Martin Luther King Day - 2008
Sermon by Steve Edington
January 13, 2008
As many of you know I'm going to be away next Sunday with Ric Masten and the congregation at the UU Church of the Monterey Peninsula in Carmel, California to do a service centered around the book I got out last fall. Our Worship Associates have planned what I know will be a very good service, and I hope you'll attend and give them your support. Since I will not be with you, then, on the "official" Martin Luther King Sunday I'm doing my sermon for the occasion a week early; and this Sunday is actually closer to Dr. King's birthday of January 15, two days from now, than next Sunday's is, anyway.
I'm going to open up with a passage from a book I introduced here a couple of years ago called Middle Church by Bob Edgar, the General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, a former Congressman from Pennsylvania, and an Ordained Elder in the United Methodist Church. The book's subtitle is "Reclaiming the Moral Values of the Faithful Majority from the Religious Right." In the book's Introduction Edgar writes of seeing Dr. King at a peace rally, which had been called to express opposition to the Vietnam War, for clergy and lay leaders in Washington, D.C. in February of 1968. As Edgar tells it:
"It was a clear day in Washington, bitterly cold but brilliantly sunny. As I leaned over the balcony rail from the upper level of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church, the preacher we had come to hear walked up the center aisle. It was one of those profound experiences that imprints itself on one's memory in the form of general feelings rather than specifics. I cannot recall the words, only that his voice seemed to fill every space in the church, that he was earnest and unafraid, and that he was able to challenge America's moral failings without seeming judgmental or alienating. For him the Gospels formed a seamless tapestry with current events, and he was unafraid to speak in both terms of right and wrong...The preacher in the pulpit on that cold but clear February day in 1968 was a thirty-nine-year-old Georgia raised Baptist named Martin Luther King, Junior."
As I read Bob Edgar's book shortly after it first came out I found myself being drawn back to this particular passage; the reason being that I was in that same New York Avenue Presbyterian Church at the same time and for the same event as he was. Nearly 40 years later I was able to catch up to Mr. Edgar at a book signing he did and speak with him about how we'd shared the same experience at a much earlier stage in each of our lives. He was exactly right when he said, "It was one of those profound experiences that imprints itself on one's memory." Indeed it was; and, for me, it continues to be. It was an experience made all the more profound for me in that two months later Dr. King was murdered, and the turmoil and unrest of those days took an even deeper and even more troubling turn.
I'm going to take my King Sunday reflections in a mainly personal direction today, drawing Bob Edgar's words about how the profound experience of having seen and heard the man, "imprints itself on one's memory." But I'm not just, in fact I'm not even primarily, speaking now of the event at which Mr. Edgar and I happened to be in attendance, inspiring and moving as it was. Instead I'd like to share a personal perspective - a perspective than spans nearly forty years now - as to how the life and example of Martin Luther King shaped the consciousness and shaped the ministries of those of my generation, who came of our ministerial age, at the time when Dr. King's ministry was at its height. I speak primarily those of us who were preparing for the ministry in the moderate to liberal American Protestant tradition, while knowing that Dr. King's influence was hardly limited to just that. I said this would be personal and that's the point from which I'll launch forth.
The faith in which I was raised, and which I know I've often referred to, was almost entirely a personalistic kind of one. The goal of faith was personal salvation - being personally reconciled to God by the acceptance of Jesus Christ as one's personal saviour. By the same token, living a religious life was also understood as a primarily personal endeavor. It meant living a life of virtue and goodness, so that your very life was "witness for Jesus" which would in turn lead others to accept him as well so they could be saved, too. And sure, you were always going to do things that were less than good or virtuous, but you could seek God's forgiveness and then get on with it.
So, personal belief and personal piety were the hallmarks of the religion that was mine up through my teenage years. While the content of my faith has changed markedly since those days, I still take very seriously, and very joyfully as well for that matter, the personal dimension to religion and faith and spirituality. Cultivating a religious or spiritual life, whatever it's particular content, is about finding some kind of personal transformation. But that's not all it's about.
