A Sermon by John Parker Manwell
The Paint Branch Unitarian Universalist Church
January 18, 2009
(Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday)

Reading

In his last sermon before his murder, at Washington’s National Cathedral on March 31, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., challenged white America to bring a sense of urgency to the struggle against white racism. We must, he said, get rid of “the myth of time” – the notion “that only time can solve the problem of racial injustice.” For it is a myth “to think that time is neutral.”

Somehow we must come to see that human progress never rolls around on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be co-workers with God. . . . So we must help time and realize that the time is always ripe to do right.

Dr. King drew on Washington Irving’s legend of Rip van Winkle, who fell asleep while George the Third still ruled, and awoke twenty years later to find that he had slept through a revolution: George Washington now ruled. King challenged white America to wake up to the revolution of our time, and take a stand on the side of justice.

We have done amazing things in our time, he said. Thanks to our science and technology, we have “made of this world a neighborhood” – “and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make it a brotherhood.” As a result, while the rich get on with their lives, the poor are often hungry and live in rural shacks and city slums, and we do not notice – or care.

He reminded the congregation of an ancient story. There was a rich man, he said, named Dives (the Latin word for rich).

And there was a man by the name of Lazarus who was a poor man, but not only was he poor, he was sick. . . and . . . so weak that he could hardly move. But he managed to get to the gate of Dives[‘ house] every day, wanting just to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. And Dives did nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, “Dives went to hell, and there was a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Dives. . . .”

Dives didn’t go to hell because he was rich; Dives [went to hell because he] didn’t realize that his wealth was his opportunity . . . to bridge the gulf that separated him from his brother Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he passed by Lazarus every day and never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother to become invisible. . . . Dives went to hell because he sought to be a conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

And this can happen in America, the richest nation in the world – . . . this is America’s opportunity to bridge the gulf between the haves and the have- nots. The question is whether America will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we now have the…resources to get rid ofpoverty. The real question is whether we have the will….

One day, we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. . . .

[Yet, it] seems to me that I can hear the God of history saying, “That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent, sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me.” That’s the question facing America today.

Sermon

In the defining story of the Jewish people, God commissions Moses to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt to the Promised Land. But after 40 years in the wilderness, before they can cross into the land of Canaan, Moses climbs to the top of Mount Nebo to look out, —

and the Lord showed him the whole land. . . . The Lord said to him, “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, ‘I will give it to your descendants; I have let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.” Then Moses, the servant of the Lord, died there in the land of Moab. . . . (Josh.34:1-6)

Martin Luther King, Jr., like Moses, led his people through the wilderness in a great march toward freedom. In much less than 40 years, they underwent their own ordeals of repression, violence, and miraculous escapes. But like Moses, Dr. King did not reach the promised land.

On the night before he died, King spoke in public for the last time. In a great hall in downtown Memphis, as tornadoes touched down nearby and torrential rains pounded the roof, he addressed the city’s striking sanitation workers. It had been an exhausting day. The first great protest, a week earlier, had been broken off in unexpected violence. He was fighting an injunction against another mass protest. The storm this night had kept many people away. King recalled for his listeners his narrow escape a decade earlier when a deranged woman had stabbed him in a Harlem bookstore, barely missing his aorta. He had faced many threats since then. That very morning, a bomb threat had delayed him for an hour in Atlanta. “Well,” he said, “I don’t know what will happen now.

We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now.” He paused. And then, his voice trembling, he went on:
Because I’ve been to the mountaintop. . . . [thunderous applause ] And I don’tmind…. LikeanybodyIwouldliketolive…. ButI’mnot concerned about that now. . . . I just want to do God’s will. . . . And he’s allowed me to go up the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I have seen [s-e-e-e-e-e-n] the promised land. . . . And I may not get there with you, but I want you to know, tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land!

The next day, standing on a balcony of the Lorraine Motel, he was felled by an assassin’s bullet.

