Soul Force

Free at Last?

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

January 18, 2009

It is our custom on this day before the national holiday celebrating the birthday of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., to take the opportunity to reflect on the struggle for civil rights that Dr. King led for most of his adult life and to take stock of his legacy to our nation. What an extraordinary year this has been to reflect on the realities of race in these United States. For the first time, an African American is to be sworn in as President of the United States to preside over a government whose capital was built by slaves and to live in a house constructed with slave labor. We might be forgiven for thinking that King’s dream for his children at the March on Washington just two years after the president-elect was born has been fulfilled, when he said: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”[1] It’s interesting and hopeful to note that, while there were hints of race-baiting during the election season (as well, of course, as claims that Obama was not really Christian but rather a secret Muslim), there has been essentially no discussion about how Obama will respond to the many crises awaiting him just 48 hours from now “as an African American.” Race seems to have become a very secondary matter to the real issues of governance in crisis.

When Obama started writing his first book, Dreams from My Father, issues of race were pressing in a different way. As he says in his introduction, written thirteen years ago,

I originally intended a very different book. The opportunity to write it first arose while I was still in law school, after my election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review…. A burst of publicity followed that election, including several newspaper articles that testified less to my modest accomplishments than to Harvard Law School's peculiar place in the American mythology, as well as America's hunger for any optimistic sign from the racial front—a morsel of proof that, after all, some progress has been made.

There would be an essay on the limits of civil rights litigation in bringing about racial equality, thoughts on the meaning of community and the restoration of public life through grassroots organizing, musings on affirmative action and Afrocentrism—the list of topics filled an entire page….

When I actually sat down and began to write, though, I found my mind pulled toward rockier shores. First longings leapt up to brush my heart. Distant voices appeared, and ebbed, and then appeared again. I remembered the stories that my mother and her parents told me as a child, the stories of a family trying to explain itself….

Compared to this flood of memories, all my well-ordered theories seemed insubstantial and premature….

[S]ome people have a hard time taking me at face value. When people who don't know me well, black or white, discover my background (and it is usually a discovery, for I ceased to advertise my mother's race at the age of twelve or thirteen, when I began to suspect that by doing so I was ingratiating myself to whites), I see the split-second adjustments they have to make, the searching of my eyes for some telltale sign. They no longer know who I am. Privately, they guess at my troubled heart, I suppose—the mixed blood, the divided soul, the ghostly image of the tragic mulatto trapped between two worlds. And if I were to explain that no, the tragedy is not mine, or at least not mine alone, it is yours, sons and daughters of Plymouth Rock and Ellis Island, it is yours, children of Africa, it is the tragedy of both my wife's six-year-old cousin and his white first grade classmates, so that you need not guess at what troubles me, it's on the nightly news for all to see, and that if we could acknowledge at least that much then the tragic cycle begins to break down . . . well, I suspect that I sound incurably naive, wedded to lost hopes, like those Communists who peddle their newspapers on the fringes of various college towns. Or worse, I sound like I'm trying to hide from myself.[2]

The stories we tell ourselves as a nation grow more complex as the variety of our origins grows. There is a tension between the claim that this is a white, Christian nation and the claim of the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal. Dr. King understood that claim through a theological lens; Donald Chinula explains it this way:

Segregation objectifies persons and desecrates them. This desecration is the ultimate fracturing of human identity, in that it abuses God’s personality as well. The desecration occurs to the oppressor as well as the oppressed. On this issue King says this:

But man is not a thing. He must be dealt with not as an “animated tool” but as a person sacred in himself. To do otherwise is to depersonalize the potential person and desecrate what he is. So long as the Negro or any other member of a minority group is treated as a means to an end, the image of God is abused in him and consequently and proportionately lost by those who inflict the abuse.[3]

Even hearing Dr. King’s words we are reminded that women, too, have a claim to the image of God, and we remember that the phrase “All men are created equal” sounds to our ears today as though it does not include women – another change which has occurred just in the years since King began his work.

