The Sublime on Earth
First Congregational Church of Evanston
January 14, 2007 Second Sunday after Epiphany
Observing Martin Luther King’s Birthday
John 2: 1-11 & Amos 5:1-23
Rev. Dr James E. Roghair, Interim Pastor
Reading Excerpts From Martin Luther King’s April 16, 1963
“Letter from Birmingham Jail,” addressed to the White Clergy of Birmingham:
My dear fellow clergymen:
...There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.
...Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that law and order exist for the purpose of establishing justice and that when they fail in this purpose they become dangerously structured dams that block the flow of social progress.
I had hoped that the white moderate would understand that the present tension in the South is a necessary phase of the transition from an obnoxious negative peace, in which the Negro passively accepted his unjust plight, to a substantive and positive peace, in which all men will respect the dignity and worth of human personality.
...
In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.” And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul; between the sacred and the secular.
My Experience of Martin Luther King, Jr.
It was Good Friday of Holy Week 1968. I was working as a seminary intern on the campus of an African American boarding school named Boggs Academy in rural Georgia. The kids had gone home for Easter so I had no Good Friday responsibilities. My late wife and I had made arrangements to drive from South of Augusta, through South Carolina, into North Carolina, through Charlotte, and then a little further to the small college town of Concord.
We were to be the guests of Jerome Gresham, the young college president, and his wife on the campus of Barber Scotia College in Concord. Barber Scotia was a small church sponsored all-black women’s college. My late wife had worked with the Greshams for a year at a Native American boarding school in Sitka Alaska, a few years earlier.
The Greshams were a part of a rather well-to-do Atlanta African American family – friends of Coretta and Martin Luther King, Jr. They were close enough friends that they had been in each others weddings. So, from the really simple surroundings of the rural place we were living, we were headed to the royal treatment of a college president’s home, and we were looking forward to the visit.
The 5 year-old 1963 Volkswagen Bug we were driving didn’t have much in the way of luxury. But it did have a radio – remember, a lot of cars didn’t in those days! And so we were listening as we started to drive first toward Augusta. We were about to head out across South Carolina, when we heard a special news bulletin that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been gunned down at a motel in Memphis. He was there to support the town’s garbage workers.
Like it was for everyone else, it was a shock for us. Living in the Black community, in the still very segregated South, we knew of King’s significance. My late wife had attended the Poor People’s March on Washington – I had only known of such events through the news. But he was a world figure.
But our immediate dilemma was what to do about the trip we had begun – traveling to see the Greshams, King family friends. Would they still want to see us? Or would they have other things to attend to?
We did the only thing you could do in those days – no cell phones, remember? We stopped at a gas station to make a pay phone call. As I remember it, there was no outside phone at the station, so I had to go inside. But inside there were an array of white men – some working, others just loafing. And I remember so clearly the conversation they were having. One remarked how glad he was that they had killed that trouble maker. Others agreed. And there I was a Northerner, making a phone call to an African American family in another state, asking them if they still wanted us to come. It was a frightening evening!
Well, the Greshams wanted us to come, and so we continued on, across the dark landscape of a state where we knew we were strangers, on a night filled with grief and emotion.
We spent a few days with the Greshams huddling around the television to see what was going on everywhere. President Jerry had to go to his office and make innumerable phone calls – personal – family – professional. There was much for him as an African American leader to do. But we were well-treated guests.
However, there was time for me to think. It was during that weekend that the course for my life ands career were changed. I had finished the first two years of my seminary course and was taking the internship year before the final academic year. But up to that point, I wasn’t sure what was really worth investing my time in. I was a bit cynical about everything. And there were so many options!
I had enjoyed working with the seminary professors. I had wondered if I couldn’t become an expert on some little piece of Church history – learn everything that could be learned about that era, become an expert and then teach seminarians. That was what I was thinking until the week that Martin Luther King, Jr. died.
But his death shocked me into the reality of the history we were living. As I walked around Concord, NC those days, I felt: If Martin Luther King, that great human being, could give his life for other people, surely I could try to do something useful to help the poor and suffering people of the world. And so, Dr. King’s death became a watershed for me, a time of decision, a guidepost into my own call and my future life and career.
When we went back to the school where we were living, I felt like I was a new being. We attended community events in honor of Dr. King shortly after his funeral. We were two of only of a handful of whites attending huge African American community gatherings in rural Burke County Georgia.
Then when the year of internship ended and I went back to Seminary I was indeed a different person. I got involved trying to help a Nigerian student with his housing discrimination in Princeton. I got in trouble with the Seminary president for publicly challenging him about the school’s relationship to the African American students and staff workers. I did some student work in the national Presbyterian Church office of Church and Race with that old Civil Rights trooper, Maggie Kuhn as my supervisor! I even wrote a thesis called “An Educational Approach to White Racism at Princeton Seminary.” My whole life and purpose had changed.
And so, although I had never really knew Dr. King in his life, his death was a huge influence on me. The coincidence of his death with Good Friday, made me almost expect that something really unexpected would happen in three days!
Of course there was no resurrection, but Dr. King’s legacy lives and even today we hear his voice and know his messages. I don’t think my experience was that singular, although the particular circumstances of who I was, where I was, and my stage in life made it crucial for me. I’m sure that was true of many, many others, as well.
