Christ Church Cathedral, Hartford, Connecticut
Brother Reginald Martin Crenshaw, OHC
RCL – Epiphany 2 C - Sunday 14 January 2007
Sermon Celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Good Morning! I am so happy to be with you to worship God, to celebrate and affirm our lives as members of the community of faith and to remember a brother who has gone before us Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I would like to begin with these words from Gandhi who said: “Be the Change you want to see in the world.”
Dr. King dreamed about how to be that change in the world. The last paragraph of Dr. King’s “I have a dream" speech speaks to this. It reads: “When we let freedom 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 the words of the old Negro Spiritual, Free at last! Thank God almighty, we are free at last.”
Therefore the road to real freedom is for us to be the change we want to see in the world.
My brothers and sisters, one more year has passed, and tomorrow which is the official celebration of Dr. King’s Birth as well as during the month of February (Black History Month) we will hear The “I have a dream" speech in parts and in its entirety on TV documentaries, radio stations, and at special community events. Preachers will echo these words and some of them who possess good preaching skills may even for a moment incite us to an emotional pitch, in which the light switch goes on and for a moment, we say and maybe even hum, “You know this dream—it may be possible isn’t it.”
And yet after all the rituals, celebrations, food orgies, memories of when we were young and in the struggle for civil rights, and other peace and justice issues, we turn the light switch off, sigh and say, “Oh well!" And we return to our life as it is today. If we have done well professionally and financially, this cry of freedom articulated in Dr. King’s speech is believed to be an accomplished fact and this is clearly indicated by our social status and financial resources.
What happens to a dream deferred Asks Langston Hughes? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore -- and then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over -- like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode? What is your answer? What dream has been deferred in your life?
Freedom, for some, is no longer a problem and for many, quite frankly, they’re embarrassed of talk about freedom in general and in particular to talk or think about the various struggles for freedom against oppression. Quite frankly, they assert that battle is over, let’s get on with the real issues, the economy and more importantly, how do I survive and maintain my life minimally at the level, that I’ve currently achieved.
Still others are disturbed by any discussion of inequality of whatever stripe and respond with denial and anger. Why, they say must we always talk about these things? Life must move on. Yes it must, but the question is how must it move? What responsibility do we have for shaping the quality of life not only for ourselves but our neighbors?
This morning’s second lesson has a sneaky way of bringing up the issue of freedom and why what we think is freedom is in fact not freedom at all. Let me repeat the words from a different translation, the Message. It reads, “What I want to talk about now is the various ways God’s Spirit gets worked into our lives. Remember how you were when you didn’t know God, led from one phony god to another, never knowing what you were doing, just doing it because everybody else did it?”
Let’s for a moment reflect on what it means not to know God. There is a profound absence, a void, in our lives when we don’t know God. Our culture of individualism leads us to a blindness and illusion. The self suffers because egotism leads a person away from the experience of community. The greatest illusion is the belief that we are god.
When we believe and act as though God does not have anything to say in our lives, the resulting belief is that we do not need God and we don’t really need each other. The consequence of this belief is manifested often in our personal lives, and in society as a whole.
We see, for example, couples unable to talk to each other about common issues between them because of the lack of faith and trust in each other. There are ways corporately in which we distinguish ourselves from others.
We create an “Other” by race, gender, sexual orientation, etc. These become ways we imprison ourselves and insulate ourselves from others. We then cast them out of the human family. They are not like us; they are not us, but something else.
All of these distinctions become reasons and justifications for all the destruction we commit upon each other. We go to war; we create scientific and social knowledge and language that exalts one group over the other.
For example, the dominant group calls its form of communication language; it calls the dominated group’s language a dialect clearly implying that one form of communication is superior to another. One group (the dominant group) calls its understanding of the divine with its attendant dogmas and rituals -- religion, it calls other groups (dominated groups) understanding of their relationship to the cosmos, to ultimate reality as primitive, superstitious and lacking in sophistication. We call one group cultural representations art and refer to the cultural representations of people we view as inferior as “folk art”.
All of these distinctions might have justifications and a great cultural and economic industry has been created around them but they are essentially judgments about the worth, work, and life of others. These judgments often become a means to isolate, condemn and dismiss.
The result of this absence of God is tragic, people are unable to trust, the ability to be intimate with another human being is impaired and hence our ability to love either ourselves or others is a reality that exists outside of our conscious life.
What then does the celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr., have to do with the ways in which God’s spirit gets worked into our lives? What do he and his life represent? Why must we celebrate what he stood for? What gifts does God give us to live the lives we need to live?
I want to suggest that Dr. King is a symbol of all of our lives. And further that as a symbol for all of us, celebrating his memory can assist us in “letting God’s spirit get worked into our lives.”
Symbols are important signs in that they point to a reality larger than ourselves. It is the job of the symbol to keep us on track to hold us accountable and faithful to our calling as Christians. Dr. King is such a symbol reminding us through his life and actions of the reality of the incarnation, the mystery of God becoming and entering human life.
Dr. King’s life points to the central Christian reality of death and resurrection and his life encourages suspicion of false security. Our true security as Christians lies in the constantly renewed experience of being stripped naked, plunged beneath the waters, raised up, and the condition of entry into that mystery, (the promised land, as Dr. King expressed it) is metanoia, a complete revolution in our lives.
It calls us to welcoming those gifts of the spirit mentioned in today’s second reading. We welcome the variety of gifts, wise counsel, clear understanding, simple trust, healing the sick, miraculous acts, proclamation, distinguishing between spirits, tongues, and interpretation of tongues. Dr. King’s life, his words, his actions reminds us of the necessity for renewal, restoration, reconciliation and justice.
As symbol Dr. King encourages and calls us to constant renewal, restoration, reconciliation and justice which we have committed ourselves to in our baptismal covenant. We have in our baptismal covenant committed ourselves to pray, to forgive, to respect the dignity and integrity of each human being, to Strive, promote and work for justice and peace. As symbol, Dr. King “demands that we let go of false securities and allow God to work his strange work upon us. Amen.
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