter except one, in the large or small stores. If you were hungry or thirsty, you would have to forget about it until you got back to the [black] section of town, for in your city it was a violation of the law to serve food to [blacks] at the same counter with whites.
If your family attended church, you would go to a [black] church. If you attended your own [black]church and wanted to play safe, you might select a church that didn't have a pastor with a reputation for speaking out on civil rights. If you wanted to visit a church attended by white people, you would not be welcome. ...
If you wanted to contribute to and be a part of the work of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, you would not have been able to join a local branch. In the state of Alabama, segregationist authorities had been successful in [stopping] the NAACP from performing its civil rights work by declaring it a "foreign corporation" and rendering its activities illegal.
If you wanted a job in this city, one of the greatest iron- and steel-producing centers in the nation, you had better settle on doing menial work as a porter or laborer. If you were fortunate enough to get a job, you could expect that promotions ... or more pay would come, not to you, but to a white employee regardless of your comparative talents. …
You would have found a general atmosphere of violence and brutality in Birmingham. Local racists intimidated, mobbed, and even killed [blacks] with impunity. ... No [black] home was protected from bombings and burnings. From the year 1957 through January 1963, while Birmingham was still claiming that its [blacks] were "satisfied," [there were] seventeen unsolved bombings of [black] churches and homes of civil rights leaders. … the silent password was fear. It was a fear not only on the part of the black oppressed, but also in the hearts of the white oppressors. …
In Birmingham, you would be living in a community where [fear] had cowed your people, led them to abandon hope, and developed in them a false sense of inferiority. You would be living in a city where the representatives of economic and political power refused to even discuss social justice with the leaders of your people. … [Autobiography, posthumous, redacted by Clayborne Carson]
Does that sound like a good way to live? Does that sound like a way to live that needs to change? I want you to notice when something's not right about the way we live in America today, and I want you to not be afraid to talk about it. Sometimes that's hard, especially if you are afraid for yourself. But I hope here in church you'll feel like you can practice speaking up even when you're afraid. Because if we can speak up instead of keeping silent, then we can find ways to work together to change what needs changing.
SERMON
On a warm Wednesday afternoon in August, more than 200,000 people stood on the Mall in Washington waiting to hear Martin Luther King Jr speak. He gave a speech he'd given a hundred times before, but never before so large a crowd, and never televised across the country by all the network news crews. Standing before the Lincoln Memorial, he said: “We have ... come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. ... Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.” [1]
The promises of democracy – he named them in the famous “I have a dream” portion of the speech: equality, freedom, justice, brotherhood, and human dignity. Equality, freedom, justice, brotherhood, and human dignity. He believed that as a nation we could rise to our best selves and keep these promises to one another. He would admit “that you've got to change the heart in order to solve the problem[s of racial injustice]; that you can't change the heart through legislation. ... [He would be the first to say that b]efore we can solve these problems men and women must rise to the majestic heights of being obedient to the unenforceable. ... If we are to have a truly integrated society,” he once said, “white persons and Negro persons and members of all groups must live together, not merely because the law says it but because it's natural and because it's right. But that does not make legislation less important. It may be true that you can't legislate integration but you can legislate desegregation. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. The law cannot make a man love me,” he said, “but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important also. And so while the law may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men. So it is necessary,” he said, “ for the church to support strong, meaningful civil rights legislation.” [2]
Five months before that warm Wednesday afternoon, he had sat in a jail cell pondering a statement by eight Alabama clergymen who called for “law and order and common sense,” “forbearance and a willingness to face facts,” a “realistic approach to racial problems.” They distinguished between “responsible citizens” and “outsiders” like Dr. King. They said: “[S]uch actions as incite to hatred and violence, however technically peaceful those actions may be, have not contributed to the resolution of our local problems. ... When rights are consistently denied, a cause should be pressed in the courts and in negotiations among local leaders, and not in the streets.” [3] (I guess the streets were too local.) Dr. King realized that they were scared. So scared that open dialogue, literally in the public square instead of in closed rooms on the corridors of power, seemed dangerous to them. So they emphasized using the courts and common sense, facing facts and being realistic, retreating into their heads when their hearts were troubled. The social climate of Birmingham was such that they did not believe that people there could rise to their whole and best selves and refrain from violence.