I can't remember exactly when, it was probably about the time I entered high school, that I first began to hear the name of Martin Luther King, Jr. And I'd hear him referred to as "Reverend King." Somewhere along the way I learned that he was a Baptist minister. This was confusing. What did leading a civil rights march, or demonstration, have to do with being a minister - and a Baptist at that? Indeed, the first things I ever heard said about Dr. King were very negative ones; and not just the blatantly racist stuff about him being an uppity you-know-what (although I heard that one plenty enough), but also that he was somehow besmirching the Christian faith by using it as the cornerstone or underpinning of his civil rights work. And all that Baptist minister stuff was probably just a front to hide the fact that he was really a Communist.
I wasn't quite sure what to make of it all myself, but when I graduated from high school - just a few months before the 1963 March on Washington where Dr. King gave his "I Have A Dream Speech" - I felt mostly ambivalent about him as I went off to college. My plans, even then, were to be a minister. Those plans, more specifically, were to attend a Baptist seminary somewhere in the South and come back to West Virginia to pastor a church like the one I'd been raised in; and get down to the business of saving souls. That was my career track when I entered Marshall University.
Some five years later I was attending the peace rally that Bob Edgar writes about while also attending a very religiously liberal seminary in upstate New York, and seriously reworking my whole understanding of what ministry was about. So what, in heavens name, happened to me? To hear some of the dear folk in my home town church tell it, the Communists must have gotten to me too.
What really happened was, beginning towards the latter part of my college experience and continuing into seminary, was my discovery of the Social Gospel. Proponents of the Social Gospel held the idea that personal transformation and transformation of one's larger society and world are all a part of the same process. Being a person of faith means taking the values of your faith and using those values and beliefs to both confront such social evils as racism and poverty and violence and injustices of many kinds - and seek to bring greater measures of love, compassion, justice, and peace to the world in which we find ourselves. To my seminary classmates and me, in the latter part of the 1960s, it was the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King who embodied that kind of ministry and that way of being person of faith in the world. I don't think any of us saw ourselves as the next Dr. King. I know I didn't. But we were inspired by his example of putting faith in action in an attempt to transform society.
One thing I will never forget, when Dr. King was killed, was the looks on the often teary faces of my African American classmates at our seminary - some of whom had known him personally. Neither will I ever forget the looks on the faces of the many persons of color in the Rochester, New York area who attended the Memorial Service for Dr. King that was held in our chapel a day or two later. Something had been taken from them which my white experience would never completely allow me to completely grasp. There was a part of their loss that I would never really know. But I do know that practically all of us on that campus, across racial lines, had lost a mentor. We had lost someone who had been showing us a thing or two about ministry in it deepest and best sense. We'd lost someone who, with his acknowledged personal flaws, had shown what it meant, as a person of faith, to both confront the terrible failings of one's society while also calling that same society to its highest ideals - someone whose aspiration was that "one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed" as he put it in his best known speech and sermon.
The theology - or understanding of God - behind the Social Gospel I referred to, to return to that for a moment, was not of a Santa Claus like Supreme Being keeping some kind of check list of our personal rights and wrongs. Instead it was of a Force or Presence or Power at work in human history, moving within the human story, and calling on human beings, in the words of the Hebrew prophets, to "do justice and love mercy" and to "let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream."
I find it interesting that most of the sound bite clips of the "I Have A Dream" speech, which I'm sure will be shown again this week, only come in on the last several lines, which are certainly inspiring and uplifting all on their own. But what often goes unheard are all the Biblical cadences leading up to the conclusion, where in the voice and style that he heard his own father use in the pulpit of Atlanta's Ebenezer Baptist Church, Dr. King spoke of how "every valley shall be exalted and every mountain made low, the rough places plain and the crooked places straight and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together." He was taking very ancient language from the Book of Isaiah and recasting it as a metaphor, as a symbol, for the world he envisioned for all of God's people - which is to say the human race. He took the traditional language of faith beyond the realm of personal piety, and made it an instrument of social transformation. To see someone do that, in the manner that Dr. King did, while preparing for the ministry yourself, was - to put it in a very understated way - very inspiring.
To briefly throw in one other bit of historical perspective here, the rise of the religious right in this country was, in good measure, a reaction or a backlash, against the ascent of the Social Gospel in mainline Protestantism; and, to a lesser degree, the ascent of liberation theology in Catholicism. Just as the fundamentalism that first gained strength in this country in the late 19th century was largely a reaction against, and a fear of, the ascent of the Modern Scientific Age; the religious right, as it came into being and gained strength in the 1980s and 1990s, was a protest against the social gospel advocates of the 60s and 70s. Yes, the agenda of the religious right was also to influence public policy, as was and is the case with the advocates of the social gospel. But for the religious right - and given my own background this was not surprise to me - that agenda centered around almost exclusively personal belief issues like abortion, or homosexuality, or the teaching of evolution, and the like. That whole movement is now showing some signs of wear and tear, but that's a topic for another day. For now, I want to get back on the main rail.
