| ""The Lord called me before I was born,…
[God] made my mouth like a sharp sword.…
And [the Lord] said to me, 'You are my servant.…
I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.'"
(Isaiah 49:1b, 2a, 3a, 6e-f)
The Book of the Prophet Isaiah speaks here of the call of a Servant to proclaim the word of God so that the light of justice and love may dawn over all the world. Christianity has always seen Jesus as the one who perfectly fulfilled this prophetic role of Servant of God, the one who, with a sharp-sword of a mouth, succeeded in bringing God's vision of justice and love to all nations. Yet the description of the Servant's vocation in the Book of Isaiah invites each and every one of us who is a follower of Jesus to join with Jesus in acknowledging God's sovereignty over our life and in accepting God's call to a ministry of justice and love, to join with Jesus in saying with today's psalmist: "Here I am;… I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart." (Psalm 40:7a, 8) As we seek to understand and chart our own Christian vocation of loving our neighbors and correcting all that works against love, I think it is helpful to call to mind the example of a person somewhat less perfect than Jesus, a person much more like ourselves, albeit still quite beyond ourselves, a person whose work for justice and lovingkindness can inspire us to the higher levels of discipleship we've not yet attained. And on this Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial Sunday, there is much to be learned about being a Servant of God from the life of this man, who was a prophet, and, indeed, a saint, even as he remained, very much like us, a sinner. Dr. King described God's call to prophesy as having come to him not in the womb, nor even on the day of his birth, January 15, 1929, nor even on the day when he first began his work as a pastor, at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, in September, 1954. No, as he described it, God's call to prophesy came to him somewhat after that, at age 27, in his kitchen, early on the morning of January 27, 1956. Dr. King had become a leader in the Negro community's boycott of Montgomery's segregated buses, a boycott launched when Rosa Parks refused to stand at the rear of her bus since a seat was available in the whites-only section of the bus. A local white Methodist minister, the Reverend E. Stanley Frazier, had publicly excoriated King for his activism, saying: "the job of a minister … is to lead the souls of men to God, not to bring about confusion by getting tangled up in transitory social problems." And Dr. King was receiving about forty threats a day, by phone and mail. On the night of January 26, 1956, he received a particularly troublesome call. The voice on the other end threatened to blow up his home and kill his whole family. The call so upset and unnerved Dr. King that he couldn't get to sleep. Going down to his kitchen, he turned to God in fervent prayer, confessing that recently he had been faltering and losing courage and that he was thinking of dropping out of the struggle. Then, as he himself described it, "Almost out of nowhere I heard a voice. 'Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice, Stand up for truth. And lo, I will be with you, even until the end of the world.'" "After that experience," said Dr. King, "I was ready to face anything." Just three days later, his home was bombed. When he hurried back to his family, he found that his wife and baby were safe-and he also found a black crowd gathering there with guns, angry at the violence against the King family and ready to retaliate. Dr. King called out to the crowd: "We must meet violence with nonviolence.… We must love our white brothers no matter what they do to us.…" From that point onward, Dr. King never doubted God's presence with him and with all the weak and the oppressed in their nonviolent struggle for justice and lovingkindness. God had called him to prophesy-to tell forth the word and will of God and to stand up for justice and lovingkindness. So Dr. King continued to proclaim that God had created blacks and whites to live with each other, not to be separated from each other. He called on Christians to break down the dividing walls of segregation and to live in harmony with persons of differing race. Most black Americans in the 1960's saw Dr. King as a Moses, as one who would deliver his people from the bondage of segregation to the Promised Land of integration. As for the white community-well, we held widely conflicting views. Time magazine proclaimed Dr. King 1963's Person of the Year, Mayor Robert Wagner awarded him New York City's Medallion of Honor, and the Nobel Committee conferred on him the 1964 Peace Prize. But in September, 1963, just two weeks after the triumphant March on Washington and Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech, white racists in Birmingham bombed the Sixteenth Baptist Church, killing four young black girls. (Today, 38 years later, the perpetrators of that terrorist act are just now being brought to justice.) Then on Sunday, March 7, 1965, a group of black civil rights marchers left Brown Chapel in Selma, Alabama, and set out across the Edmund Pettus bridge on their way to the state capital. There the peaceful marchers were attacked and bloodied by state troopers and the sheriff's possemen. Seventy to eighty people suffered broken teeth, gashed heads, and fractured bones. Much of northern white America was shocked by the violence we saw on television, and thousands of us, I among them, poured into Selma to join the blacks there in demanding full civil rights. The ensuing march under the leadership of Dr. King and the other events that followed it soon finally led Congress to pass the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1965, which President Johnson signed on August 6. And soon thereafter, Dr. King's prophetic ministry entered its second and final phase, for he came swiftly to see that his dream of an integrated America, could not be realized through the gaining of civil rights alone. It would require the gaining of economic justice as well. Dr. King came to see that winning the right to eat hamburgers at every lunch counter in the land was a hollow victory if you had no money to buy the hamburgers. Dr. King came to understand that gaining formal legal equality would not, in and of itself, end the crippling poverty that was the enduring legacy of centuries of slavery and Jim Crow. Dr. King came to perceive that the white power structure was using our huge economic advantage and the acceptability of classism to keep most blacks in poverty and to perpetuate both social privilege and segregation. Dr. King came to believe that left on our own, without a gadfly, we who are whites would never integrate the masses of poor blacks into the mainstream of American