"In Memoriam - Martin Luther King, Jr."
A modern Moses is dead. Martin Luther King's death is a cause of profound grief for you and me as it is for millions around the world.
The past year has been a frightening one in too many respects; violence at home and aboard. Tragedy in the world and tragedy in families we know. Pain continues in the ghetto and even here. At this very moment some people who sit in this place are going through personal ordeals, enough to choke love and feed it to fear.
And now, another chapter in American violence is upon us to our woe. This Sunday is a time of symbolic drama in the Christian community—Palm Sunday. According to the story, Jesus, the anointed one, entered Jerusalem at this season to face his crucifixion.
Now a modern saint and our saints are rugged people these days. Our saint has died at the hands of sickness, of racism and hatred, has died in a revolution for a better humanity, attempting nonviolently to bring about a fairer, more loving world.
Our age has lost a prophet.
Our time mourns the passing of a living symbol of peace. Our brother has been murdered.
This tragedy brings to mind an odd sidelight of history. Centuries ago the dead Alexander the Great was temporarily laid to rest following his death in the ancient capital of Egypt, Memphis, before being buried, finally, in his own city.
Greek fought against Greek in rivalries over the body of Alexander. They swung to violence and armed warfare because a dead leader lay in Memphis. It would be silly to draw any parallels from this merely curious bit of history. Alexander was a man of war, Dr. King a man of peace.
I could get lost straining for analogies. But they are not important. The one hope I would venture to hold out, is that, finally, out of Dr. King’s death and the suffering of so many of our nation’s people, a Hellenistic Age may follow, as such as an age did follow Alexander’s resting in ancient Memphis.
A hope that a new order will come peacefully as, clearly, now there can be no return to the old order.
The vital question after Alexander’s death was what direction a new rule would take for humanity. That is the question now. What will our leadership do, all of it? What will we as a people do to move in a new and nonviolent and constructive direction?
It cannot be; it must not be too late.
Thirteen or fourteen years ago, I first heard the young Martin Luther King speak to a large crowd at the Negro College, Virginia Union University in Richmond, Virginia.
I do not remember what he said that day in Richmond. But I do remember Martin Luther King often; something about his voice, something about his seriousness, something about his bearing, something about his commitment, and something about his fervor for righteousness electrified those who heard him, myself included.
As time went by a gap appeared between his theology and my own. Some of the words we use become different. But always, on television or the radio or in person, he remained for me an inspiring person. He was indeed a modern Moses to his people, a modern prophet to all people.
Just a few years back I sat on the grass and listened to that powerful voice from that man as it swept down the water before the reflecting pool from the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington.
There are times when he could stir you to tears, not merely because his voice was charismatic, but because his cause was just.
I sat up front in Brown’s Chapel in Selma, Alabama, after the death of our minister, Jim Reeb, and of Jimmy Lee Jackson, a white man and a Black man, both of whom had been murdered because they stood for integration and justice. I sat there in Brown’s Chapel and heard King speak with a natural eloquence that never seemed to leave him, and to hear him repeat as he so often did, the words from Amos:
“Let judgment run down as waters And righteousness as a mighty stream.”
Dr. King was a man ever close to his Bible, to his tradition, to what he loved, ever aware of his prophetic purpose, even aware of his destiny, it would seem.
He knew in those days in Selma as he knew every day since, that a violent death could come to him yet he lived and preached nonviolence. Hopefully, the nation will follow his example rather than that of his assassin, because the nation, because all of the people must do so, if we are not to all emerge from nihilistic cruelty, repressed rage and madness, the burning of larger portions of our nation and more of them, the threatening of our civilization.
Lawlessness cannot be allowed. Massive retaliation cannot be condoned. What whites must do is make amends for racism, stop it now, and burn, all races, burn and purge the prejudice from our hearts.
