Dan Harper | Sermons

  • The Weary Blues

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading was the poem “The Weary Blues” by Langston Hughes. This poem is not included here due to copyright restrictions.

    The second reading was the poem by Langston Hughes, titled “The Ballad Of The Landlord” This poem is not included here due to copyright restrictions.

    Sermon — “The Weary Blues”

    This is Black History Month, and in three sermons this month I proposed to speak to you about three different Black poets; more specifically, about three American poets of African descent. Last week, I spoke about James Weldon Johnson; and this week I would like to speak about Langston Hughes.

    If you were here last week, you heard me say that poets make the world; and I meant that in a broad sense of poetry, where poets make language and language makes our world. This is not some supernatural magic trick; rather it is a statement about the basic being of the universe. There is a fundamental connection between language — between what we speak and hear and write and read — a connection between language, and the very core of That Which Is.

    I want to be careful to tell you exactly what I mean by a poem. A poem is not just something that sits there on the page, and you read it, or your high school English teacher makes you read it, and that’s the end of it. A poem is language that is meant to change you, and maybe change the world around you. A few poems are meant to be looked at, like paintings, but mostly you have to say poems aloud for them to change you, or change the world around you; and if you can chant them or intone them or sing them, sometimes that increases their power.

    I’d even say that poetry and music are much the same thing; — two points on a continuum that stretches from ordinary conversation to the most abstract music. It is not always clear to me where the spoken word ends, and music begins. What is clear to me is the power of poetry, and music, to change us; more specifically, the power of poetry and music to heal us, to heal our souls, to heal our selves.

    But how does this happen? How is it that poetry heals and changes us? This is why I want to speak with you this morning about the poems of Langston Hughes. More than most poets, his poetry is musical. More than most poets, his poetry has the power to heal and change and transform. And his poetry has helped me to understand a little bit of how it is that music transforms and heals us.

    …

    Just before the sermon, I read one of Langston Hughes’s best-known poems, “The Ballad of the Landlord.” This is a poem that tells a story, which goes something like this:

    Here’s a man (or is it a woman?) who lives in a run-down old house. This house is some place in the United States, and it’s sixty or seventy years ago, and the landlord appears to me to be white. At least he acts like a white person of sixty or seventy years ago; because he has an African American tenant, he doesn’t bother fixing the roof, or fixing the broken-down steps that lead up to the front door of the old run-down house.

    The landlord has stopped by to collect the rent. The tenant reminds him about all that’s wrong with the house. The landlord doesn’t pay any attention. The tenant gets increasingly frustrated, and finally says, I’m not going to pay you any rent, and if you keep talking so high and mighty, why I’ll sock you one. But the landlord is white, and doesn’t stand for being threatened by black folk. The landlord calls the cops, who arrest the tenant. The tenant is charged and convicted of assault, and sent to jail.

    Through this whole poem, we know the landlord is in the wrong. We know that the tenant’s anger is justified, and we’re rooting for the tenant. When we get to the end of the poem, when the full force of the law is used to perpetuate injustice, we share in the anger of that tenant, and we know we have to work to correct that kind of injustice in the world. Even though this is just a made-up story, we hear the ring of truth in it — for all good poems are true; truth is what makes them good poems. We hear the ring of truth, and we hear as well a call to heal and change a world in which such injustice can exist.

    When we address injustice in the world, we are healing the world. That’s what this poem does; and that reveals to us a connection between poetry and religion, since religion is also supposed to heal the world. This is a significant point for us religious liberals, because we tend to dismiss the fact that healing is a central part of religion. Too much of religion is obsessed with faith healing, miraculous cures where some father God makes it all better without much effort on our part. We are right to dismiss such kinds of religious healing. Yet we cannot dismiss the fact that healing is central to religion. Part of the purpose of religion is to heal the world; part of the purpose of religion is to heal our souls when we are damaged by the injustice of the world.

    When I say “healing,” I don’t necessarily mean sitting there passively and waiting for some healing energy to do its work. The story of the tenant and the landlord force us to confront an ethical problem: the full power of the law and the police can be used to cause injustice. Once you start chewing over that ethical problem, it’s hard to simply sit there and enjoy the beauty of the poem. We find that the poem calls us to do something. How does this poem heal and change the world? — the poem calls us to rouse ourselves and heal the world by correcting injustice.

    …

    It is very good that poetry heals and changes the world, and I know that will help heal me in the long run, but sometimes I need some more personal healing. It’s fine and noble to say that I’m going to go out and heal the world, but sometimes life has got me down so that I don’t have the energy to do that. What then? Forget the world for a moment — how is poetry going to heal me?

    To answer that, I’d like to speak about the blues. “The Ballad of the Landlord” makes us want to heal the world, but another poem by Langston Hughes, “The Weary Blues,” describes to us how to heal our own souls.