society. So during phase two of Dr. King's prophetic ministry, he launched the Poor People's Campaign to restructure America so that there might no longer be so many poor people in a nation overflowing with affluence, so that all Americans might have food and shelter for their bodies and dignity and self-respect for their spirits. Dr. King's Poor People's Campaign, which included opposition to the war in Vietnam, cost him a lot of support among northern whites. Still, he felt called by God to decry the evils of poverty and militarism in a nation that was then spending $500,000 to kill one enemy soldier and only $50 to lift one of its own citizens out of poverty-one-tenth of 1%, a statistic that sounds awfully familiar still today, some thirty-five years later, in 2002. It was this Poor People's Campaign and the struggle for economic justice that led Dr. King to Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, At that place, on that date, he was killed by an assassin's bullet. Dr. King had said to America's affluent, "It's much easier to integrate lunch counters than it is to eradicate slums. It's much easier to guarantee the right to vote than it is to guarantee an annual minimum income and to create jobs." "[But] if you do not begin to use your vast resources of wealth to lift God's children from the dungeons of despair and poverty, then you are writing your own obituary." Despite all the changes in the past thirty years for middle-class blacks, very little has uplifted the quality of life for the black underclasses. Many analysts conclude that the socioeconomic conditions experienced today by poor African-Americans are worse than in Dr. King's time. You see, racism today has become much more subtle and refined. Indeed, our nation speaks the language of formal equality so well that those of us who are affluent have found yet one more way to preserve our educational and economic advantage over the non-privileged classes and races. We can now cry out that programs intended to remedy the economic injustices that prevent true integration are in fact discrimination against the privileged. Thus, we have learned to invoke the name of civil rights to perpetuate advantage and to preserve society's patterns of segregation and economic oppression. And because classism is still acceptable even when overt racism is not, many of those who used to be despised for the color of their skin may still be viewed with contempt because they are poor. Dr. King, a prophet of God, called on us Christians to break down the walls that divide people in order both to overcome racism and to end poverty. Two events during the past couple of weeks show us first that racism, though more subtle, is still very much alive today, and show us second that poverty, even though terribly unsubtle, is no closer now to being ended than it was 35 years ago. A first event is the proposal for a statue of "three firemen raising the flag" as an appropriate commemoration of firefighters' heroism displayed on September 11th in the face of the terrorist attack on our nation. In recognition of the fact that firefighters of all races proved heroic on that day, those commissioning and approving the statue suggested that the three figures should be an integrated group-white, black, and Hispanic. Well, what a furor has been raised in the name of literalism! Isn't the statue modeled on a photograph of a real event, and weren't all the figures in the real event white? How "politically correct" and therefore obviously incorrect it is to suggest that the firemen should be shown of different races! Why, it would be the rewriting of history! All this, I venture to say, coming from whites who when it comes to religious art have long cherished the quite non-literalistic representations of Jesus and his followers as white Europeans rather than as the swarthy Semites they "really" were. Yes, our racism has not disappeared. And when it speaks, politicians suddenly get timid, and bold statues get revised. Will we ever become freed enough from our ingrained racism to support the wisdom that if art is to be eternal it must capture in a transcendent way the deeper truths of a moment in time? So it is beautifully evocative for representations of Jesus, who came as a light for all nations, to be variously portrayed as white, and black, and yellow, as well as brown. Well, one of the deeper truths about September 11th is that it wasn't just three white guys who struggled here in this city against those who hate our country; it was the whole glorious mosaic of us that did that in this the most wondrously diverse city that can be found anywhere. And another of the deeper truths about September 11th is that it was not only the freedoms of our country that were under attack. It was also our nation's commitment to pluralism, a commitment that many Americans, ironically, prefer not to celebrate. Will racism prevent us from expressing in artistic representations of September 11th both the glorious mosaic that we are and also our nation's commitment to pluralism? I fear so. And a second event of the week that reminds us of our need for a contemporary Dr. King is the continuation of our city government's assault on the presence of poor and homeless persons outside the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church You see, even our new city government seems more committed to having the poor just disappear from our view than it is to addressing some of the root causes of poverty. Our city government, not being content with having already driven away into obscurity and into less-safe spaces thirty of the forty persons who had each night been seeking sanctuary at that church-our new mayor has now decided to appeal the federal judge's ruling that the church is within its First Amendment rights to offer sanctuary to the ten poor people who can still fit on its outside stairways, sanctuary to those desperate enough to seek it. Why is the city doing this? Well, my personal interpretation is this. The city decided to break off its settlement negotiations with the church when the city discovered that the church wanted the city to seriously address some of the root causes of poverty and make some changes in "the system" rather than just put Band-Aids on a few of poverty's blemishes. Martin Luther King received from God a call to be a Servant, a call to summon people to establish justice and love throughout the earth. This week, let us commemorate both the first and the second phases of Dr. King's prophetic ministry by joining hands to help lift all of God's children from the twin dungeons of racism and poverty. And let us, like Dr. King and Jesus and Isaiah before us, be bold enough to speak out for justice and lovingkindness, to speak out even with a sharp-sword of a mouth. Amen |
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