|
MLK—The Man, the Myth, the Message A Worship Service by the Reverends Mark W. Christian & Jonalu Johnstone The First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City Sunday January 15, 2005
Reading Martin Luther King, Jr. An excerpt from "Letter from the Birmingham Jail" We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"; then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.
Prayer and Meditation "A Fallen Friend," by Toni Vincent written in remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Great Spirit of light and of darkness: We gather once again to remember a fallen friend, and nourish ourselves from the fountain of reflections. Open our hearts to the anguish of our pain, to the tired taste of swallowed tears, and to our unrealized vision.
In this place we bring our scattered lives together, groping for meaning and looking for truth. Be with us as we continue our search for understanding of the mystery of the temporal. Stay with us as we wander through our memories, seeking pathways to the future. Move with us as we unravel the implied imperatives of hopes unfulfilled.
Justice makes tireless demands, and we grow weary. As we touch one another in common cause, and with the great spirit in our midst, Let us find the way and the courage to realize the dream which still lives within us. Amen.
MLK—The Man, the Myth, the Message A Sermon by the Reverend Mark W. Christian Delivered to the First Unitarian Church of Oklahoma City Sunday January 15, 2005 Martin Luther King, Jr., Day stands out for me among the many holidays and holy days on the calendar. It stands out because, in a culture with enormous proclivities and reactions to race, a black man is noted by a world where being non-white is often an invitation to diminution. It stands out because confronting racism was so much at the core of Dr. King’s work that we simply can’t pass over this time without reflecting on and assessing the status of racism in our nation. No other holiday makes us confront such a strongly divisive issue. Mostly, though, I think what really establishes the difference between this holiday and the rest is that it resides in our recent memory. Martin Luther King, Jr., Day was first celebrated in 1986—making this year the only the 20th official acknowledgement of Dr. King and his work. Most of us here today can remember a time when there wasn’t a holiday on the third Monday of January. Most of us recall some of what it took to establish this day. Many of us remember the man, his life and death, not just his mythic memory. This makes this day of honor and remembrance different than Independence Day or the amalgam of Washington and Lincoln’s birthday as President’s Day. For most of us it is even different than Veterans Day—originally Armistice Day. Few of us here today were at an age of memory on November 11, 1911. Part of what sets aside Martin Luther King Day is that so many of us still have first hand memories of the man, his life and his death. We remember the man. We live in the myth. My question today is whether or not we really heard Dr. King’s message. I am a bit too young to remember that day he spoke before the crowd surrounding the reflecting pool that separates the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. Thanks to film crews, I know the day well (in fact I use that speech in a class on preaching I lead each year at our Southwestern UU Summer Institute) but I don’t remember that day. I do remember the day I heard that an assassin’s bullet had struck him down on a Memphis hotel balcony. I also remember the political battles that began in 1979 and finally led to an official holiday remembering Dr. King. The fact that we can remember the man, though, does not mean that we remember him accurately or thoroughly. What we remember, how we remember, how we understand, are not necessarily an fair encryption of reality. But let’s, for the time being, begin with what most of us remember. The image that comes to mind for most of us is the young, handsome, confident leader standing before the throng in the brilliant sunlight in August of 1963. Most of us can imagine his words filling the space between the building that houses that famous statue of Lincoln and the giant obelisk that codifies our memory of Washington. I think most of our memories of Dr. King spin in and through and around that day—speaking to the crowd in the presence of these icons of our revolutionary birth and our extraordinary struggle for freedom for all. The truth is that the dream we remember from Dr. King that day was not dreamed that day. It was not made incarnate that day. It was a dream he had seen—both dream and nightmare really—for more than a decade. Dr. King was one of many who had traveled and cajoled and preached and perspired through long days and frightening nights for such a long time. The Montgomery Bus Boycott officially began 8 years earlier—and of course that was not the beginning either. That day before the Reflecting Pool was not the beginning for Martin Luther King—and it wasn’t the end, either. Still, we tend to remember the uplifting oratory of freedom of that day. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous peaks of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and every molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. The truth is that King lived and struggled and fought for almost 5 more years until the bullet struck him down that tragic day in April of 1968. What do we know of that time—those last days? What do we know about the time that led up to his ascendance to prominence? Long gone are the days when we used “Kid Gloves” in our public treatment of important personages. The tendency these days is to highlight flaw and blemish and weakness—and Dr. King has been criticized in recent years as an unfaithful husband, a plagiarist and an academic fraud. These things may well be true. I don’t imagine there are many of us in this room who would welcome a thorough sifting of our whole lives looking for possible embarrassments. None of our historically uplifting leaders seems able to escape historical inquiry when it is wed to a public appetite for scandal: not Lincoln, not Jefferson, not Washington, not Regain, neither Roosevelt, not Dr. King. Perhaps the only leaders who can hold up to this scrutiny are