We in suburbia, we who are in sympathy with the recognition of the rights and dignity of all men, we too, even we, have traces of prejudice buried so deep we have not known they were there. The time has come when basic attitudes have to change, when the color black or lack of color, still black, is to be seen as worthy, just as white has been seen that way.
The time is here to realize that blackness is not a kind of dark or evil, not “fearful and mean” any more than whiteness is a kind of purity or nobility or that it is bathed in light.
Even our use of the English language has built “prejudging” into our very thought patterns, and the time has come, by undreamed of effort, to break the language and our feelings about race, break the thought and language so we do not break ourselves and each other. If we succeed in recognizing the beauty and legitimacy of blackness, then we can forget it in time, along with whiteness, and color blindness shall someday become a great and real virtue and accomplishment of the mind.
Today some people would call for peace but do nothing about it. And today some whites would not have peace and today some Blacks no longer sing, “Black and white together, we shall overcome.” Rather, some sing, “We shall overrun!”
And what are we to do? Listen, then work quietly and sanely, and act for mankind. Tonight at the forum in this church, we can listen to a wonderfully articulate Black man, Dick Trayler, not one against us, but one of us. Come and hear Dick who is a member of the Steering Committee of the Black Caucus of Unitarian Universalist, open our ears and hear what he is trying to say to us. To hear him does not mean we will or will have to back away from democracy. To hear him out is to believe in democracy. We are not going to accept violence, any violence, as justified.
Dick Trayler is not, I think, advocating violence. We can hear him and we can support Black identity and consciousness and equality until equality comes so naturally we do not have to think consciously about it anymore. And we can keep our relationships loving ones, caring ones, with our friends of all races and religions, we can and we must, even if all hell breaks loose.
Martin Luther King did that, and someone might complain, “Look what it got him!”
Yet, out of the present crisis he may be a part of what saves us all. Like an Isaiah whose lips had been touched with the red hot stone of righteousness. Like that Isaiah who said to his God, “Here, Lord, here I am. Send me….”
He went to the people, his people, all people of this land, of this earth, with a plea for the right, and a prayer for a humane society, a caring humanity.
He went saying,” I have a dream,” and the dream he had is truly the American Dream before it became ill and lay down on death’s bed, a dream of freedom and justice for all. He came with more than stirring words upon his lips. He came with programs in education, employment, rights, guaranteed income, good housing for his people, for all people. He had a dream and now we must be among those who help make that dream come true.
Last year Dr. King wrote a book called Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community?” In his memory, I wish to read for a very few minutes, some excerpts from that book. He said,
“Freedom is not won by a passive acceptance of suffering. Freedom is won by a struggle against suffering. By this measure, Negroes have not yet paid the full price for freedom. And whites have not yet faced the full cost of justice.”
And I say we may hope to God and all the powers that be, that the price be one that hits us in our tax pocketbook and in our laws and in our attitudes and not one that tears and burns human flesh and human homes.
Dr. King said, “It is understandable that the white community should fear the outbreak of riots. They are indefensible as weapons of struggle, and Negroes must sympathize with whites who feel menaced by them. Indeed, Negroes are themselves no less menaced, and those living in the ghetto always suffer most directly from the destructive turbulence of a riot. Yet the average white person also has a responsibility. He has to resist the impulse to seize upon the rioter as the exclusive villain. He has to rise up with indignation against his own municipal, state and national governments to demand that the necessary reforms be instituted which alone will protect him. If he reserves his resentment only for the Negro, he will be the victim by allowing those who have the greatest culpability to evade responsibility.”
And to his Black brothers, specifically, Martin Luther King had this to say:
“I am concerned that Negroes achieve full status as citizens and as human beings here in the United States. But I am also concerned about our moral uprightness and the health of our souls. Therefore, I must oppose any attempt to gain our freedom by the methods of malice, hate, and violence that have characterized our oppressors. Hate is just as injurious to the hater as it is to the hated. Like an unchecked cancer, hate corrodes the personality and eats away its vital unity. Many of our inner conflicts are rooted in hate. This is why the psychiatrists say, Love or perish.
