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Martin Luther King, Jr. Sermon, Sunday, 16 January 2011:
Fr. Dan Scheid
My friends, as I look throughout this sanctuary, I know that many of you are tired and grieving, heavy-laden and anxious. As your pastor I want to find a way every Sunday to reach all your hurts and to assure you that God loves you and that life, however hard, will be okay. I'd like to make this place a sanctuary from the cares of the world, a place of respite, balm for your sin-sick souls.
Yet, as our Eucharistic Prayer for the season says, we come to this place, to this table, for strength as well as solace, for renewal as well as pardon. And it is strength and renewal that we need in times like these, when the cares of the world and the pain of our nation intrudes upon the sanctuary, the solace, the safety we so desire.
I am speaking, of course, about the shootings in the city of Tucson and the grief of our nation; a people that has lost again through violence innocent lives, even the life of a nine year-old child. A people that continues to lose a certain innocence: the hope, naïve, perhaps, that the last time such a rampage happened would indeed be the last time; and the hope that as tragedy has struck once again, that finally we'll come to our collective senses and demand that murder and mayhem be no more.
We gather today in the name of Jesus, the Prince of Peace, and to commemorate the birthday of one of his late-born disciples who lived and died refusing to walk the low and lazy path of violence; instead challenging us to the higher and harder path of non-violence and godly love, the higher and harder path that a society calcified by unremitting violence seems reluctant to take; the higher and harder path that ultimately cost him his life one Sunday morning, April four.
We are a violent society, one that has murdered in this young century an astonishing 150,000 Americans. 150,000!
In speaking about the mass shooting at Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 2007, a tragedy that claimed 32 lives, Marian Wright Edelman, the president of the Children's Defense Fund, reminded us that we're "losing eight children and teenagers a day to gun violence. As far as young people are concerned, we lose the equivalent of the massacre at Virginia Tech about every four days."
And "homicide," in the words of the columnist Bob Herbert, "homicide is white noise in this society ... we never even notice most of the killings" (Bob Herbert, The New York Times, 1/11/2011).
Violence is a sickness in itself and violence is the deadly manifestation of a society that has lost its moorings.
There are those now, after this tragedy in Tucson, who would keep us from pointing the finger of blame at any other person or group or ideology, and yet we must all, each of us, be held accountable for the actions of the man who pulled the trigger more than thirty times, much like after another shooting, this time in Dallas on a November morning, Dr. King declared in his essay Why We Can't Wait,
"We were all involved in the death of John Kennedy. We tolerated hate; we tolerated the sick stimulation of violence in all walks of life; and we tolerated the differential application of law, which said that a man's life was sacred only if we agreed with his views. This may explain the cascading grief that flooded our country in late November. We mourned a man who had become the pride of the nation, but we grieved as well for ourselves because we knew we were sick" (A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr., p. 518).
Yes, Dr. King knew that we were a violent society, and as we gather here this morning, it is right to ask ourselves, "What would Dr. King say about us today?"
In preparing this sermon, I read and re-read many of Dr. King's sermons and essays, and it is incandescently clear that he would be unremitting in his critique of America in our young century, just as he was of the country he was blessed to serve through the majority of two decades in his century. Unremitting critique, but critique with love and with hope, for he called himself an eternal optimist and he had a dream.
Dr. King was an ordained minister of the Gospel, but before that he was a baptized Christian, and as a baptized Christian, he walked in the footsteps of Cornelius the Centurion, one of the earliest followers of Jesus, whose story we heard last Sunday, and of whom I wondered aloud if he merely took his baptism as a convenience, played it safe, and returned to his secure life as a citizen and soldier of Rome; or if he took his baptism for all it was worth, thereby risking property, position, and even life itself.
History doesn't tell us which path Cornelius the Centurion walked, but it is abundantly clear in telling us which path Dr. King walked. He walked a path that took him beyond the necessary yet predictable work of confronting the evil of racism; he walked a wider but stonier path of confronting the evil of poverty and the evil of violence, a perilous path that cost him the support of some of his followers and brought increased scrutiny and condemnation by those who opposed him.
Yet Dr. King grew to have a larger dream, one that realized, correctly, that the evil of racism isn't singular, that systemic poverty in a land of plenty and the impossible paradox of peace through violence each detract from and destroy the health of a nation and a people he loved so dearly.
Our physical health, yes; but as importantly our spiritual health, for as he said in his address A Time to Break Silence, an address he delivered precisely one year before his murder, an address that we read in its entirety from this very pulpit on its fortieth anniversary, the Wednesday of Holy Week in 2007, as Dr. King said in A Time to Break Silence, "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death" (p. 241).
Yes, Dr. King was a critic of violence, and rightly saw that the exercise of military violence abroad to solve our nation's problems gives nodding approval to interpersonal violence at home; much like a parent beating an older child to show that hitting his younger sibling is wrong.
Violence as a means to an end is futile, for as Dr. King pointed out in A Christmas Sermon on Peace, in 1967,
"the great military geniuses of the world have talked about peace ... Alexander, Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, and Napoleon ... Hitler[in Mein Kampf] contended everything he did in Germany was for peace ... every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace" (p. 255),
as does our Nobel Peace Prize-winning president today, whose campaign sticker rests uneasily on my bumper; he talks about peace every time a bomb falls on Afghanistan or a pilotless drone strikes Pakistan, or when he sends a budget to Congress asking for "6% more for the military this year than at the peak of the Bush administration," and for being commander-in-chief of a country that will, "spend more on the war in Afghanistan this year, adjusting for inflation, than we spent on the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and the Spanish-American War combined" (Nicholas D. Kristof, The New York Times, 12/25/10).