In that jail cell in Birmingham, Dr. King wrote a reply to their statement. He said that “law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice ... [W]hen they fail in this purpose they become the dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.” He pointed out that there are “two types of laws: just and unjust. ... A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law ... An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law ... that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. ... [S]egregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong...” He said that “the ... tension in the South [was] a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality. ... [W]e who engage in nonviolent direct action,” he said, “are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out into the open, where it can be seen and dealt with. ... [I]njustice must be exposed, with all the tension its exposure creates, [it must be exposed] to the light of human conscience and the air of national opinion, before it can be cured.” “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. ... I have earnestly opposed violent tension,” he wrote, “but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. ... [We] need nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.” [4]
To that crowd on the Washington Mall he said: “There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, `When will you be satisfied?' “ And he answered: “We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no,” he said, “we are not satisfied and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” [5]
What did Martin Luther King Jr have to say about living as love demands? He said: “Most revolutions in the past have been based on hope and hate” – the rising revolutionaries have acted out their hate for those who perpetuated an unjust system. He said: “It is nonsense to urge oppressed people to love their violent oppressors in an affectionate sense. And I'm certainly not talking about that when I talk about love standing at the center of our struggle. I think it is necessary to see the meaning of love in higher terms. The Greek language has three words for love – one is the word eros [desire], another is the word filio [friendship], and another is the word agape ... which is understanding, creative, redemptive good will for all [people], an overflowing love which seeks nothing in return. When one rises to love on this level, [one] loves a person who does [an] evil deed while hating the deed. I believe that in our best moments ... [we] say, ... we will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with our soul force. Do to us what you will ... [b]ut be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. ... We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory. This is our message in the nonviolent movement when we are true to it.” [6] Nonviolent action aims to call all of us to our best selves so that we become obedient to the unenforceable and treat one another with dignity in the spirit of brotherhood. The foundation of this method is love: it is what love demands.
Three years after he gave his most famous speech in Washington, Martin Luther King Jr gave the Ware Lecture at the 1966 General Assembly of the Unitarian Universalist Association, held that year in Hollywood FL. He reminded us of the real advances during those three years. Protestants, Catholics and Jews had united in support of the civil rights bill of 1964 and the voting rights bill of 1965. “We struggled in Selma,” he said, “and ... we developed right there in that little town ... a real ecumenical movement ... which created the voting rights bill. That bill is a tribute to persons like James Reeb, Mrs. Viola Liuzzo and Jimmy Lee Jackson ... who died and suffered to make it possible.” And he called us to new action: “[President Kennedy was] calling for new civil rights legislation to deal with two old problems. One is the mal-administration of justice in many sections of the South. ... [The other is] an end to discrimination in ... the sale, the rental, and the financing of all housing. This is the difficult one because there are still many fears around. There are stereotypes about Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans and others. Studies reveal that there are numerous forces both private and public which make for the problem, because they are profiting by the existence of segregation in housing. ... The school problem is [still] difficult... There is still a gulf between legislative and judicial decrees and the actual enforcement of them.” Forty-two years later, his call to leadership on these very issues is still relevant. The laws are still not enforced. Social responsibility for the promises of democracy – for equality, freedom, justice, brotherhood and human dignity – is passed from government to “The Market” – that false god whose consort is called “Freedom” but whose true name is “Power.” And “The Market” in turn passes social responsibility on to consumers, making sure we are too weak and divided to act. We need to unite as citizens and neighbors to keep democracy's promises against economic injustice.
When he spoke to us in 1966, Dr. King called upon us to work to dispell the myths, still repeated today, that legislation is not effective in bringing about changes in human relations, and that the passage of one law means the struggle is over. I believe that we are also challenged today to dispell the myth that government can safely delegate to “The Market” its responsibility to keep the promises of democracy. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but neither can it be bought and sold. Behavior can be regulated, but not by the laws of supply and demand. Economic behavior needs to be regulated because economic incentives can so easily subvert moral judgment, and so easily subvert justice. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. While the law may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men. So it is necessary for the church to support strong, meaningful economic justice legislation.