Over the years I've had my own internal wrestlings and arguments with Dr. King's theology even as I continue to be guided and inspired by his example. It was those wrestlings, in fact, that scooted me on over from the liberal Christianity I'd embraced by the time I got to seminary, to Unitarian Universalism. But there was one particular line, to which Dr. King often returned, that continues to one of my fixed stars. One of his often-used phrases was to say, "The moral arc of the Universe is long, but it bends towards justice."
That one he did not get from the Bible; he got it instead from a Unitarian minister who'd preceded him by roughly a century - the Rev. Theodore Parker. Parker was a renegade Unitarian for his day, both in his theology and in his activism and as a fiery Abolitionist. At the middle of the 19th century he had a huge following at his Unitarian Church in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, much to the consternation of the more establishment Unitarians of his day. Parker was a combination Christian/ Humanist who anticipated the coming of the Social Gospel by several decades. Dr. King felt something of a spiritual tie to Parker, and he freely invoked his words.
"The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends towards justice." The language, of course, is metaphorical. You can't look up at the sky on a clear night and see a moral arc. But it's a powerful metaphor - as powerful as those ancient words from Isaiah. And its power lies in the challenge it offers to persons of faith - to persons of many faiths: How are you using the strength of your convictions to move that moral arc a little further in the direction of a more just world? This was the challenge Dr. King put before his listeners as well as the nation of which he was a citizen. It is the challenge he has left for us as well - to keep moving that moral arc a few more degrees, at least, in the proper direction.
We wrapped up a pretty remarkable election season here in this State of ours this past week. I figured that to ignore that today would be like ignoring the proverbial eight hundred pound gorilla in the parlor. I have just a few thoughts, which I hope relate to what I've already said: Some of us, as Wednesday morning came round, were pleased; some of us stunned; some of us disappointed; and most of us wondering where it all goes from here. Like many of you I had my preferred candidate for whom I voted. But beyond my preference, what I will continue to keep looking for, as this process plays out from now until November, is the candidate - actually all of the candidates for any number of public offices - whom I feel best possess the abilities, the qualities, and the ideas and values, that will move Theodore Parker's and Martin Luther King's moral arc at least a few more degrees in the direction it so desperately needs to go.
Even as I say that, however, I do so with the awareness and understanding that the path and movement of that moral arc, bending towards justice, does not fully depend or rely upon the actions of elected officials, whatever office they may hold. With all due respect and admiration to my friends who hold public office, I have to say thank God for that. Indeed, when I think of some the people who moved that moral arc along - people like Martin Luther King and William Sloan Coffin, Mahatma Gandhi, Archbishop Oscar Romero, or - going back further - Dorothy Dix, and Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth, I'm aware that none of them ever held an elective public office. Their strength came from the strength of their personalities, from their moral energy, and from their being on the right side of history as they sought to advance what our Second UU Principle calls, "justice, equity and compassion in human relations."
I know it's just a slogan, but I grant a certain credence to that 1960s adage about how "If the people will lead the leaders will follow." It was Dr. King's inspired leadership in the civil rights movement - which caused his hearers to become leaders themselves by being a part of a movement, that eventually caused the United States Congress and President Lyndon Johnson to enact the most far reaching civil rights legislation this nation had seen to that point. The people led and the leaders followed. And that is part of our calling as persons of a liberal religious faith; to be the people who will lead so that the leaders, in time, will have to follow. That call is part of the continuing legacy of Martin Luther King.
Dr. King called upon his hearers to run a race - a persistent and ongoing marathon really. That race, or marathon goes on. It is one we are called upon to take part in as we bring our values, hopes, dreams, and convictions to a world that both blesses and confounds us - and that is worthy of our love and our efforts. While Dr. King's race to justice was tragically and horribly cut short; his was certainly not a race that was run in vain; and neither must ours be. Together we continue to make the words of his dream flesh, and together we move the moral arc further along as it bends towards justice.
Stephen D. Edington
January 13, 2008
