Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday

By Ulysses Grant Dietz

Dear God, open my mind and set it free;
open my heart and set it on fire.

You see me today dressed in the full “vestments” of my position as an American curator--something I gave up wearing to church many years ago. This is the uniform I drag out when I go to meetings of the Museum’s board of trustees, or maybe to openings at another museum: the native costume of my people. Think of it as equivalent to the floor-length cope that Bernie wears every year when we chant the Great Litany at the start of Advent. I wear this today because this is, for me, a momentous and somewhat intimidating occasion.

One reason I was chosen to preach today (Bernie sort of tipped his hand in the announcements last week) is that I am entering my second year as a board member of the SO/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race. The Coalition’s mission statement is to achieve and sustain the benefits of a thriving, racially integrated and truly inclusive community that serves as a model for the nation. Words to live by indeed; words that have inspired me for years, and a mission that surely reflects the goals that MLK Jr. set out to achieve fifty years ago. But while I continue to learn how to live out that mission statement here in this town, and to understand how to be a useful member of that organization, you must all understand that it is because of my twenty-five year membership in this parish that I could accept the call to be part of the Coalition’s board. In this place the lessons of my life have come together. This is where my spirit lives and thrives and continues to grow. I just wanted to be clear about that from the start.

The other reason the Absalom Jones Committee zeroed in on me was the accident of my birth. I am the younger son of the youngest daughter of the only son of the eldest son of Ulysses S. Grant. Got that? Great-great grandson; the youngest descendant of my generation. But the unfortunate truth is that in the generations after Ulysses S. Grant won the war that freed the enslaved people of the United States, my Grant ancestors embraced the prevailing racism that followed the collapse of reconstruction. As proud as I am of my longstanding Republican ancestry, it was only when my then 92-year-old mother voted for Barack Obama in 2008 that—for me—the lingering taint of racism was once and for all washed away. It was a watershed moment in my mother’s life (representing the ongoing liberal influence of both of her sons, I might add); a spiritual and intellectual journey of which she was and remains inordinately proud.

I used to joke, thirty years ago when I first started my job at the Newark Museum, that on any given day I was the whitest person in Newark.  I have lived my entire life as a child of WASP privilege, from the silver spoon in my mouth at birth, to my prep school and Ivy League education, to the thirty-year career as a museum curator in what is probably the whitest of all professions in America. Through Ulysses S. Grant I am a descendant of Richard Warren, a passenger on the Mayflower in 1620—although I say so with mixed feelings since I share that same line of descent with the actor Richard Gere, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the folk artist Grandma Moses—oh, and Sarah Palin.  You really can’t choose your family.

You can, however choose your heroes.

Being a dutiful St. Georgian, let’s briefly revisit today’s scripture. Isaiah gives us some great material:

“I will give you as a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth."
Thus says the LORD, to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations,
the slave of rulers, "Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves, because of the LORD…who has chosen you."

Well, that seems to work. I can see the life and work of Dr. King in that scripture.

It’s just as well that Paul’s epistle was eliminated for today in favor of an excerpt from Dr. King’s famous “I have a dream” speech, because I couldn’t get much out it anyway. John’s Gospel is much better—the well known verses about John the Baptizer being the forerunner of Jesus who will baptize with the Holy Spirit.  I can’t think of a better foreshadowing of the life of MLK Jr.—prophet, leader, martyr, Christian saint.  But, enough scripture...

I can’t pinpoint the moment in my life when Martin Luther King Jr. became a hero to me. I am fairly sure that my more mature, deeper understanding of Martin Luther King Jr. in all his human complexity—his strength as well as his human weaknesses—came to me through the writing of Taylor Branch, and through his monumental trilogy on Dr. King’s life—Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and  At Canaan’s Edge. But I know that even before reading these books, my admiration and respect for Martin Luther King Jr. had long since taken root.

I can remember, perhaps six years ago, taking my son Alex to the Lincoln Memorial on a cold rainy Thanksgiving weekend and standing with him on the bronze plaque marking the spot where MLK Jr delivered his “I have a dream” speech. For me, to stand on that spot was to visit a holy place, and I was glad that my children are of the generation for whom Dr. King’s importance is taken as a matter of course, and who are taught his life and work in school.

