Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sermon by Rev. Victor Carpenter, January 13, 2008

First Religious Society, Carlisle, Massachusetts

It was a   clear brisk  morning  with a touch of early fall in the air.  The beginning of a beautiful, predicable day in the neighborhood when American Airlines flight 11 slammed into the World Trade Center Tower and “the neighborhood changed.  Changes that we are still sorting out. 

Fast forward to another September day four years later.   No cloudless sky here; instead  a storm is ravaging a great city.  Instead of airliners used as missiles, hurricane generated waves   tear apart the fabric of dailyness for the people of New Orleans. 

Since Katrina I’ve come to believe that the devastation of New Orleans is a deeper and further reaching disaster than the destruction of the World Trade Center four years earlier on 9/11.

 In New York, great buildings collapsed; in New Orleans, a great city collapsed.

While Mohammad Atta   showed us a new international reality, Katrina showed us an old national reality!   The storm force of the hurricane   revealed the storm-force of   race, class, poverty and injustice, each inter-connected with and re-enforcing the other three.

We remember the pictures of people fleeing New Orleans.   TV was filled with photos of poor   people who had no transportation out of the disaster.  People on foot, lugging what few possessions they could carry.      Those   poor people were 95% black.

We remember the pictures of people in the sports arena called “ The Super Dome” - families were trying to huddle together where drinkable water was a luxury, toilets were overflowing, a corpse lay in a corner, covered by a blanket and rumors of violence circulated rapidly and repeatedly through this terrorized community of suffering.

Someone called it a “slow-motion lynching”.

The trouble with such a dramatic and startling description is that it permits us  (we who live thousands of miles from New Orleans, we who contributed our dollars to “relief”) to “avert our eyes” and   distance ourselves; to   avoid the single overwhelming truth that Katrina’s impact upon New Orleans   revealed - the connection between race, class, poverty and injustice that exists everywhere in our American society  - in Carlisle no less than in New Orleans - today and every day to our social shame..

Race, class, poverty, and injustice are “ the four horsemen “of our American apocalypse.

 Race, class, poverty and injustice: each one connected to and re-forcing the other three.    And no one in our American history has battled them more effectively than the man who, on his Jan 21^st birthday, would have turned  79 years old this year.  

Martin Luther King Jr.    His name  will forever be associated  with  the Civil Rights struggles of the 1950’ and 60s.   That  is convenient.  Perhaps too convenient.    His lasting association with  the  Civil Rights  Movement  places King snugly as spokesperson for African Americans’ need for civil rights. So when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and spoke the words “ We shall overcome!”   It was like the victorious e end of struggle.  Check the photo on the cover of your Order of Worhsip this morning.

After the Civil Rights Act was passed by congress  King could retire .  He could go back to pasturing a church ;   become a  “familiar” in Washington, consulting with Presidents about this and that – much in the manner of Billy Graham.   After all, he had overcome and could reap its rewards.

It didn’t work  out that way.

  Five days after the Civil Rights Act was signed, the black Ghetto of Watts in Los Angeles exploded with racial rage.      White America asked Why?   Why are those black people torching their neighborhood;  why are the looting stores and  shooting at police officers ???      White America did not understand that while the civil rights Act provided the right to vote;  it   didn’t address poverty or provide the right to control one’s neighborhood.

As White America  scratched its head and muttered about  blacks not being satisfied and wanting too much  ,King went to work.  

Within months of the Watts riots King  organized what he called “ a  poor people’s campaign”.  The campaign would include both black and white Americans, linked together   in  poverty.  The campaign’s symbol would be a wagon train pulled my mules.    The mule train  would cross the country, finally arriving at Washington D.C. where it would pitch its tents  around the reflecting pool at the foot of the Lincoln Memorial.

It is important to  remember that all the while these racial and social events were taking place in this country, we were also engaged in  the Vietnam War.   Recognizing the linkage  connecting race and war

 King was as engaged in protesting that war as he was  in promoting civil rights and civil justice here “at home”.