I have seen hate expressed in the countenances of too many Mississippi and Alabama sheriffs to advise the Negro to sink to this miserable level. Hate is too great a burden but desegregation alone is not enough. Desegregation will break down the legal barriers and bring men together physically, but something must touch the hearts and souls of men so that they will come together spiritually because it is natural and right. In the final analysis the white man cannot ignore the Negro’s problem, because he is a part of the Negro and the Negro is a part of him. The Negro’s agony diminishes the white man, and the Negro’s salvation enlarges the white man.
What is needed today on the part of white America is a committed altruism which recognizes this truth. The altruism is more than the capacity to pity; it is the capacity to empathize. Pity is feeling sorry for someone; empathy is feeling sorry with someone. Empathy is fellow feeling for the person in need, his pain, agony, and burdens.
I doubt if the problems of our teeming ghettos will have a great chance to be solved until the white majority, through genuine empathy, comes to feel the ache and anguish of the Negro’s daily life.
One of the great liabilities of history is that all too many people fail to remain awake through great periods of social change. Every society has its protectors of the status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions. But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake, to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant, and to face the challenge of change. The large house in which we live demands that we transform the worldwide neighborhood into a worldwide brotherhood. Together we must learn to live as brothers or together we will be forced to perish as fools.
The decline and fall of civilizations, according to Toynbee, was not caused by external invasions but by internal decay. They failed to respond creatively to the challenges impinging upon them. If western civilization does not now respond constructively to the challenge to banish racism, some future historian will have to say that a great civilization died because it lacked the soul and commitment to make justice a reality for all men.
Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the American revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when ‘every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low and the crooked shall be made straight and tough places plain.”
Then, this last message from Dr. King from the end of his book where, again, he spoke against hatred, saying:
“We can no longer afford to worship a God of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever rising tides of hate. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals who pursued this self-defeating path of hate.
As Arnold Toynbee once said in a speech, ‘Love the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore, the first hope in our inventory must the hope that love is going to have the last word.’
We are now faced with the fact that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history there is such a thing as being too late.
Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked and dejected with a lost opportunity. The ‘tide in the affairs of men’ does not remain at the flood; it ebbs.
We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is deaf to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written in the pathetic words, ‘too late.’
There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. ‘The moving finger writes and having writ moves on.’ We still have a choice today, non-violent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.
This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and community.”
Last chance!
The night before he was killed, Martin Luther King, Jr. told his audience he was not afraid. He knew there was danger. But he was not going to be concerned about that. “It does not matter to me now,” he said, “because we’ve been to the mountaintop.”
His God had allowed him to go to the mountain, like a modern Moses, and he looked over that mountain and he saw the Promised Land. As if he knew what was coming, King said to his people, “I may not reach the Promised Land. I may not get there with you but I have seen it and you will reach it.”
Now the darkness has closed in. As Martin Buber said, “No way can he be pointed to in the desert night.”
But the dawn comes up. We are running out of time and looking to our leaders to solve the great problems.
Yet some leadership, too much of it, sits in the night hesitating to bring all of the people down this side of the mountain. The ways are steep but the time of fear must be passed through. Souls are in readiness. The dawn is breaking. The path is there to follow if we will pay the cost of justice.
King is dead. Let us not be a part of the insanity or the indifference that killed him. We honor him and cherish his memory and pray for the courage and the strength and the humanity to make his nonviolent way work.
Let’s us pray,
Martin Buber’s opening words from Foreword of For the Sake of Heaven:
In this hour of history the crucial thing is to recognize some external reality and out of its depth to be able to face the reality of the present. No way can be pointed to in this desert night. One’s purpose must be to help men of today to stand fast with their soul in readiness, until the dawn breaks, and a path becomes visible where none suspected it.
Amen.