Dr. King continued in this Christmas Eve sermon, "They [these leaders, ancient and modern] are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is the means by which we arrive at that goal" (p. 255).
Yes, Dr. King was an unrelenting critic of this country, the country he loved, "too much to see the drift that it has taken" (p. 264).
He called us into account then and now, when he preached a sermon called The Drum Major Instinct exactly two months before his was killed, saying,
"God didn't call America to do what she's doing in the world now ... But God has a way of even putting nations in their place. The God that I worship has a way of saying, 'Don't play with me ... Don't play with me, Israel. Don't play with me, Babylon. Be still and know that I'm God. And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power.' And that can happen to America. Every now and then I go back and read Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And when I come back and look at America, I say to myself, the parallels are frightening" (p. 265).
And I ask you, does Dr. King sound like a Cornelius who played it safe?
Dr. King rightly linked the cost of violence abroad with the cost of poverty at home. He and other leaders in the movement had planned direct, non-violent demonstrations at home in the summer of 1968, a summer he never saw, and in an article about this movement titled Showdown for Nonviolence, an article published posthumously, he wrote,
"the economic question is the most crucial that black people, and poor people generally, are confronting. There is a literal depression in the Negro community. When you have mass unemployment in the Negro community, it's called a social problem; when you have mass unemployment in the white community, it's called a depression ...Our whole campaign, therefore, will center on the job question, with other demands, like housing, that are closely tied to it ... On the educational front, the ghetto schools are in bad shape in terms of quality ... Often they are so far behind that they need more and special attention, the best quality education that can be given ... These problems, of course, are overshadowed by the Vietnam war ... [a] tragic mix-up in priorities ... when the guns of war become a national obsession, social needs inevitably suffer" (p. 67).
And I ask you, does Dr. King sound like a Cornelius who played it safe?
One of the bitterest disappointments Dr. King felt was the overwhelming lack of support from the liberal White Churches (St. A's was integrated, then, but most churches weren't). These churches weren't his kind of Cornelius, and he called them on it.
In his Eulogy for the Martyred Children, given for the girls killed by a bomb during Sunday school at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham in 1963, Dr. King said those slain girls "have something to say to every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained-glass windows" (p. 221).
The White churches weren't Dr. King's kind of Cornelius, and he called them on it in greater detail in his Letter from Birmingham City Jail, his response to an open letter from white, "liberal", Alabama churchmen calling him to go slow, to let the courts take care of enacting integration, and not peaceful civil disobedience and demonstration.
Dr. King took those churchmen to Sunday school, reminding them who they are and whose they are; reminding them that the church used to be,
"very powerful ... when the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society ... Things are different now. The contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century" (p. 300).
Yes, Dr. King was an unrelenting critic of the country and the church that he loved. Yet Dr. King was much more than a critic. He was a teacher whose lesson was love, a teacher who learned well from Jesus the master teacher, who taught us to love our enemies. "Love your enemies," not, "Like your enemies," for as Dr. King pointed out in that Christmas Eve sermon,
"there are some people that I find it pretty difficult to like ... I can't like anybody who would bomb my home. I can't like anybody who would exploit me. I can't like anybody who would trample over me with injustices ... I can't like anybody who threatens to kill me day in and day out. But Jesus reminds us that love is greater than liking. Love is understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all men" (p. 256).
Love, Dr. King preached, gives us the ability
"to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: 'We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force ... Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you ... Send your propaganda agents around the country, and make it appear that we are not fit, culturally and otherwise, for integration, and we'll still love you. But be assured that we'll wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory" (p. 256-57).
That, my brothers and sisters, is God's double victory; God's redemptive love that comes from unmerited suffering: the unmerited suffering of the girls killed in the church bombing in Birmingham, the unmerited suffering of Dr. King and has family, the unmerited suffering of the men and women and children of Tucson, and yes, the unmerited suffering of our Savior on the cross.
So what about us?
What kind of Cornelius will you be as baptized Christians and what kind of Cornelius will we be as a parish?
Perhaps the task of transforming the world is one that is too great for one small but powerful parish to take on.
But that doesn't excuse us.
What can we do as individuals and as a church to be the kind of Cornelius that Dr. King was?
If we can write, will we write?
If we can speak, will we speak?
If we can serve, will we serve?
Where, my sisters and brothers, do we go from here?
In his final address as the president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, an address titled, Where do we go from here?, Dr. King charged that body and he charges us today with a task, a task that we
"go out with a 'divine dissatisfaction.' Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds ... Let us be dissatisfied until those that live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security ... Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity ... Let us be dissatisfied ... Let us be dissatisfied until from every city hall, justice will roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream ... Let us be dissatisfied until that day when nobody will shout 'White Power!' - when nobody will shout 'Black Power!' - but everybody will talk about God's power and human power ... And as we continue our charted course, we may gain consolation in the words so nobly left by that great black bard who was also a great freedom fighter of yesterday, James Weldon Johnson:
'Stony the road we trod, bitter the chastening rod felt in the days when hope unborn had died. Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet come to the place for which our fathers sighed? We have come over the way that with tears have been watered. We have come treading our paths through the blood of the slaughtered. Out from the gloomy past, till now we stand at last where the bright gleam of our bright star is cast'" (p. 251-52).