And I also can vividly recall an annual meeting of the Ulysses S. Grant Association held in Washington, DC, perhaps a decade ago. One of our activities that weekend was a private visit to the archives of the Library of Congress, where the curator pulled out various Civil War documents that we were allowed to hold and study closely.  At one point the curator, knowing my connection to the Civil War general, handed me a thin sheaf of typed pages in a protective Mylar sleeve.  I wondered what interest this could be until I read the first words:

“I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.”

There in my hand was the typescript of the “I have a dream” speech—the actual speech that Dr. King held in his hands as he made history that hot summer day in 1963. It might as well have been a piece of the true cross. I trembled to hold that paper in my hands.

It embarrasses me that I have no vivid childhood memory of Dr. King’s assassination in April 1968.  Surely I was aware of him, but I was thirteen, in 8th grade, and my only real memory of that spring was our class trip to Washington DC. I’m sure I was shocked, but I am also sure that Dr. King’s death didn’t affect me the way it did African American teenagers on that sad day. His death seemed distant from my reality, in spite of the headlines that would have come into our home through newspapers and television. But I can say that it was almost certainly the first time the death of a black man had ever made it onto my personal radar, or that of any of my white friends growing up in Syracuse, New York.

I asked my brother Jed what he remembered about this day—he is eight years my senior and was a junior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  He remembers that day vividly.  He was vice president of the powerful student council at UNC Chapel Hill—an ardent young Republican deeply committed to civil rights (which might sound odd, but this was the 1960s, when the idea of a moderate, or even a liberal Republican, had not yet become anathema). That very evening my brother was presiding over the student council in a heated debate over whether the university should actively market itself to black high school students in North Carolina.  Apparently, students in North Carolina’s mostly black urban high schools in the years after integration were still unaware that they actually had the right to apply to UNC, so deeply ingrained was the traditional pattern of segregation. The southern democratic members of the student council were vehemently against this marketing outreach, fearful of how it might change their alma mater. It was the young republican contingent—my brother among them—that was arguing for reaching out to these students who, till that moment, had generally been ignored by this elite southern university.

But the debate ended when the news was received of Dr. King’s assassination in Memphis. My brother suspended the meeting and these students—privileged white students—dispersed to ponder the violent death of a figure that, whatever they thought of him, mattered in their lives and had already reshaped life as it was lived in the American South.

It also shames me that I can’t give any account of how Dr. King’s life and death affected someone who was a constant presence in my life as a teenager: a woman named Vernice Curry, the black woman who cleaned our house and took care of us as a family for seventeen years—all of my childhood. If you have read, or even heard of the recent best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett, The Help, set in Jackson Mississippi in the early 1960s, you will know that its plot revolves around the complex relationships between a group of black maids and their employers. I remember reading this fascinating book last year with a sense of superiority because my family wasn’t mean like those people in Mississippi were.  I was brought up short by a close friend who asked me just how different my world in Syracuse really was from the world depicted in Jackson?  My life in Syracuse in the early 1960s was full of these black women. Virtually every family on my street had their own Vernice: I remember seeing them going home from work at the end of each day—those who didn’t live in—in their white or pink or pale blue uniforms and white nurses shoes, heading up the hill to the bus stop that would take them to the part of Syracuse I rarely saw or even thought of. It never occurred to me watching Leave it to Beaver or—even more bizarrely, The Andy Griffiths Show, set as it was in the rural South—that a crucial element of my life was missing from those supposed depictions of the world I inhabited. I can vividly remember kissing Vernice’s plump cheek every day when I got home from school. I can remember sitting with her in our family room, while she ironed my father’s shirts and we watched Let’s Make a Deal together.  I can remember her the morning after the sudden and unexpected death of my younger brother in 1969, serving coffee and breakfast to the shocked gathering of my grief-stricken family, dressed in her best crisp white uniform, silent tears rolling down her cheeks. But I have no memory of the Friday morning after Dr. King was killed, or how hard it must have been for her to come to work that day. Did I ask her how she felt?  Did I tell her I was sorry?  How I took Vernice’s presence for granted; and how little thought I gave to what Dr. King meant to her.