    And what are the blues? The African American humanist theologian Anthony Pinn is one of those who has pointed out that the blues are a form of musical expression through which “enslaved Africans wrestled with existential questions forced by the absurdity of slavery.” Pinn tells us: “Through this music, they sought to make sense of the world and provide a framework for life. Within the spirituals, the manner in which traditional religious doctrine dominated this rationale for life is apparent. However,… there were other forms of musical expression that did not embrace the basic doctrine of the Christian church, or other traditional forms of religious expression.”

    Now Anthony Pinn is a theologian, which means that he is somewhat caught up in the theory. What I have found is that when you put his theory in practice, you find that the blues can be a legitimate form of religious expression; some blues songs are a kind of humanist hymn. They provide serious answers to religious and existential questions. When you’re singing the blues, if you have trouble in mind, you don’t call on God to solve all your troubles — you laugh to keep from crying; you go down by the riverside and rock those blues away; and you know that somehow the sun’s gonna shine on you someday — these are humanist hymns because you don’t call on God to fix your problems for you. In the poem “The Weary Blues,” there is no God who comes down to solve the problems of the unnamed musician who is singing and playing the piano; there is no God to come and take away the pain of living. The musician plays and sings, and that heals him, a little. He is not completely healed; but at least he can sleep that night. So it is that the blues have a healing power.

    None of this rules out traditional religious music as healing music. Traditional religious music that calls on God can heal the soul, too. But sometimes religious music pretends to heal, when it really doesn’t heal. Religious music, and religion itself, pretends to heal when it merely distracts us with God and deadens us to the pain and anguish we experience in the here and now; and by deadening us, the pain appears to go away, but we don’t actually heal. The same is sometimes true of the blues: sometimes the blues pretend to heal us, but instead distract us with a catchy melody and a danceable beat, serving merely to deaden us to the pain we’re in.

    When the pain we feel is deadened, but nothing else happens, that is false healing. Rather than deadening pain, the blues give us enough distance so that we can feel the pain without becoming overwhelmed by it; herein lies the power of the blues. The music and the poetry of the words channel the pain into something constructive rather than destructive. True healing allows us to regain strength and wholeness. The poetry of the blues allows us to regain strength and wholeness: it is musical poetry that has the power to heal us and change us.

    Of course that is also the purpose of these Sunday morning worship services. We come here to be healed, we come here to feel we can be made whole. And how do we do this? We do this with words and with poetry and with musical poetry. We have conversations together; we listen to the spoken word; we listen to poetry and scripture that is read aloud; we sing songs together. You may have a conversation on a Sunday morning after church where someone says something to you that somehow changes you for the better; just a small thing, just a small change for the better; but that small change may do more to heal you than all the sermon and poetry and songs during the worship service; and in that sense, that conversation is a kind of poetry (for you, at that time). I have never heard a sermon that is poetry the way Langston Hughes writes poetry, but I have heard sermons that in a specific time and place healed my soul, and for that moment there were better poetry than anything Hughes ever wrote.

    Poetry has power in it; it has the power to heal us. What we try to do here on Sunday morning is kind of poetry. We create a time and a place where words and poetry and music can heal and change us. We get through the pain of living, we get through the anger at injustice, and in doing so we aim to hold onto our dreams.

    …

    We aim to hold on to our dreams. It’s not a good idea to defer dreams for too long, because deferred dreams can turn into anger — and once you get mired in anger and pain, you wind up deferring your dreams. There’s an awful lot of pain and anger that comes with living. When you think of all the injustice that exists in the world, how can we possibly get rid of all the anger? When sadness enters our souls, how can we possibly get rid of all the pain? I don’t think it’s possible to get rid of all the anger and pain — the world is too full of anger and pain — but we can be sure the anger and pain doesn’t hold us down.

    So it is that healing from pain and anger requires us to hold onto our dreams. We have to get through the pain that life can bring; that doesn’t mean we have to get rid of pain, we just have to get through it. We have to get through the anger; that doesn’t mean we have to get rid of it, we just have to get through it.

    Langston Hughes wrote a poem called “Dream-Dust” that goes like this:
      Gather out of star-dust
        Earth-dust,
        Cloud-dust,
        Storm-dust,
      And splinters of hail
      One handful of dream-dust
        Not for sale.

    Poetry collects from life the earth-dust, the cloud-dust, the storm-dust, the splinters of hail, and distills these elements of life into dream-dust. In this way, poetry helps us hold onto our dreams.

