Martin and Barack
Sermon by Steve Edington
January 18, 2009
If timing is everything, then this particular piece of timing could not be more exquisite. Tomorrow we, as a nation, will observe as a Federal Holiday the 80th birthday of the late Dr. Martin Luther King. On the following day we will see sworn in to the office of President of the United States a 47 year old African American man who was two years old when Dr. King gave his celebrated "I Have a Dream" speech and sermon. I count among the great and many blessings of my life the fact that both of these events have taken place within the course of my life; and that, thanks to the medium of television, I'm to witness both of them - the first one at the age of 18 and the second now at the age of 63. Even during the times of my strongest arguments, and disappointments, with my country, I've always cherished my citizenship as an American. Over the past couple of months I've come to cherish it in even more profound ways.
I had originally planned on making this sermon an imagined dialogue between Dr. King and President-elect Obama, before concluding that would be way too presumptuous, and more of a reach than I feel comfortable or able in making. [Nice idea, maybe, but I couldn't make it work.] Instead I have chosen to look at some of the interplay and the touch-points between these two amazing lives, and what that interplay might mean for the common life of our country in the days ahead. And since this is a sermon, being offered in al religious setting, that's where I'll begin.
While they were raised in very different ways with respect to their religious upbringings, both Dr. King and President Obama each had and have an understanding of the positive role religion and religious rhetoric can play (can play) in our national life. Martin Luther King was a preacher's kid. From his earliest days he was aware of the stature his minister father held in the African-American community of Atlanta, Georgia in the 1930s and 40s. Like many young men growing into adulthood he had his issues with his father. But it was largely through his father - "Daddy King" as he was affectionately called - that young Martin witnessed what a powerful and sustaining and transformative force spirituality can be, especially in the lives of the dispossessed and of those who are shut out from the corridors of power. This was one of the major factors that led Dr. King to choose the ministry himself after originally considering a career in law.
While Barack Obama attended religious schools at times during his childhood, he was raised in a largely secular setting and in the absence of a father. His first book Dreams of My Father was, in part, an attempt to recover some of the fatherly presence he never had Mr. Obama did choose a career in law. It was, by his own account, when became a community organizer on Chicago's South Side that Mr. Obama became aware of what a powerful force religion and spirituality could be - in a positive and transformative way - in the lives of individuals and in a community.
To do effective community organizing in the setting he was in he had to deal with churches (some churches) if he and his organization were to have any success. It was this experience that revealed to the budding lawyer, Mr. Obama, what Martin Luther King had known from his infancy about how the power of spirituality, and the strength of congregations, can be harnessed for the sake of the common good and for greater levels of social justice.
This awareness also led Mr. Obama to write, in his book The Audacity of Hope, these words: "The discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religiosity has often inhibited us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. (If we) scrub language of all religious content we forfeit the imagery and the terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their personal morality and social justice." Referring to some of the terminology in Lincoln's Second Inaugural Address - from which we heard a portion earlier - and in Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, Mr. Obama then goes on to say, "Their summoning of a higher truth helped inspire what had seemed impossible and moved the nation to embrace a common destiny."
As someone who has spent his entire career as a religious leader, and who is now - shall we say - in the latter stages of that career, I am heartened by these words. I've been in this arena plenty long enough now to know how the "summoning of a higher truth," as our President-elect calls it, can be abused and manipulated in some tragic and horrible ways. It was a smug and self-righteousness kind of God-is-on-our-side-and-therefore-whatever-we-do-is-right kind of mentality that heavily contributed to our launching a war against a country that posed no threat to our national security, and sullied our image all around the world; leaving, I will add, our new President with the daunting task of restoring that image. I believe he is equal to that task.
But when it comes to the interplay of religion, religious language, and spirituality - and our civic life in this nation - great care, I believe, must to taken to not - using an admittedly overworked metaphor here - throw the baby out with the bathwater. After the past eight years there's a real temptation to want to do just that. Yet I am pleased to see our new President drawing on the wisdom of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King - a politician and a preacher, in the best sense of both of those terms - to use that interplay in a positive and justice-seeking way, and in a way that I hope will indeed lead us as a nation, in Mr. Obama's words again, "to embrace a common destiny."
Before I leave this point, it's time for one of my side-bars. I wonder, given that he was a minister with such a high public profile himself, what Martin Luther King would make of the symbolic status certain ministers have come to attain in the upcoming inaugural events. Several weeks ago the Obama Transition Office announced that the Inaugural Invocation will be given by the Rev. Rick Warren and the Benediction by Rev. Joseph Lowry. Rev. Warren is the minister of the evangelical Christian Saddleback Church in Los Angeles; and, I feel safe in saying, has become the most high-profile evangelical minister in America today. Rev. Lowry was one of Dr. King's closest associates during the civil rights movement. He was a the co-founder, with Dr. King, of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights organization through which Dr. King exercised his civil rights leadership.
