Soul Force

What Now, Martin?

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

January 17, 2010

^Readings

^{Preamble
to the Declaration of Independence}

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Abraham Lincoln, first Lincoln Douglas Debate, Ottawa, Illinois, August 21, 1858

from Abraham Lincoln: His Speeches and Writings, ed. Roy P. Basler, Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1946, p. 445

I hold that … there is no reason in the world why the negro is not entitled to all the natural rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence – the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I hold that he is as much entitled to these as the white man. I agree with Judge Douglas he is not my equal in many respects – certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment. But in the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.

Martin Luther King, A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James M. Washington, San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986

“I Have a Dream,” Aug. 28, 1963, p. 217.

[W]e've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition. In a sense we've come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was the promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check; a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. And so we've come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

Sermon

Martin Luther King, Jr., summarized his moral vision in his acceptance address upon being presented the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1964 with these words:

I accept this award today with an abiding faith in America and an audacious faith in the future of mankind. 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 flotsom and jetsom 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. I believe that even amid today's mortar bursts and whining bullets, there is still hope for a brighter tomorrow. I believe that wounded justice, lying prostrate on the blood-flowing streets of our nations, can be lifted from this dust of shame to reign supreme among the children of men. I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land. "And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid." I still believe that We Shall overcome![1]

King recognized that we are constantly on a journey toward greater righteousness as individuals and as nations. He refused to accept the “isness” of our current conditions but instead insisted on struggling for the eternal “oughtness” that constantly confronts us. We are all on such a journey from the way things are, from our past and our present circumstances to the future that we believe should and will come into being in our lives and in our neighborhoods, in our nation and in our world.

Some of the greatest individuals in our national history have been on such a journey, and as we look back at them we see clearly the extent to which they were bound up in the limitations of their own times and their own character. Thomas Jefferson penned the stirring words in the preamble of the Declaration of Independence that we read this morning, words to which the nation has turned in every era to define the true nature of this unique nation of ours – “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Jefferson was strongly opposed to slavery during much of his life; as he said in 1788, "Nobody wishes more ardently to see an abolition, not only of the trade, but of the condition of slavery; and certainly, nobody will be more willing to encounter every sacrifice for that object."[2] And yet, he did not free his own slaves either during his life or even upon his death, including those he himself had fathered with Sally Hemmings. Our religious tradition likes to claim Jefferson as a Unitarian because of his religious views despite the fact that he never joined a Unitarian church. As the Dictionary of Unitarian Universalist Biography puts it, “Jefferson found the Unitarian understanding of Jesus compatible with his own. In 1822 he predicted that ‘there is not a young man now living in the US who will not die an Unitarian.’”[3] And yet he failed to live out the implications of his great words in the Declaration of Independence; he failed to treat his own slaves as though they were in fact equal to him, who remained a slave-owner to the day he died.

Abraham Lincoln was probable our greatest president, saving the union and freeing the slaves. But as we noted in our readings this morning, he did not believe that African-Americans were equal to whites. As he put it, “I agree with Judge Douglas [Negroes are] not my equal in many respects – certainly not in color, perhaps not in moral or intellectual endowment.” At the same time, we need to acknowledge that making the argument for full equality would have been very difficult politically for Lincoln. Nevertheless, he goes on to affirm the right of all to the fruits of their labor, saying, “[I]n the right to eat the bread, without the leave of anybody else, which his own hand earns, he is my equal, and the equal of Judge Douglas, and the equal of every living man.”[4] An imperfect application of the claim of the Declaration that “All men are created equal” to be sure, but still an important advance which on its face destroys any argument for slavery, which by definition denies the slave “the right to eat the bread … which his own hand earns.”

Martin Luther King, Jr., was a man of his own times as well; toward the end of his too-short life he was opposed by proponents of Black Power who insisted that the struggle for equality must not stop with the abolition of legal segregation, but must instead include empowerment as a key component of real freedom. This struggle occurred on many fronts and caused significant strife in our own denomination at the end of the 1960s.

Finally, President Obama referred to the spirit of the Declaration in his Inaugural Address, saying,

We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things. The time has come to reaffirm our enduring spirit; to choose our better history; to carry forward that precious gift, that noble idea, passed on from generation to generation: the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free, and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.[5]

Obama’s election was a historic breakthrough made possible by the work of Martin Luther King, Jr., along with many others. He went on to say,

This is the source of our confidence: the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.

