Sermon at The Church of the Holy Apostles, New York City,
January 19 2003, The Second Sunday after the Epiphany
The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,
Civil Rights Leader & Martyr
 Year B
by Bradley Tyler Jones

Lection: 1 Samuel 3:1-20; Psalm 63;
1 Corinthians 6:11b-20; John 1:43-51
 

Can anything good come out of Nazareth?
Did anything good come out of Corinth?
For now, can anything good come out of Washington, DC?
We believe so, Lord, with your help. Help us to do your will.
Amen

Martin Luther King Jr. gave this country new ways to think about freedom both when it was present and when it was absent. He persuaded the nation that poverty in itself was an abridgement of personal freedom. He showed the nation how it had resolutely stuck its head in the sand as we waged war on Vietnam, with grievous damage to the freedom of countless citizens in that far nation and our own. He taught a conflicted generation not to fear its government, though it might need to fear what its government was doing.

Today’s bible readings contain a rich assortment of links to the life and ministry of Dr. King.

In the calling of Samuel we heard of the young rabbi’s confusion, thinking Eli was calling him when in fact it was God. Once that’s cleared up, God tells Samuel that Eli and his family will be punished because Eli’s sons have behaved badly and Eli knew about it. But when Eli demanded the truth from Samuel, he told him the whole truth. He didn’t mince words or sugar coat it.

Looking back 35 years we can see that the Reverend Doctor King accepted the heavy and uncomfortable mantle of a prophet with the same forthrightness as Samuel. Oh, he was blasted in his time, by his foes, of course, but also by many ostensible friends. Because he told the truth, even when it hurt.

The epistle reading also inspires comparisons with Dr. King. In the first letter to the Corinthians Paul utters one of the most outrageous statements to be found in the bible:

Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Should I therefore take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute?

Paul knew how to make his point: we are God’s and we should work with God, for God, in God, to realize God’s kingdom here on earth. Or die trying, as Martin Luther King Jr. did.

Corinth, a hub of commerce, was known as the sin city of its day. Paul used the town’s reputation to make his point. And certainly, something good and lasting came out of Corinth.

Dr. King preached against racial hatred and discrimination on one hand and the rage and violence that was building up in the African American community on the other. He preached against violence all over the US like Paul preached against sin in his letter to the Corinthians. Nonviolent action was the way to divest African Americans of passivity without arraying themselves in vindictive force, he said.

Dr. King warned his followers that violence would not solve anything and would likely make a bad situation worse. Later he did the same in the antiwar community in the U.S. He compared protest violence with violent racial discrimination and with the violence of warfare, shocking many and frustrating even more of his followers. He asked his followers to consider that they were carrying out God’s plan. Then Martin Luther King Jr. offered the alternative inspiration of nonviolent resistance that ultimately won over the Congress to the passage of the Civil Rights Act and eventually brought an end to the war in Vietnam.

It is in today’s gospel, though, that the message of Dr. King is heard the most clearly.

Philip told Nathanael, “We have found him about whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote, Jesus son of Joseph from Nazareth.” Nathanael shot back, “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” Philip responded, “Come and see.”

Nazareth wasn’t a place that inspired great expectations. It was not the foreseen birthplace of the messiah. And it was a backwater. But the message is that great things do spring from humble origins.

Come and see. Come and be delighted at what you find. This is what Philip told Nathanael and it is what Dr. King preached his entire career. Is there any doubt that something good came out of Nazareth?

Recognizing that the 74th birthday of The Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. is celebrated tomorrow as a national holiday, let’s prepare a report on our progress toward freedom. What would we tell Dr. King if he visited us today?

Remembering the repression of the 50s and the 60s, we would tell Dr. King we have more freedom of expression today. We have comparatively inexpensive electronic communication, including long distance, e-mail and the web that were unimaginable in the middle of the last century. Commitment to individual freedom continues to be important to more and more Americans as indicated by the surge in the membership numbers of the American Civil Liberties Union since 9/11. Concerned at the present administration’s inclination to suspend constitutional rights with every terror threat alert, ACLU members have been signing up in record numbers.