    If you come to church regularly, you have heard me say that religious scriptures are a kind of poetry; religious scriptures at their best distill the elements of life and make dreams out of them. Holding on to dreams is one of the things we do in our religious communities; it’s one of the things we try to do here each Sunday. We collect the elements of life — the joys and sorrows, the pain and the joy — and we take an hour or so each week to distill dreams out of our lives. Some of the dreams are personal — your dreams, my dreams. Some of the dreams belong to us all, like the dream of an earth made fair and all her people one. Our religious community is based on poetry, both the poetry of ancient religious scriptures and contemporary poetry like that of Langston Hughes. We come here to hold onto dreams, keeping them safe until they can become reality.

    All too often our dreams get deferred. For African Americans, the dream of true equality has been deferred too long; indeed, for too many racial and ethnic minorities, the dream of equality has been deferred for too long. Sometimes the world around us seems to conspire to keep our dreams from becoming a reality. When that happens, we have to do something that allows us to hold on to our dreams. Like that old dream of earth made fair and all her people one — we have been dreaming that dream from more than two thousand years, and while sometimes we seem to make some progress towards it, that dream has not yet become our reality. Yet we keep that dream bright and untarnished. So it is that poetry, and communities founded on poetry, helps us to hold on to our dreams.

    …

    How is it that poetry heals and changes us? Poetry heals us and changes us by calling to rouse ourselves and go out and heal the world by correcting injustice. Poetry heals us and changes us by allowing us to get through the pain of living, to get through the anger at injustice. Poetry heals us and changes us by helping us to hold onto our dreams, and keep them bright and untarnished. Communities that are founded on poetry, like our church community, do the same thing: in communities like this one, we are healed and changed by healing the world; we are healed by having a place to deal with personal pain and heartache; we are healed and changed by the dreams that we hold together.

    And when we are healed and changed, we might just find that we have renewed strength to go out and help to heal the world.

  • Lift Every Voice and Sing

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading was poem by James Weldon Johnson, the poem “O Black and Unknown Bards.” It is not included here due to copyright restrictions.

    The second reading is from James Weldon Johnson’s autobiography Along This Way.

    “I admit that through my adult life I have lacked religiosity. But I make no boast of it; understanding, as I do, how essential religion is to many, many people. For that reason, I have little patience with the zealot who is forever trying to prove to others that they do not need religion; that they would be better off without it. Such a one is no less a zealot than the religionist who contends that all who “do not believe” will be consigned to eternal hell fires. It is simply that I have not felt the need of religion in the commonplace sense of the term. I have derived spiritual values in life from other sources than worship and prayer. I think that the teachings of Jesus Christ embody the loftiest ethical and spiritual concepts the human mind has yet borne. I do not know if there is a personal God; I do not see how I can know; and I do not see how my knowing can matter. What does matter, I believe, is how I deal with myself and how I deal with my fellows. I feel that I can practice a conduct toward myself and toward my fellows that will constitute the basis for an adequate religion, a religion that may comprehend spirituality and beauty and serene happiness….

    The human mind racks itself over the never-to-be-known answer to the great riddle, and all that is clearly revealed is the fate that man must continue to hope and struggle on; that each day, if he would not be lost, he must with renewed courage take a fresh hold on life and face with fortitude the turns of circumstances. To do this, he needs to be able at times to touch God; let the idea of God mean to him what it may.”

    Sermon — “Lift Every Voice”

    This year, during Black History Month, I wanted to speak with you about Black poets; more specifically, about American poets of African descent.

    I want to speak to you about poets out of a deep theological concern. Poets make the world; taking poetry in its broadest sense. When I say that poets make the world, I don’t mean that they wave a magic wand, or wave their hand and say magic words, and — Poof! — they create some object, like a stage magician. But I do mean to say that there is a basic connection between language — between what we speak and hear and write and read — a connection between language, and the very core of our beings.

    Thus it is that poets make the world: their poems are not expressions of feelings so much as they are manifestations of our existence. This is why religious scriptures are so powerful to us: they are a form of poetry, and like all great poems religious scriptures make the world anew. There was nothing like it in the world before, when some ancient poet captured the essence of Moses in his words to Pharaoh: Let my people go. There was nothing like it in the world before, when some ancient poet captured the essence of Gotama Buddha in the words: There is a middle path that leads to peace of mind. There was nothing like it in the world before, when some ancient poet captured the essence of Jesus in the words: Love your neighbor as yourself. When I say that poets make the world, I don’t necessarily mean people who who write things in a form which your high school English teacher would tell you is a poem. What I mean by poets are those masters of language who, through their language, change our beings; poets are those who transform us and the world.

    As religious liberals we are always open to new sources of inspiration. This is what we mean when we say that we are not orthodox: we do not have one correct source for religion, one book or text that is frozen for all time. We remain open to new sources of inspiration; revelation is not sealed for us, revelation continues to emerge around and through us. And today, revelation continues to emerge most clearly, I believe, in poetry, or in works of prose that function as poetry.