This is the meaning of our liberty and our creed, why men and women and children of every race and every faith can join in celebration across this magnificent mall. And why a man whose father less than 60 years ago might not have been served at a local restaurant can now stand before you to take a most sacred oath.[6]

But our president, too, is a man of his times. His election has evoked lingering racism from some, on display at rallies against his policies. As president of all the people, he must represent more than African-Americans, and in a sense protect against any appearance of favoritism in order to be the leader of all of our citizens.

Yet at each of these moments of our history, flawed as all such moments are, there is a striving toward that “oughtness” to which King referred in his Nobel address, an unwillingness to settle for what is today in order to lead the way to a greater tomorrow. At each of these moments there has been a transcending faith that things can be different, that we can strive toward broader achievement of our ideals and our hopes for the future. King spoke as one deeply imbued with the vision that Jesus put forth of the possibility of the presence of the Kingdom of Heaven among us; updating the reference to make it more appropriate to our own democratic age and our own nation – which turned its back on kingdoms in declaring its independence in those words of the Declaration – King referred instead to the “Beloved Community.” Two theologians offer this description of that ideal for King:

Central to the thinking of Martin Luther King was the concept of the "Beloved Community." Liberalism and personalism provided its theological and philosophical foundations, and nonviolence the means to attain it.... In one of his first published articles he stated that the purpose of the Montgomery bus boycott "is reconciliation, ... redemption, the creation of the beloved community." In 1957, writing in the newsletter of the newly formed Southern Christian Leadership Conference, he described the purpose and goal of that organization as follows: "The ultimate aim of SCLC is to foster and create the ‘beloved community’ in America where brotherhood is a reality. . . .

King’s was a vision of a completely integrated society, a community of love and justice wherein brotherhood would be an actuality in all of social life. In his mind, such a community would be the ideal corporate expression of the Christian faith.[7]

It was his deep faith that kept his hope alive, the faith of which the Epistle to the Hebrews speaks when it says, “[^NKJHebrews 11:1] [F]aith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” It is through faith in a possible future that we are able to find our way to a better land – not in our own lifetimes, as Martin acknowledged the night before his life was ended by an assassin’s bullet only too soon, but even so we must set our sights high as we strive toward the “oughtness,” even in the midst of the discouragements of what is.

The words of the Declaration of Independence have laid a gossamer thread through our history, and we return again and again to the high promise of its ideals, grasped imperfectly even by those who drafted it and pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to defend it. When it was written, “all men” might more accurately have been interpreted to apply only to white men of property – and emphatically to men, not to women. Yet in every age the vision has grown more inclusive and more welcoming to all, men and women, rich and poor, black and white. None of that expansion occurred without struggle, first to enfranchise all white men, then to include those who had been enslaved – though imperfectly at first in the aftermath of their Emancipation. During the same era women struggled for their own rights, though they were denied the vote until early in the last century. Today we are still struggling to broaden our understanding of equality to include the equality of Hispanic and Caucasian, of immigrant and native-born, of gay and straight. But the fundamental commitment of the Declaration remains strong in us as as we return over and over to those words, as we work out the true meaning of our nation’s creed and of King’s Beloved Community.

King’s life was devoted to ending racial segregation, but his Poor People’s Campaign expanded the struggle to include empowering those who are poor; at the end of his life,

King went to Memphis to support African American garbage workers, who were on strike to protest unsafe conditions, abusive white supervisors, and low wages -- and to gain recognition for their union. Their picket signs relayed a simple but profound message: "I Am A Man."[8]

Poverty remains, not only among African Americans but among people of every race and ethnic group; segregation remains, no longer legally mandated but nevertheless real in our cities and suburbs; inequality remains in many forms, from unequal marriage laws based solely on sexual orientation to vastly disproportionate rates of incarceration for members of minorities; hunger continues in this prosperous land of ours, and life chances are undermined by poor nutrition before birth and in the early years of life. There are no easy answers to these social ills, but that is the challenge we face, to continue perfecting the promise of the Declaration of Independence, to carry out what Lincoln called that

‘something in that Declaration’ that provided ‘hope to the world for all future time. It was that which gave promise that in due time the weights should be lifted from the shoulders of all men, and that all should have an equal chance.’[9]

Like the people of every age, we have our part to play in working out the meaning of our creed in our time, in striving toward that Beloved Community pointed toward by Jesus to which Martin Luther King, Jr., devoted his whole life.

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