However, it’s not any easier to be heard today, we will have to admit. And the challenge of being heard above the din of the advertising and political campaigns is daunting. The plain truth is that money talks—not sense, not logic, not love, not charity—money is heard above all else. In terms of freedom, we’re ahead in the freedom of expression. We probably haven’t made much progress in terms of governmental and political candor. And our ability to trust our government has a direct impact on our freedom.

For example, even as we face the evaporation of the trillion dollar surplus that we looked forward to a few years ago, the Bush administration wants to increase and accelerate tax cuts for the richest Americans. The president accuses those who question his plan of being instigators of class warfare. Now I’m no psychologist, but I know a raging case of projection when I see it and George W. Bush has it bad!

The arrogance and dishonesty of the current administration on the subject of war matches lie for lie the Vietnam fabrications of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon. This nation made Saddam Hussein what he is today. We armed and funded him. The first George Bush chose not to pursue Saddam as the Gulf War wound down. Now we seem capable of no other response to the misdeeds of Iraq’s megalomaniac than to launch a war.

Having devastated Afghanistan in the search for Osama bin Laden and the retreating Taliban, we should know what war does to the freedom of a people. The effect on the people of Afghanistan is obvious—we have bombed their homes, food supplies, schools, and mosques. In this country, our freedom is also threatened. The government of a free country does not wage war without the consent of the governed. How to make ourselves heard above the din of demands for retribution, how to get policy makers to consider the lives of the innocent, this challenges the conscience of every thoughtful citizen.

We could tell Dr. King that our personal freedom is greater, but our control of our government and what it does in our name is not.

While we may have loosed the bonds of racial segregation, we now see new forms of segregation and discrimination based on wealth and class. Poor and middle class people continue to struggle with health issues, with deteriorating educational quality, with other living costs and with changing workplace norms which favor investor and shareholder concerns over workers . The push from “welfare to work” in the past decade has thrust an undertrained workforce into a world of low-paying work. This has dramatically complicated the process of job hunting and obtaining job training for those marginalized for any number of reasons like inadequate education, ex offender status, untrained mothers newly in the workplace, those seeking second incomes for families burdened with medical expenses and the mentally ill who need practical help living in a society that no longer supports them. We continue to discriminate against the poor, in other words. In this category of insuring freedom for the marginalized, we would have to tell Dr. King we have not progressed much at all.

No matter if our war du jour is in Afghanistan or Iraq, remember that it used to be against drugs. Our freedom from addiction to or dependency on mind altering substances has plummeted since the time of Martin Luther King Jr. Drugs are stronger, cheaper and more available than ever. Drugs were our biggest concern prior to 9-11and the drug problem persists. We live in a society that thinks it doesn’t have to face the complexity of modern life, it can instead have a few drinks or pop a pill or snort some cocaine. Our nation’s enslavement to drugs and alcohol is tragic and there is no end in sight.

We suffer from other addictions as well. Endless consumerism, competition, and conspicuous consumption. Despite our amazing mobility, we tie ourselves down with oversized homes, sometimes more than one, SUVs and other vehicles that defy logic and practicality, and social climbing. We would have to concede that we are enslaved to consumption and style.

Prophet that he was, Dr. King saw it coming in 1963 when he said:

“Success, recognition, and conformity are the bywords of the modern world where everyone seems to crave the anesthetizing security of being identified with the majority.

Speaking of strivers, the New York Times ran an interesting column the other day. A poll asked if respondents believed they were among the top one per cent of earners. Nineteen per cent said yes. Another 20 per cent expected to be in the top one per cent some day. The column pointed out that this absurd aspiration is held by nearly 40 per cent of the American public. And it made the point that one reason Al Gore lost the election in 2000 was because he beat up on the richest one percent not realizing that nearly 40 per cent of the populus identifies with the one percent.