Ironically, if my sheltered WASP upbringing wasn’t designed to help me embrace MLK Jr. as a hero, it did prepare me in other ways. It was at my elite New England prep school, Phillips Exeter Academy, that I first had black classmates—classmates who were in many cases my seniors and thus had to be respected. I remember Paul, from Detroit, who called me “boy” and took good natured pleasure in lifting my scrawny little carcass up over his huge afro (I was small in the 10th grade and he was very tall). And I remember another black student, another Paul, slender and effeminate, who lived in my dorm and was the first gay classmate I ever knew from Exeter. He now lives in LA as a performer under the name Paul Outlaw.

And it was in the hallowed halls at Yale that I lived in close contact with Jews for the first time in my life—Yale’s housing service must have assumed my German last name was Jewish, and so all three of my freshman roommates were Jewish. It was from them that I began to learn about the vast Jewish community in the tri-state area around New York City. Growing up in Syracuse I’d never even eaten a bagel. The unwritten quotas that had kept the number of Jewish students strictly limited at the Ivy League schools into the 1960s were gone, swept away in the rapid cultural changes spearheaded by the civil rights work Dr. King. And, of course, it was also at Yale that I met Gary Berger, and became the first person in my family’s history ever to marry outside the Protestant country club, in more ways than one.

But it was also during my Ivy League education that I came to grips with what being part of a disenfranchised minority could mean. Being gay at Yale in the early 1970s meant either being invisible (a path not open to black students, or for that matter, Jewish students) or being marginalized and denied access to the sort of power networks that made Yale such a good place for the Bushes, the Buckleys, and even for the Clintons.

But I don’t want to minimize the importance Dr. King’s legacy by trying to make too much of myself as part of an oppressed minority. I was born lucky, and my life has been blessed, and unlike Dr. King I am lucky enough to have lived long enough to regret growing older—but I have also lived long enough to see the young fruit of Dr. King’s labors begin—just begin—to ripen.

Choosing to settle down in Maplewood 30 years ago was a stroke of luck.  I wanted to find Leave it to Beaver, to recapture the blinkered vision of my happy childhood in Syracuse. We arrived here, fully expecting to be tolerated at best by the people in town. Instead, Gary and I a found a town that may have looked like the 1950s, but was already starting to live out a new vision—the vision created by MLK Jr in the 1960s and fostered by folks like the people who founded the SO/Maplewood Community Coalition on Race fifteen years ago. But these towns, like this church, remain to this day a bubble of integration and acceptance of diversity in a state that is still among the most segregated in the nation.

Dr. King said on the steps of the Lincoln memorial in 1963:

I have a dream that one day... little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. [W]e will be be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands..."

My children, who are not white, have never been taunted because of their skin color, nor because they are adopted, nor because they have two fathers, nor because one of their fathers is Jewish.  They have black friends, and Asian friends, and white friends, and even gay friends—all of which would have been unimaginable in the Syracuse of my childhood.

The road to civil rights paved by MLK Jr. is not complete. The legal instruments of justice and equal civil rights for all Americans are largely in place—with some glaring exceptions. Living into those legal facts, however, is still, as we all know too well, a work in progress.  But we are on that road, and together we are moving forward.

Martin Luther King Jr. died a year before the historical beginning of the gay rights movement (or, as the conservative right calls it, the Gay Agenda). Coretta Scott King, in 2004, two years before her death, angered the more conservative side of her community when she spoke out in favor of same-sex marriage, saying “Gay and lesbian people have families, and their families should have legal protection, whether by marriage or civil union…” You can’t imagine the impact that her words had on me and my family.  Mrs. King didn’t need to say that. Her late husband’s legacy would have been safe even had she kept silent. Which is why her speaking out made such a difference.

Martin Luther King Jr.’s mission was to bring justice and equality to his people.  And his people were black people.  But his people were also all people. Jesus was the messiah for the Jews—but he was also the messiah for the gentiles. His people came first, but he embraced all people, especially the despised and the marginalized. Dr. King spent his life reaching across the gaps that divided black from white, one religion from another.