    Now you know why I want to talk with you about poets, and their poetry. And why talk specifically about Black poets? Well, there are many things in our society that I would like to transform, but one of the great moral problems facing us in the United States today is the problem of systemic racism — and when I say “systemic racism,” I am not concerned with individual prejudice but rather with that impersonal system of racial inequality that continues to permeate American society. White, black, no matter what color our skin, none of us likes systemic racism. So how can we transform this reality or systemic racism? I’m afraid that too many of our white poets have ignored this compelling moral question; and so I find myself turning to certain African American poets.

    …

    In this first sermon in this series on Black poets, I thought I’d begin with the most influential Black poet. No, I’m not going to talk about Alice Walker, or Gwendolyn Brooks, or Langston Hughes, or — name the famous African American poet you might think I should preach on. I’m going to begin with James Weldon Johnson, in the full knowledge that his may be an unfamiliar name.

    Yet I will say without doubt (without doubt in my mind, anyway) and without equivocation that James Weldon Johnson is our most influential Black poet. I am aware that there are some English professors in our congregation, and I would be foolish to make a judgment about literary quality; so I will not claim that James Weldon Johnson is our best African American poet. So Johnson is not our best poet, nor our most famous poet, but I still claim him as our most influential poet. And I make that claim on the basis of one poem he wrote, a poem which was written as a hymn.

    Here’s the story of that hymn. The year was 1900; the place, Jacksonville, Florida. James Johnson and his brother Rosamond had been in New York City writing popular songs for Broadway; at the time of this story, they were back in their hometown and James was working as a school principal. Here is how James tells the story:

    “A group of young men decided to hold on February 12 a celebration of Lincoln’s birthday…. My thoughts began buzzing around a central idea of writing a poem on Lincoln, but I couldn’t net them. So I gave up the project as beyond me…. My central idea, however, took on another form. I talked over with my brother the thought I had in mind, and we planned to write a song to be sung as part of the exercises. We planned, better still, to have it sung by school children — a chorus of five hundred voices.

    “I got my first line:– Lift ev’ry voice and sing. Not a startling line, but I worked along grinding out the next five. When, near the end of the first stanza, there came to me the lines:

        Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us
        Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us

    the spirit of the poem had taken hold of me. I finished the stanza and turned it over to Rosamond.

    “In composing the two other stanzas I did not use pen and paper. While my brother worked at his musical setting I paced back and forth on the front porch, repeating the lines over and over to myself…. As I worked through the opening and middle lines of the last stanza… I could not keep back the tears, and made no effort to do so. I was experiencing the transports of the poet’s ecstasy. Feverish ecstasy was followed by that contentment — that sense of serene joy — which makes artistic creation the most complete of human experiences.”

    That’s how James Weldon Johnson describes writing the poem which became the hymn “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” I wanted to read that aloud because it helps explain why sometime when I sing “Life Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” tears come to my eyes. There is something in that poem that worked on Johnson while he was writing the poem, and which still works on me today.

    Johnson finished the poem, his brother set it to music, and they sent it to their music publisher in New York, and got enough mimeographed copies to distribute to their children’s chorus; they taught it to the children; the new song was a great success; and James and Rosamond went back to writing songs for Broadway. But the song took on a life of its own. Within a few decades, it had spread throughout much of the United States, and had been adopted by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. James Johnson said that his song got its widest distribution, not through copies obtained from his music publisher, but through “printed or typewritten copies of the words pasted in the backs of hymnals and the songbooks used in Sunday schools, Y.M.C.A’s, and similar institutions.” In other words, the song took on a life of its own; it spread because it touched something deep within people’s hearts; and it spread beyond Black America to White America as well.

    So why did this poem — not a great poem, perhaps — why did it become such an influential poem? I can think of a number of reasons why this poem is so influential. It is influential because Johnson’s words rang true; even if his words aren’t great poetry, his words have the ring of truth. It is influential because we sing this poem: we embody this poem with our breath and our voices, and then it blends together with the other voices singing it around us, and takes on a peculiar power in this way. It is influential because it is easy to memorize: I have a poor memory, and even I can remember most of the first verse.

    For all these reasons, we still sing this song more than a century after it was written; it is still considered the African American national hymn; and I continue to be impressed how, when you start singing this hymn with a group of Americans, how many of them (even us white Americans) know at least some of the first verse. And if a poem — I mean “poem” in the broader sense of the word — if a poem is going to transform us, one way that happens best is if we know that poem by heart, and if we say it (or sing it) aloud; and the power of that poem to transform us increases even more if it is a poem that we say or sing together.

