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Sermon
January 14, 2007 Let us pray. [So] I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today. I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day. This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring." And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania! Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado! Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California! But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia! Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee! Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring. And when this happens, When we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will 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 and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" Someone once said, if those words don’t move you then they better check for a pulse. He was right. Why does this speech move us? It is masterfully crafted. The cadences are powerful and the language poetic. Moreover, many of us can hear in our mind’s ear the power of Dr. King’s delivery. King’s oration matched his words. So it moves us as great oratory. It moves us also because we know the struggle for civil and human rights that preceded this speech and continued after it, including Dr. King’s assassination that prevented him from seeing his dream fully realized. But it moves us also because it eloquently touches within us something fundamental -- first as Americans and then as Christians. It is in the marrow of who we are in this country that justice, equality and freedom are to be pursued. That is our ideological heritage. Our founders declared --as King quoted:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Justice and equality and freedom for all are at the heart of this great experiment in government. Our challenge from the beginning and most certainly today is to seek with vigor and determination those goals – to make them a present reality. But the power of Dr. King’s words comes not simply because it captures our political and ethical ideals, but because it is an expression of faith -- I submit our faith at its best. Justice and equality are at the core of what faith dictates we pursue. Hear the words of the Prophet Amos [L]et justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (Amos 5: 25)
So it was that our earliest religious forbearers were reminded of the faith imperative to seek justice, righteousness and equality. And certainly it is so for those of us who are Christians. We are followers of Jesus – the one who embraced all – including the outcast and the forgotten. For him and for us the imperative of faith in God was very simple -- to love God and one’s neighbor. That is, of course, the essence of the King’s dream that “black[s] and white[s], Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants (and I know he would now add Muslims) join hands and acknowledge their shared equality and worth before God. And so Dr. King’s dream is not simply his dream but must be the dream of all who follow Jesus. We celebrate Dr. King, however, not simply because of his eloquence in capturing in words the essence of our faith and our political hopes. No, we celebrate him because he was not simply a dreamer but a doer. Struggling against the powerful and the entrenched -- armed not with bullets and bats but with faith and resolve -- he and others – black, white, Christian, Jew, famous and unknown – moved this country along the road towards equality and justice and freedom for all. They lived their faith – they embodied the prophet Micah’s admonition “to do justice, and to love kindness and to walk humbly with [their] God.” Their struggles were great and their achievements significant. Because of them we passed laws that opened voting and public accommodations to all. Our courts held that no one will get an inferior education because of separate schools based on race. Because of them, no longer do African-Americans have to travel from their homes in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, or Chicago to their family homes in the Mississippi delta or the pine forests of Georgia or the farms of Alabama for days on end without being able to stop because there is no place to sleep or open to eat for a black person on the major north-south highways and byways of America. But let us be clear there is still so much to do to bring about racial equality – indeed, equality and justice across not simply racial lines, but religious, ethnic, gender and sexual orientation ones as well. When I was living in Washington, DC a friend of mine established a foundation to try and reduce infant mortality through education and improved health care. She told me something that I suspect is still true but I hope improved. The infant mortality rate in the area within a three mile radius of this nation’s Capitol was similar to that of a third world country. A combination of children having children, poor nutrition and a lack of adequate prenatal medical care contributed to that shocking fact that within eye shot of our nation’s Capitol, babies that should have survived did not. And, of course, that area was predominately African- American. {Fallows} There is more to be done! Yes, on the legislative front but much that needs to be done on an individual level. And the steps in the future will not be easy. There are, I believe, two aspects to our challenge. The first is truly to see what binds us as human beings across lines of race, religion and ethnicity – indeed, across all lines of division. We are all children of God – we are all made in God’s image. We are born, we live and we die. We are at our best -- we are truly living in God’s image -- when we love and are loved and at our worst when we hate and are hated. We all worry about our children – about their and our own futures