Let me close with a quote from a recent song (introduced to me by my children) called I’m Not Afraid:

I'm not afraid to take a stand
Everybody come take my hand
We'll walk this road together, through the storm
Whatever weather, cold or warm
Just let you know that, you're not alone
Holler if you feel that you've been down the same road.

If you don’t already know it, the song is by Marshall Mathers III, better known as Eminem. I don’t pretend that MLK Jr would remotely understand the anger, violence, or misogyny that routinely appear in Eminem’s lyrics. But I do know that this brilliant wordsmith has formed a bond with the community of black hip-hop and rap musicians that is unprecedented in the history of American music. Eminem, like him or not, could never have happened without the work of MLK Jr. We are all on the same road, and if we choose not to walk alone, we’ll follow Dr. King’s example and reach out for each others’ hands. The chief lesson that I’ve learned from my years in this parish, in this town, and now on the board of the Community Coalition, is that we’re all in this together. And the seed of that lesson lies in the life of MLK Jr.

As a final blessing, here’s the simplest possible prayer, one that my father said to us every night as children, as he marked our foreheads with the sign of the cross. Both my brother and I carried on this tradition as long as our children would allow us to.

God bless you, and keep you, and fill your heart with love.

What more can we ask? Amen.

© 2011 Ulysses Grant Dietz

What Would Martin Say?

By Aleeda Crawley

On my first trip abroad, I met a Hungarian woman, Marta, in Paris; she and I continued to correspond for many years, and finally I persuaded my travel buddy Michelle to take a trip with me to Budapest. Marta spoke very little English, and I spoke very little French, and no Hungarian. Over the years, her husband translated my letters for her, and Michelle and I, having misunderstood a dinner invitation joined them for our second dinner one evening. We talked about the U.S., and the flow of many East Germans into Budapest, anticipating the fall of the Berlin wall. Over dessert her husband leaned back and said, “So, you are from Harlem? As it turned out, neither Michelle I lived in Harlem at the time, and we explained that all black Americans did not live in Harlem. We still laugh about t hat evening to this day. Stereotypes make it easy to understand the world, but they make for a humorous and sometimes dangerous shorthand.

I often see bracelets and bumper stickers with the letters WWJD, standing for What Would Jesus Do? In a lot in Maplewood Village, I’ve seen a strange twist on this question: Who would Jesus bomb? My question today is yet another version: what would Martin say? Here’s what Martin said: “the most segregated hour in America is 11 a.m. on Sunday morning.” In my personal experience, I would add to that any hour in barber shops, beauty salons, country clubs, board rooms. I don’t doubt that Dr. King would see this church as progress--seeing how far our nation has come, but I think he would be shocked at how far we still have to go. Maplewood/South Orange is one of only five communities in the U.S. where integration is visible on a block-to-block basis, and we are an anomaly in the fourth-most segregated state in the union. Within a few miles of this church there are marginalized citizens who do not have access to affordable housing, quality education, or basic healthcare. Within a few feet of my voice, there are friends who are denied the right to marry, which may seem frivolous to those of us whose partners are not denied insurance benefits, hospital visitations, or public displays of affection.

Dr. King is celebrated, and rightly so, as a civil rights leader. Unfortunately, so many people have characterized his work as being on behalf of African Americans, and this is a gross oversimplification. Dr. King was a human rights leader, speaking in favor of social justice for ALL people, and in favor of peaceful conflict resolution. He spoke of economic inequality, of a debilitating poverty that ultimately will impoverish everyone. The world seems so much more complex than it did 50 years ago. Still I looked at Dr. King’s words as I was preparing my homily, and believe that had he lived 3,000 years ago, like Isaiah, he would have been called a prophet. Today’s old Testament reading, with just a few changes, might have been spoken by him: For America's sake I will not keep silent, and for Washington’s sake I will not rest, until her vindication shines out like the dawn, and her salvation like a burning torch. If he were living today, he would be considered a visionary. His ideas are as powerful and valid now as they were to his audiences in the middle of the last century.