Economic injustice is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong. It distorts the soul and damages the personality. The tension of such injustice is already present. Creative nonviolent action is necessary to bring it out into the open where we can deal with it, into the light of human conscience and the air of public opinion, so that together we can make the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the average citizen passively accepts his unjust economic plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all will respect each other's the dignity and worth. Dr. King would call upon us to participate in nonviolent direct action to create the kind of moral tension that calls all of us to be our best selves. He would call upon us not only to support legislation that restrains the heartless, but also to take action that changes hearts. I think we have a unique potential to change hearts here in the Houston area. Our region is just as diverse as New York or Los Angeles, and it appears to have more integrated neighborhoods. It seems to me that in our area it is easier to see than it is in New York or Los Angeles that the real social divides among us are rooted in economic class, not race or faith. Differences of racial or religious culture cease to divide us when we find common ground in the goals and struggles of our economic and family life. The legal and political dams that impede the flow of social progress are built on economic foundations. If we bridge the superficial divides of racial and religious culture, we can have meaningful dialogue about differences rooted in economic class, and form a common vision of economic justice in our society. The class divide between us is symbolized by that false god, “The Market,” who forestalls all conversation about social responsibility, brotherhood and the economic forms of human dignity.
If we speak out for moral economic behavior and meaningful economic justice legislation, and demonstrate against unjust economic behavior, many may find us tiresome. Some may ask: when will we be satisfied? We can never be satisfied so long as corporations are considered to be persons in our laws and in our courts, persons behind which the actual people who run them and make their decisions and carry out their bad behavior can shelter and hide and avoid responsibility for their actions. We cannot be satisfied when banks are permitted under law to deal in subprime mortgages and other unwise and exploitative loans and practices. We cannot be satisfied when promotions and pay increases are based not on measures of skill, accomplishment and character, but on prejudices about gender, race and culture. We cannot be satisfied when employers are permitted to pay less than a living wage. We cannot be satisfied with public policy based on an irrational worship of “The Market” rather than a rational and whole-hearted reckoning of our social responsibilities to one another as citizens and neighbors. We cannot be satisfied with economic injustice. We cannot be satisfied when the promises of democracy – equality, freedom, justice, brotherhood and human dignity – are unrealized because the behavior of the heartless goes unrestrained, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.
When he spoke before the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, Dr. King described his dream that we would become our best selves “and live out the true meaning of [our] creed ... that all men are created equal[,] ... be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood[,] ... freedom and justice ... [, become] a nation where [all] will [be judged not] by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. ... This is our hope,” he said. “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.” [7]
And when he spoke to our General Assembly – and with some knowledge of our heritage, reminded us of some bold and inspiring words from our Unitarian forebears – he said to us: “We can sing `We Shall Overcome' because somehow we know the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice. [8] We shall overcome because Carlyle is right: `no lie can live forever.' We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right: `truth crushed, will rise again.' We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right:
`Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne
yet that scaffold sways the future and behind the dim unknown
standeth God within the shadow keeping watch above his own.'
With this faith,” he said to us, “we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. We will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood, and speed up that day when all of God's children all over our nation and the world will be able to walk the earth as brothers and sisters, and then we can sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: `Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty we are free at last.'” [9]
So may we speed that day. Amen and amen.
[1] “I Have A Dream,” March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington DC, August 28, 1963.
[2] “The Church Remaining Awake During A Great Revolution,” Ware Lecture, Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly, Hollywood FL, May 18, 1966.
[3] “Statement by Alabama Clergymen,” April 12, 1963.
[4] “Letter from the Birmingham Jail,” April 16, 1963.
[5] “I Have A Dream,” March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington DC, August 28, 1963.
[6] “The Church Remaining Awake During A Great Revolution,” Ware Lecture, Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly, Hollywood FL, May 18, 1966.
[7] “I Have A Dream,” March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, Washington DC, August 28, 1963
[8] King is quoting Theodore Parker: “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one... And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”
[9] “The Church Remaining Awake During A Great Revolution,” Ware Lecture, Unitarian Universalist Association General Assembly, Hollywood FL, May 18, 1966.