    I have some thoughts on how this song transforms us. For many of us who live in the United States, “freedom” and “liberty” seem to have become tired words. “Freedom” — that old stuff, we don’t need to hear about that, that all got taken care of in 1776. “Liberty” — well, the Liberty Bell is cracked, and that should tell you about the state of liberty in this country. What James Johnson manages to do in “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” is to remind us that freedom and liberty were not won in 1776; nor were they won on January 1, 1863; nor were they won when the Civil rights Act was signed; nor, most probably, will they ever be completely won for any of us, black or white or whatever our skin color. When I sing “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” I am reminded that human beings have a hard time living up to their ideals; and I am reminded that freedom and liberty are a process, not an end-state.

    …

    Johnson was in his twenties when he wrote “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.” He went on to write other, better-regarded poems and novels and books. Perhaps his best-known book of poems is a small volume called God’s Trombones, beloved of religious liberals. But I’d like to skip past all that, skip ahead to a book he put together with his brother Rosamond in 1925 when he was in his mid-fifties.

    This was their Book of American Negro Spirituals. It is but one of many collections of African American songs and spirituals, but it is important, I think, in large part because Johnson placed one of his best poems at the beginning of the book, the poem we heard in the first reading this morning, “O Black and Unknown Bards.” This poem tells us why we should pay attention to a book of African American spirituals. Johnson elaborates on the thoughts in the poem in his prose introduction to the book, in which he says:

    “To supply [the slave] trade Africa was raped of millions of men, women, and children. As many as survived the passage were immediately thrown into slavery. These people came from various localities in Africa. They did not all speak the same language. here they were, suddenly cut off from the moorings of their native culture, scattered without regard to their old tribal affiliations, having to adjust themselves to a completely alien civilization, having to learn a strange language, and, moreover, held under an increasingly harsh system of slavery; yet it was from these people this mass of noble music sprang; this music which is America’s only folk music and, up to this time, the finest distinctive artistic contribution she has to offer the world…. Take, for example, ‘Go Down, Moses’: there is not a nobler theme in the whole musical literature of the world….”

    Johnson is telling us about the power of poetry to transform the world. Now we could argue the relative merits of African American spirituals, and whether they are indeed the only American folk music, and so on, and so on. There is a place for such scholarly arguments, but Johnson is making a poetic argument here. He is telling us this: Faced with an impossible situation — an alien civilization, the degradations of slavery, a strange new language — faced with these harsh conditions, African Americans made poetry; and with their poetry, they transformed their souls with nobility, and so transformed the world around them.

    These songs continue to transform us, transform all of us here in America. Yes, these old spirituals have a special place in the cultural lives of African Americans, but their poetry can transform all of us. When we sing or listen to these songs, we get connected to those early people of African descent who were forced to come live in America; and we understand the nobility of their souls, a nobility that allowed them to retain their humanity in the face inhuman conditions.

    So it is that all of us — African Americans, European Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans — we all are made a little more noble, and that nobility becomes a part of who we are as a people. This nobility breaks down systemic racism, just a little. By allowing us to share in that nobility of soul, we find our own souls becoming a little more noble, and such nobility can serve as a sort of vaccine against impersonal, infectious systemic racism taking hold in our souls.

    …

    I wanted to close with brief word about James Weldon Johnson’s understanding of religion. We heard some of his ideas on religion in the second reading this morning. Given the ideas on religion he expresses, I like imagine that Johnson would have felt quite at home in our Unitarian Universalist church. He would even have felt at home in this church back when he wrote those words in 1933, back when the minister here was a staunch humanist named Stanton Hodgin — well, he would have felt welcome here except for the fact that he was black, and in 1933 this church was very definitely a white church. Those were different times back then, racially speaking.

    Be that as it may, I still like to imagine what Johnson would have felt if he could show up in our church today. I like to imagine saying to him: You know, what you said back in 1933 — that’s pretty much what I preach from the pulpit; and what you say is pretty much what we do in our church: we don’t have religion in the commonplace sense of the term (which is these parts means orthodox Christianity); we try to practice conduct towards ourselves and our neighbors that constitutes our basis for religion; we feel Jesus is a great spiritual and ethical thinker who inspires us; and each day, if we would not be lost, we take a fresh hold of life, and we renew our courage to do this by touching the face of God, whatever God may mean to each one of us individually.

    These religious ideas permeate all of Johnson’s poetry. He is not one of our best known American poets. But he is a deeply human poet, and a humane poet. Even if the critics don’t place him into the first ranks of American poetry, his humanity counts for a great deal. No, he didn’t write anything that is considered as great as T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”; but far more people know and have memorized and have been transformed by “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing.”

    By singing “Life Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” or any of the songs in The Book of American Negro Spirituals, we become for that moment poets ourselves. We bring that written poetry to life by singing, or even just saying the words aloud. In so doing, we transform ourselves, we transform the world, we create new understandings of what it is to be human in America, we make ourselves just a little bit more noble.

  • The Covenant of Martin Luther King

    A sermon in honor of the 80th birthday of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and in honor of the historic inauguration of Barack Obama, the first African American president of the United States.