In a 1967 rally speech in Montgomery Dr. King asked the question: Are we really making any progress? He described three attitudes leading to different answers on the question. In it I saw that these attitudes haven’t changed, whether we are discussing race, or poverty, or human rights. The extreme optimist argues we’ve come a long, way, and society has just about solved these problems. The extreme pessimist says we’ve not seen meaningful progress; we’ve created more problems than we’ve solved because our flawed human nature cannot be changed. Dr. King concluded that both these arguments had one thing in common; they both led people to do nothing to change, one side because the work is done, the other because it cannot be completed.

Clarence Clark, a fellow parishioner, once told me that it was very strange coming to NYC from the south. In the south, the demarcation was clear; you knew where you could go, and where you would not be welcome. In NYC the lines were never so clearly drawn. I never understood, until I was older, why my parents resisted my frequent requests to “come on over” to Palisades Park as they invited us to do on those radio jingles. A post-civil rights era, young Yankee girl does not always recognize the slights of discrimination. As you get older, you notice awkward silences when you enter a room and NYC taxicabs passing you by in the evening. Martin said there is a third attitude, the realist: “The realist seeks to reconcile the truths of two opposites while avoiding the extremes of both.” The two conclusions are not mutually exclusive. Martin would say the realist understands we have come a long way since Clarence’s days in NYC but we still have some way to go in Aleeda’s time.

Dr. King stated that the realist, unlike the pessimist and the optimist had the responsibility to do something about righting a wrong. He said it many different ways: ‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.’, and ‘The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.” A couple of years ago, I was asked to be on the nominating committee of an African American group I belonged to. We had chosen someone who was highly qualified for the office and was in every way just like her predecessors, with one exception: she was white. On the day of the election, another African American member not only asked the chosen candidate not to run for that office, but had the temerity to ask her to consider a lesser office. This member saw no wrong in doing this, but I was appalled, and left the group. I expressed my disappointment, asking if it was 1957 or 2007. The candidate, in her graciousness, did run for the lesser office, and was elected. I’m here to say today that racism is not dead, presidential elections notwithstanding, nor is discrimination limited to a particular group. I’ve heard it said that one type of discrimination is not the same as others. I’ve heard the bible quoted in support of some of these discriminations. Martin said: “In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” I remind all of these folks that the bible was used for hundreds of years to support the morality of slavery. Separate but equal is always more separate and less equal. Discrimination is immoral and unjust, and on this Martin was clear: ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’

We substituted today’s New Testament reading for the words of Dr. King, but part of today’s Epistle is truly appropriate for the celebration of Dr. King. 1 Corinthians says: Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. When I look out at you, I do not see black, white, Hispanic, Asian, straight, gay, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Buddhist, agnostic, atheist, Democrat, Republican, young or old. I see mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters…friends. We are different, but the humanity that links us is more powerful than all the labels we use to divide us. More powerful than nationality, race or religion. More powerful than sexual orientation, gender or class.

In times of natural disaster, we look more like the world Dr. King would have wanted. We suspend our divisions and work together on a common task . The earthquake that struck Haiti this week brought me to tears. They were the same as the tears I shed when I watched the World Trade Towers collapse, when I saw the devastation of the tsunami in Asia, when I watched people waving for help from their rooftops in New Orleans. My horror turned to anger when hearing Pat Robertson condemn the victims as receiving a punishment they deserve. How wonderfully convenient to see the world as sinner and saved. Pat Robertson does not speak for me or my God, does not reflect my kind of Christianity. I want to tell Pat Robertson that I believe Dr. King would be ashamed of him and his lack of compassion for the suffering of another human. I also believe that Martin would say: Put aside your anger. Pray for Pat Robertson. Do whatever you can to ease the suffering of the Haitian people.

This world unity soon fades, and we slowly slip back into our old –isms and phobias. I have often thought the only time when we will abandon our tendency to see differences in each other is when some powerful alien attacks Earth, determined to annihilate the human race. The alien won’t ask how you voted, what your nationality is, who you slept with or what God you worshiped. They will unfortunately possess the unity humans have abandoned.