Dr. Suess, Mr. Rogers and Jimmy Carter! What do we know, though, of those latter years in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.? One of the better books on Dr. King of which I am aware is by Vincent Harding. Harding was a contemporary and co-worker of Dr. King’s. He taught at Illiff School of Theology in Denver and was the first director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., center in Atlanta. In “The Inconvenient Hero” he writes— We forget that Martin Luther King, Jr., did not ascend into the skies from the Lincoln Memorial in 1963, but spent five hard, searching, experimenting, stumbling, sometimes lonely and often beleaguered years trying to find the way toward a humanized America … We would like to forget that it was not the weaver of gentle sunny dreams of freedom who was shot down on a balcony in Memphis, Tennessee. Rather it was a man who was recently described by a careful scholar in this way: “In the last twelve months of his life, King represented a far greater political threat to the reigning American government than he ever had before.” It is that courageous brother who calls us now to move beyond nostalgia, beyond collective amnesia, beyond mere repetition, and to remember our tasks, his tasks, the work to which he set himself as he rapidly outgrew the limitations of August 1963. If we consider him for a while … it is not hard to see that there was a long road toward maturity of King and the Movement beyond the march in 1963. (Pg. 49) In the years between 1963 and his death he became increasingly radical, increasingly impatient and, with the power of a Nobel laureate in tow, increasingly visible on the world stage. His increasing radicallity led him beyond issues of race to the more systemic institutional problems fostered, promoted and protected by American might. By late 1967 he had given up on the “New Deal” responses that were long on promise and absent on delivery. In a posthumusly published set of King’s writings—he put it this way. The dispossessed of this nation—the poor, both white and Negro—live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means ... to lift the load of poverty. (pg. 18) King became an able and vocal opponent of the war in Vietnam on ethical grounds. Not just because so many young black men dying for a “White Man’s War” in the way that Malcolm X or the Black Panthers might—but on the grounds that this war against an Asian people was defying God and destroying the fabric of a great nation. He opposed the war because he was becoming increasingly caught between two questions: “What does love demand?” and “Who is my neighbor.” Regarding the injustice of Vietnam—to the Vietnamese—Vincent Harding observes that King went against all prevailing prudence in his opposition to the war. It was impossible (for him) to be silent on Vietnam. Black people told him to be still, for his voice would anger the giver of all perfect gifts in the White House. White people told him to be still because we was not qualified to speak to issues that they had been in charge of for so many destructive years. Members of his own organization warned him about what his opposition to the war would do to cut down on financial contributions from their friends who saw no connection between Mississippi and the Mekong Delta … King, who felt the connection like a fire in his heart, finally moved against all this advice and stood up in Riverside Church in New York City precisely one year to the day before his assassination and let the nation and the world know…what he thought there were political implications of his religions beliefs. (pg. 14) Through it all, I fear we forget that last fact—Martin Luther King, Jr., was a man of faith. A faithfulness to God that shaped and sent him forward in ways he probably would not have chosen for himself. So this is the man we remember—an organizer, an inspirer, a conscience. Tomorrow we remember a man who could not and would not stay within the bounds or bonds that friends or foes would impose on him. Dr. King was a man, flawed and finite, heart-full and human. A man who responded to the children of God he saw all around him. He grew in his compassion as he grew in his impatience. He grew in his radicallity—identifying the prime problems of our nation as race, militarism and materialism. King was alive and evolving right until the moment a bullet struck him down. Now he is alive only in our memory, only in memoriam. As we go forward tomorrow in remembrance—perhaps we should caution ourselves against too easy an example that we might draw from this fallen leader. Carl Himes, Jr., gives us a stirring proscription against a complacent memory of Martin Luther King. Now that he is safely dead Let us praise him Build monuments to his glory Sing hosannas to his name Dead men make such convenient heroes: They cannot rise To challenge the images We would fashion from their lives. And besides, It is easier to build monuments Than to make a better world. So now that he is safely dead We, with raised consciences Will teach our children That he was a great man…knowing That the cause for which he lived Is still a cause And the dream for which he died Is still a dream, A dead man’s dream. We need not fall into the trap that the poet sees. We can keep the honest core of this day alive if we try. We who can remember the actual life and times of Dr. King must remember that he boiled our political problems down to an unholy alliance between Race, Militarism and Materialism. That he never ceased in his advocacy of non-violent resistance against these evils. More so, as people of faith we must keep alive the truth that Dr. King was very clear about the religious and spiritual implications that demand that we, as he did before us, address those infirmities. The spiritual ground that King proceeded from was found his obedience to the demand of Love and the relentless question “Who is my neighbor?” Perhaps the best thing I can advise to be true to the dream—to keep it from being simply “a dead man’s dream,” is to ask the same questions that consumed Martin Luther King, Jr. Tommorrow, take time to ask “What does love demand?” Take time to ask “Who is my neighbor?” Perhaps these two questions can take us beyond the man, beyond the myth and center us in a message worthy of so holy a day. AMEN
|
