Beyond the Dream:

In honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

A sermon offered at the Unitarian Universalist Church

By Rev. Hilary Landau Krivchenia

January 19, 2003

Readings

From Martin Luther King's  Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech December 10, 1964 --Oslo, Norway

I accept the Nobel Prize for Peace at a moment when twenty-two million Negroes of the United States of America are engaged in a creative battle, with determination and a majestic scorn for risk and danger, to end the long night of racial injustice.  I am mindful that only yesterday in Birmingham, our children, crying out for brotherhood, were answered with fire hoses, snarling dogs and even death. Only yesterday in Philadelphia, Mississippi, young people seeing to secure the right to vote were brutalized and murdered.  Only yesterday more than 40 houses of worship in the State of Mississippi alone were bombed or burned because they offered a sanctuary to those who would not accept segregation. I am mindful that grinding poverty afflicts my people and chains them to the lowest rung of the economic ladder.

We must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.  The tortuous road which has led from Montgomery to Oslo bears witness to this truth. This is a road over which millions of Negroes are travelling to find a new sense of dignity.

I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history. I refuse to accept the idea that the "isness" of man's present nature makes him morally incapable of reaching up for the eternal "oughtness" that forever confronts him.  I have the audacity to believe that people everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up.  This faith can give us courage to face the uncertainties of the future. It will give our tired feet strength as we continue our forward stride toward the city of freedom. When our days become dreary with low-hovering clouds and our nights darker than a thousand midnights, we will know that we are living in the creative turmoil of a genuine civilization struggling to be born. I come to Oslo as a trustee. I accept this prize on behalf of all who love peace and brotherhood.  Every time I take a flight, I am mindful of the many people who make a successful journey possible -- the known pilots and the unknown ground crew. So you honor the dedicated pilots of our struggle … so you honor the ground crew without whose labor and sacrifices the flights to freedom could never have left the earth.  Most of these people will never make the headlines.  Yet when years have past and the blazing light of truth is focused on this age -- men and women will know and children will be taught that we have a finer land, a better people, a more noble civilization -- because these humble children of God were willing to suffer for righteousness' sake.

Sharon Welch – from Sweet Dreams in America Published 2000
Given the persistence of injustice, given the ongoing challenges of social inequality, many people question our comforting myths of cultural progress, political reform, and institutional change.  The uneven march to racial justice is not unique.  In work for equality between women and men, in trying to create a world without the threat of nuclear war, there are gains and losses, achievements followed by new challenges and threats.  How do we respond to the persistence of injustice?  I search for categories that combine the seemingly incompatible – mutually exclusive and yet simultaneous longings for justice, rage at suffering, and forthright recognition of our own shortsightedness, complicity, and limits.  We face the loss of wonderful myths – of being more than ourselves and, in not hiding from that loss, something does emerge – wistful and slight.

Sermon

Tomorrow is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day – the American National Holiday commemorating the life and work of the civil rights hero.  Recently, though, I became irritated – I had picked up the biography to share with the kids and from one page to another it read.

“Martin went wherever people needed help.  In April 1968, he went to Memphis, Tennessee. 

On his second day there, he was shot.  He died.”

I get tired of it – Amelia Earhart – heroic pilot – she died in flight, Bobby Kennedy – justice worker – killed in campaign – Malcolm X – Died, Abraham Lincoln.  Is there some secret desire to frighten us into inaction?  I don’t want to forget the people who have struggled and died – their lives and even their deaths made a difference -- there is no knowing whether the voting rights acts would have been passed without the deaths of white youngsters – the deaths of countless Black youth had moved no one in power.  Still, I also want to hear, I want to speak, about the ones who lived.  Yes, there is a message – this work of world saving can cost you everything.  Yet, there are countless people who lived and flourished, so many people whose hearts and bodies were on the line.  We must -- as Sharon Welch said – face the persistence of injustice and the loss of wonderful myths.  Yet, if we dwell too much on those who die – no matter their grandeur, if we celebrate overmuch our martyrs – we establish new idols and run two other significant risks – the risk of choosing out of fear to live a seemingly safer life and the risk of living in the past.  The address of life is in the present.  Today is Sunday.

We are gathered as people with a hunger for life – with fears and longings we can hardly put into words.  This time is meant to nourish – not to waste – therefore, let us go to the heart of things – to the heart of life and the life of the heart.  Politics is where life and the heart meet.  Our society is a portrait of the heart – a moral profile of us as a people – a whole people.  Therefore, religion will never stay out of politics – nor politics out of religion.  In church – by gathering -- we set aside time to clarify our hearts and minds – but it will not be our hearts and minds by which history will judge us – it will be by our actions.

Martin Luther King said:  “No lie can live forever.  The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends toward justice”  I respond, it may bend toward justice – but it is we who bend it and our hands that determine how far and how fast.

