"Liberation in Black and White"

"In the days ahead we must not consider it unpatriotic to raise certain basic questions about our national character.  We must begin to ask, 'Why are there forty million 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?'"

-    The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr

These words were uttered by the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King in 1963.  Perhaps in hearing them you were struck, like I was, by how by the issues he was addressing some forty years ago - the divide between rich and poor, America's tendency toward militarism,  our national priorities - are still so very much with us, unresolved, still front and center in our national debate in 2003. His questions sound like they were written today.

As Martin Luther King Day has been approaching I have been thinking how badly we could use a leader of his vision and moderation and strength today.  King's voice certainly helped give substance and shape the moral tone of his era .  As I have been thinking about writing for today, I couldn't help but wonder how his presence might have changed today's debate, raising the level of our national conversation and bettering its tone..  I won't pretend to know how Martin Luther King would address our social issues but as I thought about him, and reread his works in recent days against a backdrop of today's news,  two concepts championed by King that I'd like to share with you.

Before I begin, let me seem to go off on a tangent for a moment. Although I am both a religious and political liberal on most issues, I take in quite a bit of conservative commentary.  I watch Fox news programs on television and listen to conservative radio pundits Bill O'Reilly and Jay Severin. All of this expands my understanding of what's going on, and helps me understand the thought processes of those I tend to disagree with. I feel exposing myself to a broad spectrum of thought  is something I should be doing both in my capacity as a citizen and as a minister.  But I have to admit, that if and when the talk gets disrespectful or too vitriolic or nasty, I turn it off. When Howie Carr refers to Fat Ted instead of Senator Kennedy, I change the channel.  Recently Jay Severin repeatedly referred to UN General Secretary Kofi Annan using a body part instead of a name. I turned the radio off. Two or three weeks ago Sean Hannity, addressing some football riots that took place in Ohio, advocated that National Guardsmen should shoot to kill, saying that would instill some discipline and respect for property into America's college students. I turned the television off. In a similar vein, when our president talks about the "axis of evil" or says we should smoke the enemy out of their holes dead or alive," my stomach knots.  Speech filled with hatred and disrespect is a feature of today's conservative expression that I both recognize and deplore.

I don't particularly associate this kind of rhetoric with liberal commentary.  Imagine my surprise, then, when I received a letter from a conservative friend complaining about nasty, hate filled sentiments being expressed by political and social liberals. I would have thought him mistaken, except that he supplied numerous examples. He offered ugly quotes - one by the NAACP's Julian Bond saying those who don't support affirmative action are fascist, another by novelist Susan Sontag saying the white race is  "the cancer of human history". There were others. A little research proved them to be accurate statements by these individuals. This made me realize, sadly,  that both sides of our national debate right now are given to strident overstatement.  I suspect, much to my dismay, that I am less sensitive, less apt to notice or turn off shrill language when it is closer to my way of thinking. Speech filled with hatred and disrespect is a feature of liberal expression in this era that I deplore but do not always recognize as readily as I should.

With this in mind, I poured through my volume of the collected writings of Martin Luther King looking for expressions of hatred, disrespect for the souls of those he opposed.  I found none. I can qute to you vicious remarks from that era by the likes of Bull Conner and George Wallace who saw Negroes as sub-human, but no equally demeaning response by King.  In spite of the injustices he suffered never seemed to lose his sensitivity to what was demeaning.  He held a vision of a world  in which black people were free at last, yes, but free within the context of a beloved community, a world that was best for both his people and those with whom he struggled. Do we dare imagine such a radical goal with our enemies today?

King's nonviolence ran deeper than a political tactic. His nonviolence was a way of life that emanated from deep within, infusing his political strategy and all his language.  Do not doubt that King's times were every bit as challenging and as violent as these.  Newspapers vilified him, the FBI investigated him, his house was bombed, bottles and stones were thrown at him and many landed when he marched. He anticipated his own death. But he spoke without fail of love as his best weapon against those who would do him harm.

During the Montgomery Boycott his home was bombed while his wife Coretta and daughter Yolanda, were home.  Both could have been killed. He rushed home to comfort his badly shaken family and to survey his blackened home.  Outside a huge sympathetic crowd gathered - angry, ready to riot. But not even in this moment did King forgot to control the terms of the debate.  He did not go with the flow. He stood firm. To the angry crowd he said:

"We believe in law and order.  We are not advocating violence.  We want to

          love our enemies.  Be good to them.  I did not start this boycott.  I was asked

by you to serve as your spokesman…What we are doing is just, and God is with us.  Go home, with this glowing faith and this radiant assurance."[1]

This is a message of love from King which Americans badly need to hear in  today complex political context. Imagine hearing these words by an American of King's stature, fresh and new off the pages of today's Sunday paper, applied to the issues we are facing now. "Let no man pull you so low as to hate him….In your struggle for justice, let your [enemy] know that you are not attempting to defeat or humiliate him, or even to pay him back for the injustices he has heaped upon you.  Let him know that you are merely seeking justice for him as well as yourself."[2]  And these words, "I  still believe that love is the most durable power in the world.  Over the centuries [we] have sought to discover the highest good. …. I think I have discovered the highest good. It is love. This principle stands at the center of the cosmos. As John says, "God is love." He who loves is a participant in the being of God. He who hates does not know God." [3]  

King's message that love is the most durable power is one message we badly need to hear in America of 2003.  The other is a message that goes along with it - . These words are King's:

 "Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word.  It is the word "maladjusted."  Now, we should all seek to live a well adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities.  But, there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call upon you to be maladjusted.  I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination.   Never intend to adjust myself to mob rule.  I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism.  I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things.  I call upon you  to be as maladjusted as Amos who in the midst of the injustices of his day cried out in words that echo across the generation, "Let justice run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." …I call upon you to be as maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who dreamed a dream of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man.  God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we will be able to go out and change our world and our civilization. And then we will be able to move from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man to the right and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice." [4]

My ears were getting accustomed to incivility. Martin Luther King says don't get used to it.  Be alert. Have the strength to stay awake to injustice. Love.  Be maladjusted.  Find a way to bend the world toward justice with your love.  