Then, just this past week it was announced that Rev. Gene Robinson, The Episcopal Bishop for the Diocese of New Hampshire and the first open gay Episcopal clergyperson to become a Bishop, will deliver the invocation at a pre-Inaugural event at the Lincoln Memorial this afternoon with our President-Elect in attendance. Rev. Robinson and I don't hang out together but we know one another. Our paths occasionally cross in various interfaith events. He is also a good family friend of one of the members of our congregation and very UU friendly.
I have no desire to turn this sermon into a commentary on three preachers praying, but I can't just let it all sit out there either. Many persons in the gay/lesbian/bisexual and transgender community - and their supporters and advocates, of which I consider myself one - were chagrined and rather taken aback with the choice of Rev. Warren. It was not because of his theology; and it was certainly not because of the many good deeds he and his 20,000 member congregation do in attempting to alleviate poverty, disease, and human want around the globe - good deeds that I, in the main, admire. But his selection came hard on the heels of the prominent role he and his congregation played in the successful passage of a referendum in California - in the November 4th election - that prohibited same-sex marriage in that State. Whether the outcome of this referendum can be rightfully enshrined into law is in the hands of a court at this time.
I think Mr. Obama is doing the right thing in reaching out to the evangelical community, but the timing and the placement, in this case I feel, and not so exquisite. I was pleased, and felt the President-elect did take a step that needed to be taken, in his choice of Gene Robinson to open the event at the Lincoln Memorial this afternoon. I'm also pleased to see that one of the participants in this event is one of my personal heroes, Pete Seeger.
What we are witnessing in this whole matter is the power of symbolism, particularly the power of religious symbolism - something our new President well understands and apparently intends to utilize. I just feel that in this case he didn't get the symbols arranged quite right.
Had the Inaugural Ceremony Planning Committee asked me to arrange the Order of Service - something they somehow neglected to do (!) - and told me I had to use both Reverends Warren and Lowry, I would have given the Invocation to Rev. Lowry. The symbolism of one of Dr. King's closest associates offering the Invocation of the Inauguration of our first African-American President would have been just dynamite.
I would have given the Benediction to Rev. Warren as a way of conveying the message that evangelicals do indeed have a place at the table. I would also note that that table sits in a very big tent of faith traditions when it comes to the interplay of religion and our civic life. Of course, I wasn't asked, which means that the order of the Inaugural Ceremony, in the immortal words of Coach Bill Belichek, "is what it is." And it is also time for me to move on.
Earlier I made reference to the title of one of Obama's books The Audacity of Hope. One of my hopes is that our President Elect can also appreciate the paradox of hope; that paradox being the hope is both a very powerful thing and an extremely fragile thing; it is incredibly strong and very easily broken. Rev. King would certainly have, I am sure, some things to say to Mr. Obama about this paradox. By the time he'd barely reached the age of 30 Martin Luther King knew what it was like to have the hopes and aspirations of persons, who had felt a profound sense of dispossession for generations, vested in him.
Dr. King strove to balance his desire and his calling to give his followers reasons to believe in themselves and in what they could attain when it came to the achievement of full racial equality, while also knowing that there would be defeats, disappointments, and setbacks that would sorely test the hope he was attempting to inspire. The horribly tragic and ultimate setback was, as many of my generation well remember, Dr. King's assassination. It was damned hard to be hopeful about much of anything in the immediate aftershocks of that event. We knew the journey of peace and racial justice had to continue, it was just very hard to take it up once again at that moment.
Barack Obama - while not confronting the same specific set of issues that Dr. King did - went a long way in his campaign for the Presidency to bring in a new generation of voters. Many of them had not previously felt that much of an investment in the political process. They had not previously invested a lot of hope in what it is possible to accomplish by things like working to elect candidates to public office, or advocating for certain pieces of legislation. This is one major accomplishment to Mr. Obama's credit before he even takes the oath of office.
The balancing act our incoming President faces, coming off of his amazing campaign, is to continue to offer the kind of hope and the belief in the art of the possible, that he was so capable of inspiring over this past year - while also dealing with the nitty-gritty, back and forth, exercises of political power that are a part of any process of governance; and a part of the process of using the wheels of government to accomplish good and worthwhile ends. That process, too, brings its disappointment and setbacks - especially for those who wish to see great ends accomplished, especially for those of us who wish to see greater levels of "justice, equity, and compassion in human relations" achieved, along with "the goal of world community with peace, liberty, and justice for all" as our UU principles so grandly put it.
I want to support our new President in achieving such ends, knowing that they may well be times when I'll be feeling and expressing disappointment as well. The challenges Mr. Obama will face, even as he speaks the last words of his oath of office are enormous, on both the domestic and global level. You know the list as well as I; I feel no need to itemize it here. In meeting these near overwhelming challenges our new President will, I believe, be looking for the right mix of a necessary kind of hopeful rhetoric on the one hand, while also working in the trenches of what can be accomplished on any given day on the other. Such was the line that Dr. King himself had to walk.