Martin thought that Jesus’ most important lesson was "Love your enemies." He said: "There’s another reason why you should love your enemies, and that is because hate distorts the personality of the hater. We usually think of what hate does for the individual hated or the individuals hated or the groups hated. But it is even more tragic, it is even more ruinous and injurious to the individual who hates. You begin hating somebody, and you will begin to do irrational things. You can’t see straight when you hate. You can’t walk straight when you hate. You can’t stand upright. Your vision is distorted. There is nothing more tragic than to see an individual whose heart is filled with hate. If you hate your enemies, you have no way to redeem and to transform your enemies. If you love your enemies, you will discover that at the very root of love is the power of redemption."

Martin’s book Where do we Go from Here? Chaos or Community?, published posthumously, contains a powerful essay, The World House, in which he writes: “We have inherited a large house, a great "world house" in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Moslem and Hindu—a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.” He continues: “Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, too late." I hope it’s not too late for us and our children, and our children’s children. Sometimes, when hearing or seeing how creative mankind can be in its divisiveness man I fear that it is too late. I see dismissive labels and stereotypes that give people permission to denigrate, deny and defame the humanity of people seen as “other”. What sustains me is those glimmers of proof that may not be too late. My parents grew up in an America where they could not live, eat or shop where they chose; where they could not vote freely, where opportunities for higher education were limited, where their lives could be threatened for some imagined slight. My dad never lived to see an African American elected President of the United States. I could not have imagined peace in Ireland, or a post-apartheid South Africa in my lifetime. Who could have predicted that Iowa would offer their gay citizens the right to marry before we saw such legislation passed in NY or NJ? The Red Cross raised $9MM within 72 hours following the Haitian earthquake. We have, for the moment, turned swords into plowshares; the military forces of several countries are there helping the people of Haiti. The outreach of support and aid has been as rapid as the destruction. I could not have predicted it, but Dr. King wrote of such things: This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men. This often misunderstood and misinterpreted concept has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man.

We have a responsibility to love everyone, and ultimately to forsake the idea of enemies versus allies, of them versus us, of inferior versus superior, of any type of OTHER. We are one, connected not by those things which separate us, but the one thing that is within us all, no matter how scarred: our humanity. We simply cannot survive as a species if we continue to identify people as “other”. There is a Cherokee proverb: One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, "My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith." The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked, "Which wolf wins?" The old Cherokee simply replied, "The one you feed." To this I can only think Dr King would say: let the church say Amen.

© 2010 Aleeda Crawley

Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday: Yes We Can

By The Rev. Bernard W. Poppe, Rector

In the Gospel lesson this morning Jesus saw Philip and extended to him the invitation that he had already made to others, “Follow me.” Philip not only followed him, but encouraged Nathaniel to follow also. When something makes sense, we want others to share in it.

Last week we baptized three babies and in essence told them to join us in following Jesus. There is something vitally important to us here that makes us come week after week. Something of the “holy” touches us here and leaves us wanting more and that something attracts others also. It’s Jesus. Jesus has touched our lives and they will never be the same. We bless the bread and wine that becomes his mystical body and we also become his mystical body. We are encouraged to do good and to be good. We form a community that has the love of God at its center and it’s so important to us that we come back time and time again to find its healing, wonderful quality. Jesus simply said “Follow me.” It’s an invitation that has been called out loud and clear through the ages and many have responded and invited others to do so as well.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was someone who heard Jesus’ invitation. He accepted it and like Philip called others to follow. And many did. King is looked to as a modern day prophet because like the prophets of old he called a nation to account for its inconsistent justice. It’s incorrect to stand here and say that King’s message was delivered only to African Americans. His message was delivered to all people through the prism of the African American experience. People oppressed because of the color of their skin. People denied rights, attacked and killed, denied housing and jobs without cause. People whose human dignity was trod upon. King’s words held a nation accountable for actions and words that extended cruelty and words and actions that were not extended that could have helped alleviate the pain. He followed Jesus along the way and invited others to do the same. He marched and led others in the march.

Oppression of any kind diminishes the oppressor as well as the oppressed. King’s words were to the release of the captives of both sides of oppression. People who hate are captive of the destructive force of that emotion. People who hurt others damage their own souls as well as the bodies or lives of the people they hurt. Racism is an ugly disease that impacts the person of color but infects the soul of the racist. It is a fearful disease that wreaks havoc in the spirit of a person and in a people. It sees enemies where there are none, and inspires shameful actions against innocents.