Today, 40 years after his murder, we as a people stand atop the mountain. Like King, we can see the promised land. While King had a dream, a vision, of what could be, some faraway day, we, this very week, see a vision that seems so close that we can almost touch it. Surely with the inauguration of an African American president, that promised land must be at hand. Our expectations are that high.

This week is a week to celebrate. We have, indeed, come a very long way, and celebrate we should. Soon enough, the reality will begin to set in that the economic tsunami which has swept over us will leave precious little room for anything but jump starting the economy, any time soon.

But as we stand at the mountain top and look out, the real question is, what do we see? Can we see that though we’ve made great progress against racism, we’ve fallen even further behind in our efforts to overcome poverty? Just as the cost of the war in Vietnam put an end to Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty, so the cost of today’s economic bailout, and of war and our enormous public debt may block new efforts to fight poverty for many years to come.

Yet I want to suggest this morning that there’s work to be done while we wait for prosperity to return. The chief obstacle to fighting poverty in our time is not just money. It’s our public indifference to the problem. More and more in recentdecades,wehaveturnedourbacksonthepoor. We’veallowedthegap between rich and poor to grow, not shrink. The once familiar concept of “progressive taxation” is no longer part of our public lexicon. Our top income tax rate has fallen, during my lifetime, from a wartime high of 90%, to today’s top rate of 35%, thanks to wave after wave of tax cuts, with still more in prospect to restartoureconomy. ToomanyAmericansnowthinkofusingtaxestomitigate income inequality as “socialism,” even “confiscation.” We, as religious liberals, have work to do, maybe even work on ourselves.

Dr. King knew that freedom is indivisible. You may, at last, be free to vote,, but you still won’t be free if you can’t find a job that will support your family. You will not be free if you have not been able to get a decent education. You will not be free if you can’t find decent housing, in a safe neighborhood. You will not be free if your basic humanity remains unrecognized and you are invisible. Dr. King knew this. Do we?

At the time of his murder, King was in Memphis, supporting the city’s sanitation workers. They had jobs, but their struggle was for even more than decent pay. It was for dignity. And they had asked him to help. Would you or I have joined them?

A few weeks before, when their struggle was getting under way, a trash compactor truck was driving with its five-man crew when they ran into heavy rains. They were forbidden to park their truck and seek shelter, thanks to residents’ complaints about black garbage collectors’ supposed “picnics” in their white neighborhoods. So on this day, those who could not squeeze into the cab had let go of their handholds on the outside of the truck and climbed inside, with the trash. Somehow, a freak accident started the compactor, and two of them were crushed to death, and dismembered.

Now sanitation workers had no insurance and no death benefits. They were at the bottom of the city’s job ladder. So the city made an exception and granted the two widows each $500.

Against this backdrop, a preacher among the striking workers suggested a slogan for their organizing efforts: I AM A MAN. The mayor, a highly regarded white liberal, refused to bargain with them, and they decided to strike. “This was a strike that we called,” a long-time trash collector would remember later. “Labor didn’t call it. We called it.” “Let no one make a mistake about it,” the mayor proclaimed. “The garbage is going to be picked up in Memphis.” He hired strikebreakers, but couldn’t find enough, and the strike dragged on. Which side would be we on, as homeowners whose trash was piling up?

Many among Dr. King’s supporters had urged him not to get involved. It would be a no win situation. It would distract attention from civil rights. It would cost him support among his liberal but all too comfortable white allies.

But King insisted. He saw that the right to vote is not enough if a person can’t get a decent job or place to live. Already, against such protests, he had insisted on opposing the war in Vietnam. He saw it as diverting enormous sums that could otherwise have been used to fight poverty. It meant drafting and killing thousands of poor young black men, who did not have middle class deferments as college students. Now, just as he had opposed the war, he insisted on standing up for these sanitation workers. Yes, they had jobs. But they could not support their families. And they did not have dignity. In the public eye, they were invisible. He insisted. And it cost him his life.