The Voice of the Prophet
One of the things that Martin Luther King did is what God’s prophets always do – he challenged people to live the life of faith. Not to live a piety isolated from the rest of life – but to let faith inform and transform the rest of life. King’s letter from Birmingham Jail was addressed to particular persons and addressed particular issues. But like the letters of St. Paul, many of which were also written from jail, the words of King seem to echo down the years and continue to speak to us.
“In the midst of blatant injustices ...” King said, “I have watched” church people “stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle ... I have heard many ministers say: ‘Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern.’ And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul; between the sacred and the secular.”
And so it is that Jesus – who spent so much of his time caring for the sick, and feeding the hungry – who preached first of all good news to the poor – who gave sight to the blind and release of the captives – this Jesus gets honored in worship that seems primarily geared to making the well more comfortable. Not to preaching the good news to the suffering that Jesus did.
And so churches – liberal or conservative – don’t particularly want to get involved in the things that make for peace and justice in the world. We would rather concentrate on the minutia and ignore the big things. But there are still mighty struggles going on in the world. Can the church go on and do its own thing? Or will it be a part of what makes a difference?
Bringing Faith into Life – Jesus
Bringing faith and theology out of the spiritual stratosphere and into ordinary life – the life where poor people suffer and where privileged people take advantage of them – that’s what Martin was all about. When we look at the Scriptures we find Martin’s theme was Jesus’ theme first.
It may seem a bit of a stretch – but I propose that the story of Jesus at the marriage in Cana of Galilee serves to effectively tie the ethereal and the real to one another in the Gospel of John.
We are all familiar with the way the Gospel John begins. We read in Christmas Eve candlelight services – that great Johanine prologue. It begins not with the birth of Jesus in a manger, but begins out in the netherworld somewhere: In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. Everything in creation that was made, was made through the Word of God – and nothing was made without the Word, and on and on it goes – talking about Light and Darkness. In those few paragraphs Jesus is tied to the eternity.
Immediately after that, and still in the first chapter, of the Gospel of John we hear about John the Baptizer and how he had to confirm that he was not the Messiah, but instead he recognized who Jesus was – not as his long lost cousin. But Jesus was the Lamb of God and the one who was to take away the sins of the world. And Jesus is Baptized by John, and then begins to gather disciples.
So when Chapter 2 begins, then, “On the third day, there was a wedding in Cana of Galilee...,” We are brought down out of the stratosphere and into the reality of small town community life. But there are some subtleties that we could easily miss. The third day doesn’t sound so very important as related to the wedding, except that when you read the mention of the other days in the first chapter and add them up, we find out that the wedding was really the 7th day mentioned. That is surely significant. If Jesus is being tied to creation in the opening paragraphs, the mention of 7 days refer to the days of God’s Creation. And the wedding at Cana is being tied to the day of Sabbath – the gift of God to the people – the day of rest and God’s special blessing.
The Gospel of John is very carefully constructed to tie Jesus to that otherworldly sphere of Creation, and then to tie Jesus specifically to that gift in its most earthy incarnation. Jesus is at a wedding feast, among the poor of the land. And people were so hungry and thirsty that they came from far and wide and the provisions gave out. And there Jesus is. His first act in this Gospel is to be the blessing of God to his own people. The Gospel of John, which begins in the Stratosphere, moves so quickly into the world of human need.
Bringing Faith to Life – Martin
That movement is familiar to us when we tell the story of Martin Luther King, Jr., too. He was a national, even an international figure, but when he spoke, he didn’t wasn’t distant from the problems of his people. He spoke with his body – going to jail, fighting for the right for poor folks to ride the bus or to stay in a motel or to vote in an election. He fought for children to go to decent schools. He marched with garbage workers.
For Martin, the eternal Word of God the same Word that was present at Creation and the same Word that was present at the wedding of Cana in Galilee was present to the needs of those very poor people for whom he gave his life.
Jesus and Martin – bridging the gap between stratosphere of religion – the totally spiritual and ethereal realm where it is easy for us to imagine God dwelling – and the earthly life where poor people struggle to live lives of hope and meaning. Jesus does it first with water made wine. Jesus did it over and over again throughout his ministry – feeding the hungry. The story of the feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle story told in all 4 gospels and it is told 5 times!
Martin bridged that gap over and over again as well. But, Martin complains “... I have watched ...churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul; between the sacred and the secular.”
The Challenge to the Church Today
What are Jesus and Martin challenging the church to today? How are we to speak out for peace? How are we to proclaim justice, as the gap between the rich and poor grows ever wider – not only in our community and our nation, but in the whole world. How are we to speak for the health of the earth as the actions of people – and that includes us – are destroying the earth we live on? What is the challenge of Jesus and Martin to First Congregational Church – on this second Sunday in January 2007, but also into the years that lie ahead?
Martin Speaks of his Death
We all remember now, that a couple of months before King was assassinated (actually it was February 4, 1968) Martin spoke to his congregation at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. And King gave what actually became a part of his own eulogy. The videotaped image has been played over and over since.
In that sermon King summed up what he thought were the most important aspects of his own life and ministry. On this week that we remember King, his words might be a challenge to our own lives and our life together to be clear about what is really important in our own lives.
Martin said: “Every now and then I think about my own death, and I think about my own funeral ... I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long ... Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize ... Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards ... I’d like somebody to mention that day, that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried give his life serving others. I’d like somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody...
“Say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. That I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter, I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious thing of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind.”
Amen.
(Quotations in this sermon are from the Commemorative issue of Visions Magazine:The Magazine of Afro-American Culture)
Last Updated: Wednesday, February 6, 2008