“Hands up! Don’t
shoot!” “I can’t breathe.” “Black lives matter.”
For the past
several months—beginning with the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson,
Missouri and culminating with the murders of two police officers in New York,
American clergy have talked a good deal about race relations at the present
moment and in the history of our nation.
In the past several weeks, the ISIS beheadings, the horrific stories of
Islamist violence in France, and a thwarted terror plot in Belgium have
overtaken our public discourse, and some have questioned why we preachers have
not used our pulpits to condemn terrorism as strongly as we do gun violence or
racial profiling in our own land.
Tomorrow is Martin
Luther King Day, and as a response to those queries, I’d like to point us to a
new book by TV host and author Tavis Smiley.
It’s called Death of a King,
and it chronicles the last year of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s life. Dr. King was
assassinated almost fifty years ago now, and time has burnished our memories of
his life. We have softened and
domesticated him. But, as Smiley tells
us, on April 4, 1967—a year to the day before his death—Martin Luther King, Jr.
went to The Riverside Church in New York and gave a speech called “Beyond
Vietnam: A Time to Break the
Silence”. That was a controversial
speech, and in his new book, Death of a
King, Tavis Smiley describes its impact on the last year of King’s
life. In Smiley’s words,
In his speech King calls the US “the greatest purveyor of violence in the
world today”. From that day April 4,
1967 to April 4, 1968, King becomes persona non grata in this country. Everyone turns against him.
We have forgotten that when Martin Luther King
Jr. died he was no longer welcome at the White House. The board of his own organization, the
Southern Christian Leadership Conference, had censured him for speaking out
against the war. So had the leaders of
the NAACP and the Urban League. As Tavis
Smiley tells it,
In the last year of his life [King is] talking about the triple threat
that’s going to destroy our democracy: racism, poverty, and militarism.
When he died, the last Harris Poll said that ¾ of Americans had turned against
him. 57% of blacks had turned against him. He dies not having any idea of
the holiday and the monument and the postage stamp. [Tavis Smiley, Book TV Interview C-SPAN 2014 Book Expo]
“Hands up! Don’t shoot!” “I can’t
breathe.” “Black lives matter.”
Why do preachers
persist in talking about violence on American streets and cities rather than
about ISIS beheadings or the Charlie Hebdo killings? We do so because the nature of prophecy has
always been about God’s critical judgment of oneself and one’s own community.
It is easy to condemn violence done by others. It is harder to look at violence
done on one’s own behalf. The killing of
innocent people by terrorists is always a moral outrage. But it is not my moral
outrage to address. The killing of
innocent people in my own country is also a moral outrage, and it is our
collective moral outrage to address. To
paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, the proper response to a moral imperative is
not “thou shalt” but rather “I ought”.
If you think I’m
playing casuistic games here, turn back to our Old Testament reading for this
morning. In the third chapter of the
first book of Samuel we hear the familiar story of the call of Samuel to be a
prophet [1 Samuel 3: 1-20]. This is a passage often read at ordinations: the young boy Samuel, serving in the house of
Eli, hears a voice calling him and goes to the old man to respond. Eli, of course, had not been calling the boy,
and so over the course of the story we discover that the voice calling Samuel
was in fact God’s voice. Samuel returns
and prepares to hear. We usually end the reading with Samuel’s response to God,
“Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” [1 Samuel 3:9]
Today, though, we
hear the rest of the passage, the part normally left out of ordination
liturgies. What we hear is a word of judgment delivered against the very
household in which Samuel serves:
On that day I will fulfill against
Eli all that I have spoken concerning his house, from beginning to end. For I
have told him that I am about to punish his house for ever, for the iniquity
that he knew, because his sons were blaspheming God, and he did not restrain
them. [1 Samuel 3: 12-13]
Now here’s the
interesting part: you can imagine how
Samuel feels, having to go back to old Eli and tell him God’s message of
judgment. To his credit, Eli wants to
hear the whole truth even though that truth is spoken against him: “Do not hide it from me,” he says. So Samuel
repeats God’s stern message “and hid nothing from him. “ And after
this torrent of bad news, Eli responds, “It is the Lord; let him do what seems
good to him.” [1 Samuel 3: 17-18] By
facing into a harsh judgment of his own household, Samuel has established his prophetic
credibility. “And all Israel
from Dan to Beer-sheba knew that Samuel was a trustworthy prophet of the Lord.”
[1 Samuel 3: 20]
“It is the Lord;
let him do what seems good to him.” “Hands up! Don’t shoot!” “I can’t breathe.”
“Black lives matter.”
Would that all
America had known or knows now that Martin Luther King was “a trustworthy
prophet of the Lord”. Like the prophet
Samuel, King spoke prophetic truth to his own household. Forty-eight years
after King’s speech at The Riverside Church, forty-seven years after his
murder, we, the people to whom he preached and prophesied have not quite gotten
what he came to say. We often recall
that he had a dream, but we don’t look very deeply into what the content of that
dream actually was. So in order to open up and get inside Dr. King’s dream, let’s
listen again to what he had to say to those gathered in The Riverside Church
that day:
I am convinced that
if we are to get on to the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation
must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift
from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and
computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important
than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism
are incapable of being conquered.
And here is how
Dr. King concluded that day:
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the
long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. . . . [W]ill there be another message—of
longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their
cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it
otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
“I can’t breathe.” “Black lives matter.” What will we choose: to be a thing-oriented society or a
person-oriented society? Will we opt for “the long and bitter, but beautiful
struggle for a new world?” Will we stand with those who suffer violence in our
own country? Or will we choose to say, in King’s words, “the odds are too great, “the struggle is too hard?”
In our Gospel for this
morning [John 1: 32-51] Jesus spots Nathanael under the fig tree and addresses
him as an Israelite in whom there is no deceit.
Flattered and impressed, Nathanael marvels at the miracle of Jesus’s
insight. Jesus responds,
“Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the
fig tree? You will see greater things than these.” And he said to him, “Very
truly, I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending
and descending upon the Son of Man.” [John 1: 50-51]
Do we believe Dr.
King because he told us he had a dream, or do we believe him because he told us
the hard things we—his American household--needed (and still need) to hear? The
iron triangle of “racism, extreme materialism, and militarism” is still with
us. The message “of longing, of hope, of solidarity with [human] yearnings”
has yet to be heard by those suffering violence and oppression done in all our
names.
“Hands up! Don’t
shoot!” “I can’t breathe.” “Black lives matter.” Forty-seven years after his
death, we honor Martin Luther King Jr. by daring to face in to the hard
prophetic words he came to tell us. America, our shared household, has some
hard work to do if we are seriously to address racism, extreme materialism, and
militarism in our own household. There will always be purveyors of violence,
but let that no longer be said of us. On
this day, and always, may our response be the one that Eli—under God’s stern
judgment himself—gave to the budding prophet Samuel: “It is the Lord; let him do what seems good
to him.”
“Hands up! Don’t shoot!”
“I can’t breathe.” “Black lives matter.” Yes indeed, they do. Amen.