and we struggle with our own mortality and that of our loved ones. This is true whether one is white or black, Christian, Jew, Muslim, Hindu, or atheist. But we are also different. This is one of the points Paul was making in his words to the church at Corinth that we heard moments ago. There were some apparently in the church in Corinth, who believed that their gift of ecstatic speech was the critical sign of faith -- of a special spiritual connection with God. Paul reminded the church that God bestows many different gifts, wisdom, judgment, and perseverance – among others. And all of these gifts were necessary for the fullness and richness of the kingdom of God and for the church. Now, you may be saying, of course, that’s right – it’s obvious that we are not all the same – some of us are creative and some analytical -- some good with words some with tools. You are right but I submit it is still a very hard thing not simply to accept intellectually the reality of diversity but to celebrate it in its particular forms. And until we do, we will fall short of doing justice and achieving equality and gaining freedom for all. The difficult of accepting differences was brought home to me in a book entitled The Faith Club, which the book group here is now reading. It chronicles the discussions between three women: one a Christian, one a Jew and one a Muslim. They came together after 9-11 to write a children’s book that they hoped would reveal the connectedness of these three Abrahamic faiths. But along the way that project changed. They found that they were different; that there were things -- important things -- they did not share. For a while it looked like their project would founder on their differences. I have not finished the book but my sense is that they ultimately learned to understand and respect their differences right along side their similarities. It is not easy to understand those who are different. The process of understanding cannot be short circuited by use of stereotypes. One of the major hurdles with which the women in The Faith Club had to deal was the danger of stereotyping each other rather than truly understanding their differences and diversity. “Well of course she does that or likes that because that’s her culture “she is a ___ [fill in the blank with the appropriate pejorative stereotype]. It’s invidious. It’s done often, I suspect, not consciously so much but out of habit -- for it is easier than exploring the nuanced complexity of another. The challenge is not for us to embrace or mimic these differences per se but to accept and understand them. Our differences are real. Moreover, they do not go away with understanding or persuasion. The goal is thus not to eliminate all differences. Its not possible to make all people like us – or like them regardless of which side of the line you are on . But more importantly, as Paul reminds us differences are God given. I sat in a tiny chair and desk combination in a second grade classroom 20 years ago. I was attending a parent teacher conference with my youngest daughter’s second grade teacher – an African -American women with 35 years teaching experience. She was a gifted teacher and had by luck been the second grade teacher for my other children. So moments into the conference I blurted out that I was worried because my youngest was not yet reading at the same level in second grade as had her siblings. Well, I was not prepared for the response. Mrs. W said, “don’t you ever compare your children. They are each wonderfully different and have their own gifts. Value them for their uniqueness.” I have never forgotten that moment or those words. It was not that I was unaware of the fact that my children were different but, nonetheless, I could not help comparing them. I was guilty of not celebrating their differences but trying to make them the same. Now don’t misunderstand me, it was right to be concerned about my daughter’s reading skills but not to expect her to be the same as the others. Though difficult the same lesson applies in our wider world. In 1855 Lincoln wrote a letter to his best friend Joshua Speed. It was the time when a political party called the “Know Nothings” was achieving some electoral success. They were opposed to most people who were not white and protestant and native. Lincoln wrote
Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except Negroes.” When the Know –Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except Negroes and foreigners and Catholics.”[1]
We have made great progress. The “Know Nothings” of our day are fewer than in years past. But Dr. King’s dream is not complete. What we have ahead is hard. It is living the great commandment. Loving one’s neighbor means knowing them and understanding them and valuing them. It is very difficult to do this when some live behind the fences of gated communities and others reside in places disdainful of the suburbs and the country and those that live there. We must reach out to each other and truly learn if we are going to achieve justice and equality. Last week Gordon Forbes preached about our faith embodying real hope --one that recognizes that there will be difficulties and very rough spots on the way forward. He was right. But as we think about the way beyond the dream -- to the reality Dr. King sought -- we should remember the words of Isaiah The nations shall see your vindication and all kings your glory … You shall no more be termed Forsaken and your land shall no more be termed Desolate but you shall be called My Delight … (Isaiah 62: 2, 4)
Isaiah did not use the word “shall” – the imperative – in this passage by accident. Yes, our hope is a realistic one, but it is also a certain hope. The dream will become a reality that is the promise of our faith -- the timing is, however, up to us. Amen
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