In his sermon at the Washington Cathedral, Dr. King appealed to people like you and me. He spoke of Rip van Winkle who when he had climbed the mountain where he went to to sleep, had passed a sign with a picture of King George the Third of England. As he climbed back down, this same sign bore the strange new likeness of George Washington. Rip had slept through a great revolution.

You and I, King warned, risk doing the same. Comfortable in our segregated enclaves and middle class lives, we are in danger of sleeping through a great revolution, a revolution of perspective, in which the world has become “geographically one,” and all its people are one. One world. One people.

We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.¹

For several months, against vociferous opposition among his supporters, black and white, he had been planning a poor people’s march on Washington. It was not enough to struggle for civil rights. It was not enough to oppose the war in Vietnam. The oppressed Negro would not be free until he had a job, until she could earn a living wage. And not just the Negro. King was planning a march that would include native Americans, Appalachian whites, and the urban poor, whatever their color and ethnicity. If they would pledge non-violence, he invited them to come to Washington, led by mule-drawn caravans from places like Marks, MS, the poorest county in the country, to insist on their dignity as human beings, and our oneness as a human family.

Freedom is indivisible, and Dr. King knew it. For his listeners at the National Cathedral, he recalled what people had said about his insistence on opposing to the war in Vietnam:

There comes a time when [we] must take the position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but [we] must do it because conscience tells [us] it is right. I believe today that there is a need for all people of goodwill to come with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “We ain’t goin’ to study war no more.” This is the challenge facing modern man.

This was King’s position in standing against the war, and it was his position in standing against poverty. He had a dream. He had looked out from that mountaintop, and seen the promised land. He knew that in the promised land, there is no oppression, and there is no war, and there is no poverty. He knew that in the promised land, no one is invisible, and all of us are sisters and brothers and children of God.

Dr. King called it the “kingdom of greatness.” It’s not enough, he said, to

build great bridges and skyscrapers and other wonders of technology. As he told his listeners at the cathedral —

[It] seems to me that I can hear the God of history saying, “That was not enough! But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not. I was devoid of a decent, sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no shelter for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If ye do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me.”

There is nothing new about poverty, Dr. King said. What is new is that we now have the ability to get rid of it. The real question is whether we have the will. And that’s the question facing you and me, these forty years later.

We may not in the next few years have much money for fighting poverty. But we have work to do, hearts to change, beginning with our own, and continuing across America. For even when prosperity returns, there will be no new war on poverty until you and I, and millions like us, are ready to pay the price: not just in paying income taxes that reflect our privileged position in society, but in changing the way we live: By opening our neighborhoods not just to minorities who are educated, like us, but to subsidized housing for the poor; by opening our neighborhood schools to children not only of minorities but from poor families; by opening our congregations not only to folks who are highly educated minorities, but others whose degrees are in the school of life, not the Ivy League. And in all this, committing ourselves to listen to each other, see each other’s different life experience, and learn what it is like to walk in their shoes.

We’ll find the will to push for these things only as we do the spiritual work of opening our hearts to understand, deeply, the pain of people whose life experience, like the minstrel’s, has been invisible to us because we have not thought to listen. What better place to practice, to stretch our hearts, than the church? This church. And as Dr. King said, the time is always ripe to do the work of justice, the work of caring and of love.

We have come so far, and now we stand at the peak of the mountain, and look out. We can see the promised land, and we can build it, if we will but open our eyes, and our hearts.

“Come build the land, my people, we seek.” Let us build the kingdom of greatness in our own land, in our own time. Let us join our voices now in Hymn 121.

Benediction

For our benediction, I leave you with these words with which Dr. King closed his sermon at the Washington Cathedral, echoing his text from Revelation, “Behold, I am making all things new”:

God grant that we will be participants in this newness and this magnificent development. If we will but do it, we will bring about a new day of justice and brotherhood and peace. And that day the morning stars will sing together and the sons of God will shout for joy. God bless you.