I'd like to share with you a story I stumbled upon as I researched King this week. In 2001 a US Supreme Court decision permitted the Ku Klux Klan to participate in an Adopt-A-Highway Program in Missouri.  The state of Missouri had sought to prevent participation by the Klan, but the Supreme Court, rightly, I think, provided for this kind of free speech and equal protection under the law.  (This is one of those cases that makes the ACLU unpopular because they defended, not so much the Klan, but our precious freedom of speech.)  So the Klan got their piece of highway to clean but turned out not to be the end of the story.  Sometime afterwards, the Missouri Department of Transportation, in a brilliantly creative move, renamed the Klan's highway.  The road they adopted is now officially, the "Rosa Parks Freeway," in honor of the woman who refused to go to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama on that fateful day in 1955.  I'm sure the Supreme Court and the ACLU, were both happy with this outcome. And Martin Luther King would have been proud.

Here's another true story that King would have championed, from a book by Ian Frazier entitled On the Rez, about life on South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation. The following is a true story about their basketball team and one beautifully maladjusted young woman:

When Pine Ridge [Reservation kids] are the visiting team, usually their hosts are courteous, and the players and fans have a good time. But… occasionally at away games their kids will be insulted, their fans will not feel welcome, [and] the host gym will be dense with hostility…

In the fall of 1988, the Pine Ridge Lady Thorpes went to play in Lead [,South Dakota] ... in the locker room, the Pine Ridge girls could hear the din from fans… yelling fake-Indian war cries... The usual plan for the pre-game warm-up was for [each team]  to run onto the court in a line, take a lap or two around the floor, shoot some baskets, and go to their bench at courtside… then the game would begin. Usually the Thorpes lined up for their entry more or less according to height, which meant that senior Doni De Cory, one of the tallest, went first. As the team [readied] in the hallway… the heckling got louder. The Lead fans were yelling epithets like "squaw" and "gut-eater." The high school band  joined in, with fake-Indian drumming and a fake-Indian tune. Doni De Cory looked out the door and told her teammates," I can’t handle this." SuAnne quickly offered to go first in her place. [SuAnne was a freshman, fourteen years old.] She was so eager that Doni became suspicious. "Don’t embarrass us," Doni told her. SuAnne said, "I won’t. I won’t embarrass you." Doni gave her the ball...

[SuAnne] came dribbling onto the court with her teammates running behind… the noise was deafeningly loud. SuAnne went right down the middle…and suddenly stopped when she got to center court. Her teammates were taken by surprise, and some bumped into one another... Su Anne turned to Doni De Cory and tossed her the ball. Then she stepped into the jump-ball circle at center court, in front of the Lead fans. She unbuttoned her warm-up jacket, took it off, draped it over her shoulders, and began to do the Lakota shawl dance. SuAnne knew all the traditional dances – she had competed in many powwows as a little girl – and the dance she chose is a young woman’s dance, graceful and modest and show-offy all at the same time. "I couldn’t believe it – she was powwowin’, like, ‘get down!’" Doni De Cory recalled. And then she started to sing in Lakota, swaying back and forth in the jump-ball circle, doing that shawl dance, using her warm-up jacket for a shawl. The crowd went completely silent. "All that stuff the Lead fans were yelling – it was like she reversed it somehow," a teammate said. In the sudden quiet, all you could hear was her Lakota song. SuAnne [then] stood up, dropped her jacket, took the ball from Doni De Cory, and ran a lap around the court dribbling expertly and fast. The fans began to cheer and applaud. She sprinted to the basket, went up in the air, and laid the ball through the hoop, with the fans cheering loudly now. Of course, Pine Ridge went on to win the game. [adapted]

 SuAnne was a beautifully maladjusted spirit. She was unafraid to stand apart. Reaching for resources deep within, she (at 14!) managed to act out of love toward others in the face of their hatred.  She (at 14!)  believed in the love within her enemy and found the strength to call it out of them. She changed some hearts that day.

There is something in her story and in King's message which speaks directly to those of us here in this sanctuary. Here in this community we stand out, and apart, with our rainbow flag flying out front and the symbols of the world's great religions on our wall. We stand out in our diversity, as we gather a people united, not by our race, specific belief systems or by our sexual orientation but by a commitment to find a way to walk together in spite of our differences.

There are those in town who disagree with our views who would accuse us of being maladjusted in the worst sense of the word.  But insofar as we can maintain our respect for those who speak ill of us - insofar as we can maintain our respect for the humanity and suffering of those who have world views that we oppose, insofar as we believe in the love within others and attempt in good faith to call that love forward, insofar as we do this we are maladjusted in the sense that King intended. As you leave here today, and walk out into our beautiful and broken and complex world, bring Martin Luther King's advice with you into both your big moments and small:  let no one pull you so low as to hate; be maladjusted, have the strength to love.