Dr. King’s prophetic words gave hope to people of color that they would indeed overcome. But it also gave hope to white America that we too could overcome the hate that boiled inside and destroyed our dignity even while we were attacking the dignity of our brothers and sisters. Jesus was the incarnation of God’s love and justice. He asked us to follow him. It’s not too late to follow. Can we follow? Yes we can!

This week is an incredible week. The convergence of themes and actions hit spiritual chords of unprecedented hope even as we face unprecedented challenges. Dr. King, the check will be cashed on Tuesday. The echoes of Dr. King’s dream still reverberate down the mall in Washington as the inauguration events begin to take place. This is also the week designated as Christian Unity. What a nice dream that is also. The exhilaration felt by so many Americans, indeed the global citizenry, is impossible to describe. It certainly goes beyond our new President. The exhilaration taps into the ecstasy of being able to surpass our own fears and join in the desire to create a world that people of faith have always thought possible. Peace and Justice for all people. Opportunities on an equal basis. There are still plenty of dreams, but when one is achieved, why not hope for more.

The role of the prophet is a lonely one. It is a dangerous one. The Biblical prophets discovered rejection and sometimes death. Jesus discovered betrayal and execution. But the biblical prophets demonstrated that their voices spoke with God’s voice and God’s voice cannot be stilled. The resurrection of Jesus demonstrated beyond compare the power of God’s word made flesh. God’s word cannot be killed or stopped. It carries on through the work of other prophets. Every age has had the voice of God ring out and Dr. King had a loud clear voice that carried on that bold tradition.

The quotes that we read from several of the written works of Dr. King are timeless and stirring. They call us to reach for our higher selves. We are all capable of the goodness these words call us to. We are able to let go of that which holds us back and allow us to follow Jesus without fear. Jesus told Nathaniel that he would see “greater things than these”. “You will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the son of Man.”

Visions of heaven. Seeing the messengers of God active in the world. It’s a beautiful image. It’s something to hold onto. The world is a complex place and in no way can we minimize the problems faced by the world in terms of the economy, the warring factions, terrorist threats, lingering racism, greed and corruption in business and government, the environment. But we cannot give up hope either. To do so is to lose everything. Joy is a foothold to hope. And hope creates visions that inspire up to reach higher and achieve beyond our wildest dreams.

I listened to a talk given by a man a couple days ago. It became a personal witness of his discovery of hope. Before he discovered the hope within, he was imprisoned by despair and an anguish that would not leave him alone. He decided that he would commit suicide and had several ideas on how to do it. The method he finally chose was to go to the Manhattan Bridge and jump. He spoke of the moment he stood on the side holding the rail looking down at the water so far below on that June day five years ago. He tried to tell how it felt to let go of the rail and the free fall he experienced. The impact shattered an arm, broke his ribs, punctured his lung and broke his legs. But amazingly he surfaced. He told of a moment of clarity in which he did not want to die. He waved his remaining good arm while drifting in the East River for almost an hour before he found himself in the path of the Staten Island Ferry where he was spotted and rescued by the Coast Guard. He assured us that we didn’t need to go to that extreme to learn what he did. He described how wonderful his life is now and shudders to think how close he came to losing it, but also how devastating despair can be. No one needs to tell him how fortunate he is, and he says that he better than anyone can tell us how fortunate we are to find hope before despair can claim us. On a lighter note, he said the New York Post picked up the story and described the attempted suicide of a deranged, middle aged man. While he couldn’t quibble with the word “deranged”, he was furious at being described as “middle aged.”

Hope is what keeps us going. We cannot lose it and the prophets call us to remember the visions of heaven that are within our reach. How difficult it seems to be to hear that message that offers nothing but life’s abundance.

This historic week fulfills a promise of equality in a President whose own background unites two races. He will most certainly be judged by the content of his character, and so must we all. Skin color is no indication of the heart that beats within. Our actions even more than our words tell who we are and whose we are. Jesus calls us to “Follow Him.” The prophets are the drum majors and the stirring beat calls for a lively march. Can we do it? Yes we can. Amen.

© 2009 St. George's Episcopal Church, Maplewood, NJ