Never mind the delusion factor. Our president will play to the outrageous and impossible aspirations of Americans –and accuse the suspicious of waging class warfare--as long as it reinforces his campaign for hegemony and reelection. This is as appalling as the recently re-exposed and much discussed Southern Strategy of the Republican Party. It promoted sub rosa racial discrimination under the cover of buzz words and phrases like states’ rights and a variety of reactionary initiatives like President Bush’s plan to dismantle Affirmative Action.

Did anything good come out of Trent Lott’s public humiliation in Pascagoula, Mississippi late last year? He was exposed and the Republican Party’s Southern strategy was addressed. That was good. Then nothing happened. That was bad. Then the president rebuked him. That was good. Again, nothing happened. That was bad. Then the public got in an uproar and the republican Senators took away Lott’s position as Senate Majority Leader. That was good. But he held onto his Senate seat and was awarded the Rules Committee Chairmanship, one of the most powerful, if most invisible, Senate leadership positions. That was bad, very bad. Where are we on the Good-Bad meter? Is the overall good effect ahead of the overall bad?

It is at least two steps forward in terms of the combined exposure and repudiation and in terms of losing the top slot in the Senate, even if it is one step back, in terms of the Rules Committee chairmanship. It was good to hear the Republicans proclaim that nostalgia for segregation has no place in that party. It will be better when they prove it by attracting significant numbers of African American Republicans. Let’s put this instance into our report on progress toward racial freedom and racial honesty to Dr. King.

You may recall we had another president not long ago with a different take on things. He created a commission on racial reconciliation that was forgotten amid the explosive scandal over his adultery and dishonesty. The commission was headed by a renowned historian named John Hope Franklin, a significant scholar from Duke and an African American. As it was forming, the nation went into a collective tailspin over whether reparations for slavery were on the table for the commission to consider. There was never much heard from the Commission. Looking back it is painful to realize that the nation was so distracted by the lies and sex scandal that it missed the opportunity to take meaningful steps to heal the wounds left over from slavery.

That is one way in which we remain short on freedom: as a society we lack the ability to look backward and realize just what it is we do to ourselves. We are capable of letting ourselves be distracted at critical moments by topics and issues that don’t merit much attention on their own, much less in comparison to serious issues. Philip Roth said it very well:
America’s oldest communal passion, historically perhaps its most treacherous and subversive pleasure, is the ecstasy of sanctimony.

Sadly this same ecstasy of sanctimony seems all too prevalent in the country as the patriotism of people who challenge the administration is questioned. As the administration prepares for war on one front it ignores serious problems on another, a reprise of the race and Vietnam debacle of 38 years ago.

We’d have to tell Dr. King that we are just as vulnerable to stupid distraction now as we ever have been, and seemingly just as incapable of grasping the importance of a big issue and dealing with it proactively. This affects our freedom directly, of course, because the longer we put off the race issue, the more it festers and the more there is to solve. We have the means but lack the will.

If we had the opportunity to tell Dr. King all this, our report on our proximity to real freedom, he would not be surprised. By the end of his life he knew painfully and personally how easily people could be distracted from the truth. He wouldn’t be surprised because he saw it when he said:

"We must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character. We must begin to ask, 'Why are there millions poor people in a nation overflowing with such unbelievable affluence? Why has our nation placed itself in the position of being God's military agent on earth...? Why have we substituted the arrogant undertaking of policing the whole world for the high task of putting our own house in order?”

Like Samuel telling Eli the bad news, Martin Luther King Jr. has forewarned us of our dilemma. Eli let his sons blaspheme so he faced consequences. We can’t allow our nation to dive headlong into war without objection or we, too, will face consequences.

Doctor King had some advice for us in that department: in 1967 in his Sermon “Where do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” he said:

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.
He also had for us a solution:
Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time: the need for man to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence. Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

This message was delivered as part of his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in 1964. For those of us who are pondering the role of the church as our nation prepares for war, Dr. King would remind us of Jesus’ citation of the first commandment and the Golden Rule. Love God and love your neighbor, including your Moslem, Iraqi and North Korean neighbor. And be thankful for prophets like Samuel and Nathanael and Martin Luther King Jr. who show us the truth when we can’t find it, though they are long gone from this mortal sphere.

Amen

 

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