And sometimes it seems to swing back – into the past.  There are times when today looks like it could be 1966.  There has been too much comfort for middle class America until the last couple of years, too much advance, too many new bills granting new rights to citizens and, it is time to face and finish the work of making justice here.  And, somehow, war, is, in a timely fashion, beginning to deflect the national attention.  The nation is gearing up for war and demands for justice here at home are considered – untimely and unpatriotic.  People traveled to Washington DC, hundreds of thousands from what I have read, gathered in their local communities, speaking out, protesting the War on Iraq – a war which has been quietly waged for some time now.    In the last week, our president came out in opposition to the affirmative action admissions program at the University of Michigan.  I could tell it was not 1966, as Martin Jischke came out in support of Michigan and of diversity, as did many others.  Still, we could be doing time travel.  But I know we don’t want to go back in time.  I remember when I was fifteen or sixteen, driving south with my father to meet his family in Savannah – his uncles and cousins, for the first time.  It would have been about 1969 or 70 and the south still held for me this terrible mystique of fear.  I felt scared as a Jewish girl, a liberal Yankee with Pennsylvania plates.  Where did that fear come from – maybe some of it rolled off my Dad - who knows.  One day, as we drove past some outlet, I saw a towel waving in the hot breeze – we were headed for Wilmington, North Carolina first.  And there was this giant beach towel with the confederate flag on it and the words “The South will rise again.”  I don’t want to live in that past.  Last week – we heard the statistics about abortions and we may struggle with abortion – but we never want ourselves, our wives, or our daughters dying in back alleys.  We don’t want to find our nation divided again by foreign policy.  We don’t want to watch more violence between Americans erupt in our streets.  Women still make less for every dollar that men make – but we don’t want to go any further back in time.  We don’t need to go back to see the injustice in prisons, or the discrepancy between incomes for black and white families.  We don’t really want our young people sent overseas to fight for ambiguous gains.  We don’t want to go back in time.  It’s tempting to think that the answers are there – but our deepest creativity is in learning from the past yet moving in the present.

While memory is important, it must remain memory – nostalgia is a trap.  If we live in the past, carrying the burdens of the past we will be absent for the people who need us to carry on now.  And if we wait for the right moment in the future our moment in history will have passed us by and the new present will be the creation of someone else’s choices. 

A couple of weeks ago, I wonder how many of you might also have caught this, there was a dialogue on the program NOW between Bill Moyers and long time racial justice activist, playwright, actor, and director, Ossie Davis.  Davis was born in 1917, two years before my father – also in Georgia – though, as a Jewish kid and a black kid in the deep South, they would have had different experiences.  Davis has been a marcher, fundraiser, and an artist who has worked tirelessly for justice.  He has even written books for children and youth to teach the history of black people in America.  He was the MC for the 1963 march on Washington and he gave eulogies at the funerals of both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.

Davis and Moyers looked at the nostalgia that Senator Trent Lott expressed for 1948, when Strom Thurmond ran for president on a platform of segregation, and a few people really did hope the Old South would rise again.  Lott said: “when Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him.  We're proud of it…. if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years, either.”  These Problems.  Problems like Affirmative action, perhaps?  These problems that we have faced as a nation have been minimal in comparison with the lives of marginalization and terrorism that have been the lives of African Americans.  Visiting Memphis and Birmingham last year I was reminded.  I walked the path through Kelly Ingram Park – a life size series of metal sculptures that portray the firehoses, jailhouses, police dogs – the risks taken by thousands of quiet, ordinary citizens insisting on their rights in the land of the free.  The sculptures were terrifying – the reality unthinkable.  It came more alive for me while reading Walking with the Wind by Congressman John Lewis of Georgia – my congressman for many years.  It brought alive the terror and courage of that time.  In spite of that systematic terrorism the Civil Rights movement formed – and because of it.  The courage that arose for Civil rights was in the face of danger.  That is, in part, why we so admire Martin Luther King, Jr. because he was willing to risk and to give all for a dream of justice.  To be more than he was, and to call people to be more than they were.

Bill Moyers said to Ossie Davis, “You said to me a couple of weeks ago, maybe the problem is we have told the old story one time too many.”  Davis replied, “It is true. You know, we have the tendency, when we do something of value, to stop there and keep celebrating it, going around and around. And we keep playing Martin Luther King's 1963 speech. And it doesn't occur to us that maybe the most important speech Martin Luther King ever made was the one he never made, because he died before he got to Washington that second time. We can't stay forever where that left us. That put us on a platform, but the platform is no place for an unending picnic.”

An unending picnic.  In part, that’s what the eighties looked like – even the nineties.  Yes, many did keep working – but it was hard to find the center – what Davis called the moral assignment.  It was hard to put our hands around that moral assignment – there were so many issues and such highly visible suffering and, at the same time, there was so much mindless consumerism -- emptiness consuming emptiness.  We were not drifting too far backward – but somehow not moving far forward either.