    This sermon was preached by Rev. Dan Harper at First Unitarian Church in New Bedford. As usual, the sermon below is a reading text. The actual sermon as preached contained improvisation and extemporaneous remarks. Sermon copyright (c) 2009 Daniel Harper.

    Readings

    The first reading this morning is a responsive reading.

    As we get ready to inaugurate the first Black president of the United States, we read together these words by Frederick Douglass: “We deem it a settled point that the destiny of the colored people of this country is bound up with that of the white people of this country.

    We are here, and here we are likely to be. To imagine that we shall ever be eradicated is absurd and ridiculous.

    We can be remodified, changed, assimilated, but never extinguished.

    We repeat, therefore, that we are here; and that this is our country; and the question for the philosophers and statesmen of the land ought to be, What principles should dictate the policy of the action toward us?

    We shall neither die out, nor be driven out;

    But shall go with this people, either as a testimony against them, or as an evidence in their favor throughout their generations.”

    [Adapted from an essay by Frederick Douglass in North Star (November 1858); as quoted in Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (1992), Derrick Bell, p. 40.]

    The second reading this morning is from “Strength To Love,” a sermon by Martin Luther King on Luke 10.29, “And who is my neighbor?” In the sermon, Rev. King takes that question that Jesus was asked, and asks that same question of race relations in the United States in the 1960s.

    “…[W]e must admit that the ultimate solution to the race problem lies in the willingness of men to obey the unenforceable. Court orders and federal enforcement agencies are of inestimable value in achieving desegregation, but desegregation is only a partial, though necessary, step towards the final goal which we seek to realize, genuine inter-group and interpersonal living. Desegregation will break down the legal barriers and bring men together physically, but something must touch the eharts and souls of men so that they will come together spiritually because it is natural and right. A vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws will bring an end to segregated public facilities which are barriers to a truly desegregated society, but it cannot bring an end to fears, prejudice, pride, and irrationality, which are the barriers to a truly integrated society. These dark and demonic responses will be removed only as men are possessed by the invisible, inner law which etches on their hearts the conviction that all men are brothers and that love in mankind’s most potent weapon for personal and social transformation. True integration will be achieved by true neighbors who are willingly obedient to unenforceable obligations.”

    [From “Strength to Love,” Martin Luther King (Fortress Press, 1981), pp. 37-38.]

    Sermon “The Covenant of Martin Luther King”

    This month I have been preaching a series of sermons on the topic of covenant. We in this church have a deep and immediate interest in this topic: first because in our religious traditions, churches are organized around their covenants; and second because in our own church here in New Bedford, we are in the process of writing a new church covenant. To write a new church covenant — that is a task of great moment. We do not rewrite our covenants very often. In our own church, during the whole of the 19th century, we rewrote our covenant perhaps twice; and in the 20th century, we did not have a written covenant, perhaps because it seemed so overwhelming to try to put our implicit covenant into writing. So it has been a century and a half since we last rewrote our covenant; and because of this, I devoted the first two sermons of this year to our own church covenant.

    But there are covenants that extend far beyond our church community. Some would argue that the great religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all founded on the covenant of Abraham; and that being so, then perhaps two billion people are still a part of that Abrahamic covenant. This morning I would like to speak with you about a covenant that is not quite so broad as that; but it is a covenant that extends far beyond our own church. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. helped us understand a covenant that exists in the United States — a covenant that had consisted mostly of broken promises. He spoke to us all about this covenant, he gently encouraged us to acknowledge the broken promises, and he has moved us to repair these broken promises, to repair this covenant. We are still engaged in repairing this national covenant. We most often hear this national covenant summed up in the words from the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.”

    I would like to speak with you about how Martin Luther King articulated, and reinvigorated, our national covenant. More particularly, I would like to speak with you about the tremendous progress we have made in reinstating that covenant in the past year.

    1. When Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963, he said: “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.’” But Rev. King also said: “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” This second statement is another way of putting of our national covenant; but it is, I think, a fuller, more comprehensive statement of a fundamental principle of our country. From a religious and moral perspective, Rev. King was telling us that we are not merely created equal; at a deeper level, we find our destinies tied together, so that if any one of us is treated unjustly, justice for all the rest of us is threatened.

    From our own religious perspective, when we hear the words “inescapable network of mutuality,” we are likely to think of what we call the Web of Life; we know that all human beings, all living beings, indeed all nonliving things, in this universe are tied together in a web of interrelationships; and when we act, we must be conscious of how our action affects the entire Web of Life. Jesus of Nazareth used a different term: Jesus spoke of the Kingdom of Heaven, which is the underlying reality of the here and now in which we are all connected, one with the other, so that we must love our neighbors as ourselves, for in truth we are so interconnected that the way we treat our neighbors is in fact the way we treat our own selves.