This actually sets up my final point, which is about the primary difference between Barack Obama and Martin Luther King, when it comes to their respective roles in our national life. The line from Martin Luther King to Barack Obama is the line from the prophet to the powerful. The prophet, in the Judaic tradition - within which I include the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth - was the one who purposefully stood outside the corridors of power in order to speak truth to power. Dr. King stood within and operated within, this prophetic tradition. He never strove for any kind of a public office himself. His role was to call, to confront, to challenge those who were in power - from the County Sheriff to the President of the United States.
When he stood before the Lincoln Memorial on that August day in 1963, with both the White House and the Capitol in his view, and directed his call and challenge to this nation to "rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed" he was speaking the truth of his faith tradition - which was also a universal human truth as well - to the halls of power. He spoke words of judgment about the great unfinished business of racial justice and equality and the seeking of peace, and words of exhortation to continue the pursuit of these goals.
Nearly 45 years later, thanks, in part, to much of what Dr. King set in motion, Barack Obama now enters those halls of power to take a seat at their highest level. Thanks to the genius of our Constitution his power is not absolute; and one of my hopes for his Administration is that he will restore the balance of the power of governance that our wise founders intended, especially after the abuse it has taken over the past eight years. But balanced as it is, the power Mr. Obama assumes now places him firmly and highly within those same corridors to which Dr. King spoke his prophetic voice. And now it is President Barack Obama who will need to turn his ear to the prophetic voices that will be attempting to speak their truth to him. My greatest hope for his Administration is that he will continue to hear those voices. Given all that has brought Mr. Obama to the Presidency I feel my hope is well founded. Time, of course, will tell.
My parallel hope in this regard is that those of us who strive to be persons of faith and hope and love and justice and peace will continue to speak our prophetic voices and make them heard. For this dialogue, this conversation, between prophecy and power must keep going forward if we are to see the great nation we are still in the process of becoming.
The seeds of that greatness are really all around us. We saw some of them this past Thursday afternoon when those who were operating ferry boats, and other kinds of watercraft, instantaneously realized that whatever they were doing at that moment paled in importance to saving human beings from a fallen airplane in the Hudson River. Unless you just got in from Mars you know that wonderful and miraculous story well by now. The miracle was one that had to do with the strength and will of the human spirit - which is one of the greatest miracles there is.
Above and beyond attending to the many and formidable demands of his office I hope our new President will find ways to nurture those seeds of greatness and those seeds of a generosity of spirit that are all over this land. It was, after all, his ability to convince so many of his fellow Americans that those seeds exist that helped get him elected.
I'll close with a story about another of those seeds. I got this from Margery Eagan's column in last Thursday's Boston Herald. Many of you know that when I go for some newspaper commentary I generally cite the more liberal leaning Boston Globe or New York Times. So this morning in the true spirit of inclusivity, which our new President is striving to demonstrate and urging us to cultivate, I'll do my part by favorably citing the more conservative leaning Boston Herald. We've all got to pitch in! Actually, there's no ideology here - it's just a wonderful, feel-good story.
In the run up to the inaugural festivities one of the D.C Marriott Hotels offered a one million dollar come-to-the-Inauguration package that included 300 rooms, four suites, and $200,000 in food and drinks. A "technology tycoon" - Ms. Eagan's characterization, not mine - named Earl Strafford, Sr. bought the whole package and threw in an additional $600,000 for what he wanted to do with it - which was not to throw a self-aggrandizing party for a few hundred of his closest friends. Instead, working through various organizations that attend to the needs of developmentally disabled children, to wounded soldiers, to the terminally ill, to domestic violence survivors, and to the homeless and the chronically unemployed, Mr. Strafford created The People's Inaugural Project.
The aim of this effort is to bring persons such as I just mentioned, and those who work with them, to the Presidential inauguration and to this Mariott. One of the events planned for this occasion is a Martin Luther King luncheon at noon tomorrow, at which one of Dr. King's sons will speak. Ms. Eagan's local angle on the story was about some of the people from a Hyannis, Massachusetts based organization called Cape Abilities, that works with children with Downs Syndrome, and who will be sending some of their clients and volunteers to this event.
Yes, it's a one-shot thing, and all the challenges and problems these folks are facing will still be there when it's all over. But they will also have had an experience that none of them could have dreamed of, by having a part in welcoming our new President into office. There are indeed seeds of hope and generosity amongst us.
One of the tasks of leadership, from heading up the humblest organization to being President of the United States, is to tap into the aspirations and the capabilities of those for whom one's leadership is offered. It is to lift up those aspirations and utilize those capabilities in ways that work to the greater, common good of all. It is to identify seeds of hope and generosity and sacrifice and nurture them well. Martin Luther King knew this. I believe Barack Obama knows it as well. What we need to know for ourselves, if we do not already, are the challenges and commitments we are also ready to take up as our country enters a new phase in its life.
Stephen Edington
January 18, 2009