President Johnson called for a conference in 1966 after the passage of the Voting Rights Act – the conference was called “To Fulfill these Rights.”  John Lewis – then chairman of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee – and a high profile activist in the south – was invited to attend.  He wrote: “It has always been my position that in any situation where people are prepared to talk about problems, to negotiate, to try to work out solutions, it is imperative to listen, to at least hear what they have to say.  That is an essential part of the philosophy of non-violence – that you are open to receive as to deliver, that you are willing and able to keep all possible doors open.”  When Lewis arrived in Washington it turned out not to be about civil rights – but about upcoming seats in congress that the democratic party wanted the black vote for.  And, indirectly, about the Vietnam war, which was escalating.  Lewis was disheartened -- yet he returned home and kept working.  He was opposed to the war and he returned to his speaking that same year, saying: “I think there’s a myth, some type of fever or something, that’s running wild on the American scene that gives us the idea that we are so right and that we are so powerful that we should emerge as the keeper of the world’s record as the big cop.  We are more and more going to different places around the world and we are going in the name of peace, and to stop the spread of communism.  We are going to the Congo, the Dominican Republic, and Vietnam, and after Vietnam no doubt we’ll be going someplace else, saying this is part of a peace keeping effort.”  I’d say he had a pretty good Crystal Ball.  I haven’t always agreed with him.  But when the City of Atlanta and former President Jimmy Carter wanted to run a road through the Great Park and a series of in town neighborhoods, including mine – Lewis stood with the residents against the road.

            John Lewis was fifteen the year that I was born.  He had a thirst for learning.  He was living in Troy, Alabama on a dirt farm, share-cropping cotton and raising chickens – which he could never seem to eat once he got to know them.  One Sunday morning he was listening to the radio.  You see, Church – for John and his family -- was a luxury.  It happened once or twice a month – they had to travel too far, their minister lived in Montgomery, and they could hardly spare the hours for church, seeing friends, and for family visiting.  So often – and this is one of those stories that people might tire of… he had church with his chickens – offering them passages of the Bible.  He liked it better than real church anyway – where he said “I was tired of the preacher talking about an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, and how the soul would be saved by that pie in the sky after you die.”  That morning, when he was fifteen, the radio was tuned to an Atlanta station and he finally heard a minister preaching the social gospel – the gospel of golden slippers on the streets of this world, of the plagues and curses in this time, of salvation from suffering in this life.  The young preacher seemed to speak directly to Lewis – and for him.  His life was changed by that preacher, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. that morning.  When he left for college he wanted to preach the social gospel, too, and became involved in the waves of activism.  Although he wanted to be the first black student admitted to nearby Troy State University and met with Dr King to discuss the legal and political profile of that project, his parents asked him not to take up that cause – for fear of reprisals upon their farm and their lives – that was an off the book way to determine enrollment based on race.  So he let go – but he studied with James Lawson the teachings of Thoreau, Gandhi, and the principles of non-violence.  He was arrested forty times in the service of the movement.  When he applied for Conscientious Objector Status he was told that he was unfit to serve because of his arrest record.  He walked the Edmund Pettus Bridge in 1963, once to the middle and once all the way from Selma to Montgomery.  He, too, spoke in DC in 1963 on that day we revisit and revisit.  “nonviolently…we shall fragment the south and put the pieces back together in the image of democracy.  Wake up America!”

I do not think that his words of awakening were intentionally in counter balance to those of the leader he loved so much.  When I chose to call this sermon – beyond the dream – it was because some myths can induce a wishful sleep.  As the US experienced the hate-filled devastation of September 11, in many ways we were joining the countless numbers of Americans, black, Gay, and so many Americans of color, and of people around the world who have been systematically hated and attacked.  People who have been far more helpless and even more innocent than we.  Yet there is no soul who deserves to experience such terror – no soul.  Hard as that is to imagine – when we are enraged – even at bigots, killers, and dictators – there is no soul who deserves terror.  It teaches nothing but more terror, instills nothing but terror.

            Trent Lott’s remarks swiftly prompted John Lewis to say; “The American community has come too far to go back to an era when racist statements and actions are marginalized, excused and brushed under the rug.  We cannot allow the climate of racism to return and reverse the clock on human progress, racial understanding and equal justice for all.”  Yet, he was also swift to speak after Senator Lott called and talked with him.  December 16 he stated: “I spoke with Sen. Lott today and we had a productive conversation.  I accept his apology.  The ability to forgive, to heal and come together for the common good is very much consistent with the philosophy of non-violence of the Civil Rights Movement.  Somehow and in some way we have to believe that every individual has the ability, capacity and desire to change and to grow.” 

            He may be proven wrong – I’m somewhat skeptical of Lott – yet I know that the only path is forward along the way of love and of good.  I know it – by the witness of history – bleak though history is.  I know it – by the principles we affirm.  I know it as an article of faith.  This is where religion and politics come together.  It is not faith in a creed or an idea but in a power that can be perceived – the power of goodness, courage, and love.  I can’t know but I suspect that many times as we come here we hope to catch some piece of that power from one another – to cease dreaming and to awaken into that audacious power.  It is not just a power that belongs to martyrs.  In order to move off that platform – to move on from the dream into the work of making justice – we need a deep creative force.  A force that empowers us to face the uncertainties of the future – not seeing the outcome or having any guarantee.  “When you pray, move your feet.”  I thank Lewis for that African proverb.  Move your feet!  That is where religion and life intersect.  This time together is for drawing up strength – gathering it up so that we can move forward and risk.  The speech, the speeches, that King never made is being written every day – in countless minds.  Somehow we must pack up the picnic and find that precious power and joy while moving our feet – while making the world anew.