    Rev. King drew on many religious sources to help him articulate various aspects of our national covenant. When he accepted the Nobel Prize, he drew on the story of Moses, saying: “Oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself. The Bible tells the thrilling story of how Moses stood in Pharaoh’s court centuries ago and cried, “Let my people go.” This is a kind of opening chapter in a continuing story. The present struggle in the United States is a later chapter in the same unfolding story.” As Moses had a covenant with his god to lead the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt, so we know that Martin Luther King led Americans of African descent out of the bondage of segregation and racism; and like Moses, Martin Luther King died before he saw the Promised Land of freedom. The story of Moses is a powerful story because it reminds us that it is hard work to get out of bondage; just because you start the journey to freedom doesn’t mean you’ll see its end; it took the Israelites forty years to get to the Promised Land, and even then their troubles continued for centuries.

    But I believe the real center of what Rev. King taught us about covenant was not what he taught us through the story of Moses, powerful as the Moses story may be. For at the center of Rev. King’s message were the teachings of Jesus. Jesus said that all of religion could be summed up in two commandments, the second of which was that we should love our neighbors as ourselves. And that is why, again and again, Rev. King asked us to consider this question: Who is our neighbor?

    Who is our neighbor? One day, so we are told, a lawyer approached Jesus. Now remember, Jesus was Jewish, and this lawyer was Jewish, and Jews take their religious laws seriously. Jesus asked the lawyer to summarize the religious laws of Judaism. The lawyer gave the correct answer, which was “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.” Jesus agreed that was the correct response. Then the lawyer asked, “Who is my neighbor?”

    That’s the key question, isn’t it? Like the lawyer, we all know we are supposed to treat our neighbors well. But who is our neighbor? To answer this question, Jesus told a story.

    One day, a man from Jerusalem was going from Jerusalem down to the city of Jericho, along a steep, winding, dangerous road. The man was ambushed by robbers. The robbers beat him till he was bloody, took his money, and left him by the side of the road, bruised and unable to move.

    Soon a priest from the great Temple at Jerusalem came down the road. The priest saw the man lying there, but instead of stopping to help him, the priest looked the other way and hurried on by.

    Then a Levite came down the same road. Levites were important officials at the great Temple at Jerusalem. Like the priest, the Levite took one look at the poor man lying by the side of the road, looked the other way, and hurried on by.

    Then a man from Samaria, a Samaritan, came walking along the road. The Samaritans were a despised ethnic and religious group; where the priests and the Levites were respected and honored, the Samaritans were disliked and shunned. When Jesus told this story, he knew that his listeners would immediately assume that the Samaritan, too, would walk past the man lying in the gutter; or even kick him while he was down.

    But that’s not what happens in Jesus’s story. The Samaritan was moved to pity at the sight of the beaten, robbed man lying in the gutter, and bandaged his wounds. The Samaritan hoisted the beaten, robbed man onto his donkey, brought him to an inn, paid all the bills, and looked after him. The next day, the Samaritan went to the innkeeper and said, “Look after that man until he gets better. On my way back, I’ll make sure to pay you back if there’s any extra expense.”

    This is how Jesus answered the question: Who is our neighbor?

    Rev. King tells this story with great richness and depth. When Rev. King tells us this old story, we know he’s telling us that White folks should see Black folks as their neighbor; and we know that he’s telling us that Black folks should see White folks as their neighbors, even though the White folks have been treating them as badly as the Samaritans two thousand years ago.

    But there is far more to this story when Rev. King tells it, for in his own way Rev. King was a poet, and poetry always goes beyond the mere surface meaning. The way Rev. King tells the story, we feel that the Black folks, like the Samaritan, were the best of neighbors to the White folks; but not the other way around. Frederick Douglass wrote: “We [those of us who are Black] shall neither die out, nor be driven out; but shall go with this people, either as a testimony against them, or as an evidence in their favor throughout their generations.” Rev. King managed to tell those of us who are White folks, in a gentle kind of way, the same thing that Frederick Douglass said: that the status of Black folks stood as testimony against us White folks. This may have been painful to us White folks; we may have wished we could cross to the other side of the street and avert our eyes, as did the priest and the Levite in Jesus’s story. But like all good preachers, Rev. King made a moral point: Our country was like the man lying in the ditch, morally speaking: our country had been unspeakably damaged by the evils of slavery and racism; and we needed to address this immorality.

    Who is our neighbor? Well, we know the answer to that: everyone, people of all skin colors. And who is our neighbor? And we know another answer to that question: the neighbor is the person who attempts to heal the broken condition of the man lying in the ditch. And who is our neighbor? And we come to realize that we are all neighbors, we are all interconnected; and with that realization, we begin to take responsibility to care for all our neighbors; we are all part of the inescapable network of mutuality; we are all part of the Web of Life.

