Songwriter James Taylor extends a very appropriate invitation today.
"Let us turn our thoughts today to Martin Luther King"I frequently think of Martin Luther King, especially on his birthday. The Civil Rights movement, the War in Vietnam, the landing on the moon, President Kennedy's call to ask what one can do for one's country that led among other things to the establishment of the Peace Corps., and even my own call to a ministry of reconciliation, the sixties as a whole continue to be seminal influences on my life.
And so, when my wife and I took some time away from General Synod in Atlanta and went to the MLK Center and sat in the Ebenezer Baptist Church, I cried while listening to the tapes of his sermons and speeches that continually play for the visitors. In fact I am an absolute wreck on MLK Day when, invariably, the "I Have a Dream" speech is played back. The eloquence of thought, the brilliance of the delivery, the quality of the man, the respect for the martyrdom that awaited him, the ideals for which he stood and the hope that he inspired all come flooding through me, and the tears pour forth.
Would he be happy today, if he were alive to witness the Inauguration of an African American as President of the United States? I cannot imagine otherwise.
Is there justice in the promises that Barack Obama will make on Tuesday when he promises to uphold and defend the Constitution? Undoubtedly!
Can I rejoice with all African Americans, indeed all people of color and all those that are marginalized, that one of "their own" will occupy the most powerful office in the free world? Certainly.
Has the national sin of slavery that has tainted our nation been ameliorated? Is racism a thing of the past? Do we have more work to do with regard to racism, bigotry, white privilege, hate related violence? No! No! and Yes!
Last April 6, author Taylor Branch published an article entitled, "The Last Wish of Martin Luther King," in the New York Times. Based upon a speech he had just given at the National Cathedral in Washington D.C., Mr. Branch wrote eloquently and provocatively of Dr. King's last sermon at the Washington Cathedral on March 31, 1968, the Sunday before he was murdered in Memphis. (Here is a link to the entire article: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/opinion/06branch.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&sq=Martin%20Luther%20King&st=cse&scp=2 )
At the close of the article Mr. Branch wrote of how Dr. King included a discussion of the Parable of Dives and Lazarus (Luke 16).
"Dr. King loved this parable as the text for a fabled 1949 sermon by Vernon Johns, his predecessor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery.
Lazarus was a lame beggar who once pleaded unnoticed outside the sumptuous gates of a rich man called Dives. They both died, and Dives looked from torment to see Lazarus the beggar secure in the bosom of Abraham. The remainder of the parable is an argument between Abraham and Dives, calling back and forth from heaven to hell.
Dives first asked Abraham to “send Lazarus” with water to cool his burning lips. But Abraham said there was a “great chasm” fixed between them, which could never be crossed. In his sermon, Dr. Johns drew a connection between the chasm and segregation.
But according to Dr. Johns, Dives wasn’t in hell because he was rich. He wasn’t anywhere near as rich as Abraham, one of the wealthiest men in antiquity, who was there in heaven. Nor was Dives in hell because he had failed to send alms to Lazarus. He was there because he never recognized Lazarus as a fellow human being. Even faced with everlasting verdict, he spoke only with Abraham and looked past the beggar, treating him still as a servant in the third person — “send Lazarus.”
Dr. King’s sermons drew more layers of meaning from this parable. He said we must accept the suffering rich man as no ordinary, nasty sinner. When refused water for himself, he worried immediately about his five brothers. Dives asked Abraham again to send Lazarus,this time as a messenger to warn the brothers about their sin. Tell them to be nice to beggars outside the wall. Do something, please, so they don’t wind up here like me.
Dr. King said Dives was a liberal. Despite his own fate, he wanted to help others. Abraham rebuffed this request, too, telling Dives that his brothers already had ample warning in Torah law and the books of the Hebrew prophets. Still Dives persisted, saying no, Abraham, you don’t understand — if the brothers saw someone actually rise from the dead and warn them, then they would understand. Jesus quotes Abraham saying no. If the brothers do not accept the core teaching of the Torah and the prophets, they won’t believe even a messenger risen from the dead.
Dr. King said this parable from Jesus burns up differences between Judaism and Christianity. The lesson beneath any theology is that we must act toward all creation in the spirit of equal souls and equal votes. The alternative is hell, which Dr. King sometimes defined as the pain we inflict on ourselves by refusing God’s grace.
Dr. King then went back to Memphis to stand with the downtrodden workers, with the families of Echol Cole and Robert Walker. You may have seen the placards from the sanitation strike, which read “I Am a Man,” meaning not a piece of garbage to be crushed and ignored. For Dr. King, to answer was a patriotic and prophetic calling.
He challenges everyone to find a Lazarus somewhere, from our teeming prisons to the bleeding earth. That quest in common becomes the spark of social movements, and is therefore the engine of hope."
Even so, there is much to be done. In light of this reality the New York Conference staff is planning a "Sacred Conversation on Race" retreat on January 25-26. With the facilitation of Berniece Powell Jackson, former Executive of the UCC Justice and Witness Ministries, the staff along with some other leaders from across the state will begin this conversation in hopes of developing some strategies for broadening the circle to engage the entire Conference. Please keep us in your prayers.
"There is a feeling like the clenching of a fistBlessings,
There is a hunger in the center of the chest
There is a passage through the darkness and the mist
And though the body sleeps the heart will never rest
Oh, Let us turn our thoughts today
To Martin Luther King
And recognize that there are ties between us
All men and women
Living on the Earth
Ties of hope and love
Sister and brotherhood" (James Taylor)
Rick Cowles
1 comments:
Rick,
I was in Basic Training in Fort Jackson, SC when King was assassinated. I was in Advanced Training in Fort Lee, VA when RFK was assassinated. I was on Ton Son Nhut Air Base outside of Saigon when the Chicago Riots happened at the Democratic National Convention and when Nixon was elected and when Apollo 8 circled the moon and when Apollo 11 landed on the moon.
All of this is emotional for me too. But part of my emotions around these events concern being cut off from those realities and yet having my face pushed into the realities of the daily grind of the life of a grunt. I was, for instance, twice blown out of bed by incoming rocket fire.
When stationed in downtown Saigon, early in my stint there, I had access to one of the tallest buildings in Saigon. Many, both military types and civilians— embassy staff, would gather on a “porch” (my guess is it was six or seven floors up— nothing in Saigon was very tall) and look out over the Mekong Delta as fighter jets would drop flares to illuminate the jungle below and then B52s would come in behind them and carpet bomb the vast terrain. We all knew it was horrific, yet none of us could look away or stop from gathering to watch. And all this was (and, I might add, remains) quite surreal.
And I suppose I am writing to say (again) I, too, am emotional about these events and get emotional around their remembrances
Perhaps one reason I get emotional is because I constantly seek to better connect with the era which was mine and yet I feel it was an era which was stripped away from me, robbed from me.
Joe Connolly
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