To a large extent, and thanks to the work of Dr. King and many allies Black and white, segregation as a legal mandate has been wiped out in this nation. The right of minorities to vote has been secured in the law, though a constant struggle is necessary to ensure that it is not denied on grounds other than race. Most importantly, segregation remains a reality in terms of where people are able to find and afford housing for themselves, and this de facto segregation in turn drives the quality of schools, neighborhoods, and life chances for many. Denied life chances, too many African Americans end up prison, constituting almost 40% of prison population vs. 13% of the population as a whole. Without regard to the many factors which result in this extraordinary disproportion in incarceration rates – particularly for Black men – it must be said that the social order – parents, families, neighborhoods, churches, schools, local, state & federal governments – are failing far too many of the young people in our society. One important outcome of the election of Barack Obama is that, as one cabinet appointee put it, “it’s cool to be smart again.” Clearly peer pressure plays an important role in the choices young people make and the wrong turns they take, but we can do better, all of us, in pointing in a positive direction.

Of course, King’s life was not only about ends – about equality between races in particular – but also about means. It’s not enough that change should come – change must come without violence, or it just paves the way for a new round of oppression. The problem with segregation was not just that some were up and some were down; real violence was needed to maintain the oppression of separation and degradation, violence epitomized by attack dogs and fire hoses, petty insults and lynchings. I think that King’s heart would be broken to find that we are again, as at the end of his life, engaged in war abroad. While he was lauded – at least some of the time – for his role in leading the Civil Rights Movement, he was criticized severely when he chose to raise his voice against the Vietnam War. Just before his death, in his speech “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” he said:

One day a newsman came to me and said, "Dr. King, don’t you think you’re going to have to stop, now, opposing the war and move more in line with the administration’s policy? As I understand it, it has hurt the budget of your organization, and people who once respected you have lost respect for you. Don’t you feel that you’ve really got to change your position?" I looked at him and I had to say, "Sir, I’m sorry you don’t know me. I’m not a consensus leader. I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I’ve not taken a sort of Gallup Poll of the majority opinion." Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.

On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?

There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it is right. I believe today that there is a need for all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "We ain’t goin’ study war no more." This is the challenge facing modern man.[4]

The ongoing war in Gaza reminds us of the terrible costs exacted by war; I do not propose to adjudicate all the causes, the claims and counterclaims of that conflict or of the conflicts in Iraq and in Afghanistan; I do know that Dr. King would have reminded us over and over that violence, like oppression, taints the victor as well as the victim, something we see if we look at the broken bodies and minds of our soldiers as they return from the front and from the distortions to our national priorities caused when war is the chosen means of response to threat. Forrest Church quotes Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse on the costs:

From the psychiatric point of view, it is not possible to unleash selectively the primitive aggression necessary to acquire and maintain power over others, even in a “good cause.” The ends not only do not justify the means, but aggressive means can subvert even the best of ends.[5]

King’s goal was grander than the election of an African American as president; his goal was the creation of a Beloved Community, the Kingdom of Heaven of which Jesus spoke. His goal was not one which could ever be finally achieved this side of heaven. But he managed quite brilliantly to turn his dreams, his visions of what a better world would look like – into immediate, practical actions which have begun to come true for us before our eyes. Here’s how Forrest Church describes another way of understanding that vision:

The commonwealth of God is grounded not on uniformity but on mutuality. We are not replicates of one another, distinctive only to the extent that we have or have not received Jesus as our Lord and Savior, but related to one another in a single body with many different members, each with a unique gift. Which means, among other things, that converting a Jew to Christianity is like trying to turn a hand into a foot.

Members in the commonwealth of God are not bound together by the specifics of their religion, for the nature of our interdependency does not require this. Rather we are bound by the shared recognition that when one person suffers, all suffer; when we violate one life, all lives are violated; when we pollute the earth, all living things are stained; when one nations threatens the security of another, it too becomes less secure; when we place the planet in mortal danger, we hazard the future of our own children as well as the children of our enemies.[6]

King’s vision extended far beyond the moment we face at noon on Tuesday, when for the first time an African American becomes president of this nation. His vision extended into the receding future, always struggling for more justice, more equality, more peace, more freedom. No, we can’t say that we have come to the point where all of God’s children can say that we are all free at last – free from oppression and from the burdens of being the oppressor; but we have made long steps since his death forty one years ago. Our task is to keep dreaming more dreams; telling our own stories; sharing our unique gifts; building up the commonwealth of God, the Beloved Community, the Kingdom of Heaven. King spoke of his commitment to this task when, as HeavenHhe accepted the Nobel Peace Prize, he said:

I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him.

I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him. I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality.

I refuse to accept the cynical notion that nation after nation must spiral down a militaristic stairway into the hell of thermonuclear destruction. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.[7]

Amen.