    2. Nearly two years ago, we began to hear about this man named Barack Obama who was running for president. The pundits quietly told us that we could safely ignore this Obama fellow, because he was too inexperienced, which sometimes was a way of saying that a Black man couldn’t be president. Not yet, anyway. Obama and his supporters did not listen to the pundits, and they were organized, articulate, and they didn’t talk down to us. On March 18, 2008, not quite a year ago, Barack Obama gave a speech titled “A More Perfect Union.” In that speech, he responded to some racially-charged criticism, and he said in part: “I have asserted a firm conviction — a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people — that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.” Obama said, in effect: we need to see each other as neighbors; it’s time to stop fighting with our neighbors, or ignoring them, and instead bend down and pick up the man in the ditch.

    I heard that speech as recalling us to our national covenant. Fighting with our neighbors get us nowhere. Pretending that racism doesn’t exist gets us nowhere. To have this public figure, this politician, acknowledge to us that race and racism are real; and say at the same time that we need to move beyond race and racism; this was a remarkable moment when a politician reminded us, not of our self-interest, but of our covenant together.

    We needed this reminder. In spite of Martin Luther King’s legacy, we have not always acted like good neighbors over the past forty years. Race relations got a little better for a while, but beginning in the 1980s, in many ways racism got steadily worse. Schools are more desegregated now than at any time since Rev. King was alive. We got distracted by naked self-interest. Some politicians proclaimed that racism is done with, it’s over, we can move on — while our own eyes told us that racism still exists, it is not gone.

    What Barack Obama’s speech on March 18 of last year said to us was simple: In order to move forward, yes, we do need to acknowledge that the American covenant has repeatedly been broken in the past, and over and over again our country has not treated all people equally; but we also must acknowledge that our national covenant still exists. That speech last March acknowledged that no, we’re not going to end racism tomorrow; but Obama also reminded us that we can treat each other more like neighbors.

    The remarkable thing, however, was not Obama’s speech — good as that speech was. The remarkable thing was that most Americans understood his speech. Not everyone liked what he had to say, and some Americans remain frozen in naked self-interest, but I think almost all Americans understood what he said, and we recognized the truth and justice of what he said. Since the 1980s, politicians have been dumbing down their messages to us Americans; they have been treating us like children, and all too often we have acted like greedy ill-behaved children. But when someone finally talked to us like adults, when someone finally talked to us about race and racism in all its complexity — we responded thoughtfully.

    Not only did we respond thoughtfully, but the American electorate responded favorably to Barack Obama. We heard what he said, and the majority of us agreed that it’s time to move forward, it’s time to get our national covenant up and running again. And so our country elected Obama as president with a healthy margin. The pundits were proved wrong: a Black man could be elected president of our country, and was elected president.

    And so it is I feel that we are witnessing a huge change in our nation.

    We are renewing our national covenant: a covenant that all persons shall be considered equal. We are asking ourselves: Who is our neighbor? And we are responding: we are all each other’s neighbors.

    We are renewing our national covenant. Our country has been morally degraded, first by slavery, and then by racism. Racism eats away at our national conscience. We may not admit it in public, but we know that other countries are disgusted by the racism that is still endemic in our country; we try to ignore their disgust, but we know it’s there. We try to make up for our moral failing by taking the moral high ground in other areas: for example, we have taken the moral high ground against terrorism, even while we cannot admit our moral failings when it comes to race. And so, while we don’t admit it publicly, we have been ashamed at the moral failing of racism.

    To elect a Black president has gone a long way to healing the national sense of shame. When we feel shame, it can paralyze us; so it is important to heal from that sense of shame. We know we still have plenty of work to do end racism, but now we have renewed energy to do that work. Whether we agree with Obama’s politics or not — I’m sure we all have reservations about some specific directions he is taking — we know that what’s happening now is bigger than one man; it’s bigger than partisan politics. We have elected have a Black president of the United States; and through that simple action, we should feel that our national covenant has been renewed. We are again committing ourselves to the 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 people are created equal.”

    ———

    The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was born on January 15, 1928. He would have been 80 years old this past Thursday. As we celebrate his birthday this week, I feel we now can remember Rev. King best by living in the present, and looking to the future.

    We shall live in the present: In two days, we will inaugurate have a Black president. Let us decide that this is a renewal of our national covenant; let this renewal re-energize us to live out our dream that we will live out our belief that all persons are created equal. We know there is hard work in front of us, but may we work together as neighbors to finally end racism and heal race relations.

    We shall look to the future: Of course we don’t know how the Obama presidency will work out. But we are less interested in politics this morning than in morality. Let our national morality came back into wholeness. May ours become a nation where we live out our ideals, that all persons are created equal. May the words of the Hebrew prophet Amos come true at last: “Let justice roll down as waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” [Amos 5.24]