In 1967,  40 years ago, King mounted the pulpit of the great Riverside Church in New York City to deliver a blistering  attack on that  war.

One year later he was assassinated.

Now,   four  decades after his murder,   Americans, white and black, will link arms and sing “We shall overcome” as we ourselves will do in a few minutes, in honor of King’s birthday.  It is right and good that we do this in honor of a man who won a great victory in America’s fight against racism.

But let us remember that the true value of this man and the fact of the national holiday in his name is NOT  simply that he still inspires us   but that IT keeps his critique of our society in front of us; encouraging us to keep looking honestly at our society and our individual roles in society.

For Instance:

      King taught us to think about racism  beyond  the simplistic  either/or:

If you are a racist, you do racist things; if you are not a racist you don’t do racist things.

By such simplistic  definition I know I’m certainly not a racist and I’m certain that each of you would say the same thing about yourself.  No racists here!

King knew better.

King said that such  thinking  doesn’t really get at it.

Instead he suggested a four-step approach to the problem of racism.  And each step requires a courageous decision: Are you ready?????   Here we go.

Step one:  You have to decide that the established order of life in America in 2007, still includes a large order of racism.

Step two: You have to decide that the system SHOULD change.

Sept three:  you have to decide that the system   COULD change.

Step four: you have to decide that YOU, Yourself should do something to  change It.

As I said, each one of these four steps requires a courageous decision.

Most, if not all of us, have already taken that first step.   You recognize that the established order of things is wrong.    And if you don’t recognize I suggest that you really are living in a bubble.

So  we’ve already had the courage to move to step two :  deciding that the established order SHOULD change.   Perhaps you read an article about Global warming, or the continuing death toll in Iraq.  Perhaps you  detect  racism at work in the current discussions about immigration or you agree that the minimum wage needs to be raised.

You’ve passed step two!  Congratulations

Ready to move to step three?  Deciding that the system COULD change??

Big jump - this one REALLY takes courage.   But think of the alternative which is a kind of despairing hopeless   weariness; a fatigued, drained, worn-out failure of imagination.

Now you’re ready for the biggest jump; the decision that YOU YOURSELF can change things.

You look around; see people you admire doing it; you decide to do something to change the system yourself.

Forty years ago the UUA Board of Trustees was meeting in Boston when a general call for help from Martin Luther King.     King was calling from a small Alabama town named Selma where the police were violently suppressing a civil rights demonstration.

Hearing this call the President of out Association (the Rev. Dana McLean Greeley, with the approval and support of the UUA Board) agreed to temporarily adjourn the meeting, they all immediately flew toAlabama, and re-convene the Board meeting in a black church in Selma.

Over 100 UU ministers and double that number of laypersons joined the board.      One of those ministers, James Reeb - and two laypersons, Violet Liuzzo and Jimmy Lee Jackson died there.

The name “Selma” continues to resonate in our denomination;  “Selma” continues to send chills of pride down the spines of UU ministers and laypersons alike.  Men and women who answered the call to challenge the established  “system” and enable “justice to roll down like the waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Perhaps that story of Selma will inspire you to think seriously about the system in which we live right now.  And what better time than  during this presidential election year.

Right Now  a  white woman and a black man are contending for the leadership  of  our country.  Both of them are agents of change.    Such contenders reflects a welcome, indeed an inspiring and invigorating  change in our country.   

Reflecting on this  vision of what is both new and newly possible  I look forward to the morning of January 20, 2009  when  a new face appears on the rotunda in front of the Capital in Washington DC;   when a new hand reaches out for Bible or Koran upon which to swear an oath of office;

And the spirit of the man who  ,  on the following morning ,  would have celebrated  his 80th birthday would see his “dream” come one step closer to reality.

One of the greatest truths that King spoke is that we are all “ bound in an inescapable network of mutuality”.   And  so we are ;    so  we are !