Scripture: Amos 5:14-24
I’ve been hearing voices. I realize that’s a statement that could be interpreted to mean that I need professional help or that I need to be medicated or some such thing, but before we go there, let me tell you about the voices I’ve been hearing.
One of the voices I’ve been hearing in my head recently is the voice of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It’s his birthday, you know, the day after tomorrow. The official holiday is designated as the third Monday in January, and it just so happens that this year that means the holiday is almost a week away from his actual birthday. But that hasn’t stopped me from being aware that his birthday is just a few days away or from having his voice come into my head without any conscious intention on my part to summon it.
This is something that happens to me every year around this time. The time of Martin Luther King’s public ministry, let’s say from the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955 to his death in 1968, was my coming-of-age time. The year he came to Chicago was my first year of studies for the ministry. I was fortunate to be able to hear him speak in person on a number of occasions, to large rallies of thousands of people, in church sanctuaries bulging with hundreds of people, in church basements where a few dozen people were gathered to make plans for a next day’s activity. His is a voice that will ever be fresh in my mind, and it comes to me about this time every January without my having to sit down and say to myself, “I think I’ll try to remember Dr. King’s voice because his birthday is coming up in a few days.” It’s not like that at all. It just happens.
And because it happens, I find myself confronted with some questions every year. This never turns out to be a nostalgia event for me. It is never the kind of thing where I hear his voice and say to myself, “Wow, that guy was really good. He really knew how to give a speech. He really knew how to inspire people. Boy could we ever use a Dr. King again. He was something.” It’s more of an uncomfortable feeling I get. I hear his voice, and it makes me take stock of myself. I hear his voice and I have to ask: What am I supposed to do with it? As a person what am I supposed to do with this voice? As a minister of the Christian gospel, what am I supposed to do with this voice? What is the church supposed to do with this voice? His voice doesn’t let me just admire it. His voice forces me to confront some somewhat uncomfortable questions. And I don’t experience this as something I really have any choice about.
One specific question I have to ask myself every year is in what way Dr. King’s birthday is going to affect our worship here at Sojourners, and specifically my preaching on any given Sunday in the middle of January. Just because his voice is in my head, doesn’t mean I have to preach about him or make him into a theme of our worship service. It is not really an appropriate and not a good way to honor Dr. King for this to become a kind of knee jerk event for Sojourners every year. We’re progressive folks here and we say we believe in racial justice and so when Dr. King’s birthday comes around we automatically look for some way to do our annual obligatory homage to Dr. King. That wouldn’t be a good spirit to have. And I have other cautionary voices speaking to me about this as well. They say: Dr. King’s birthday is not a church holiday. They say: We are here to worship God, not to honor individuals, no matter how worthy those individuals may be. They say: We are gathered here as Christians, as followers of Christ, not as followers of Dr. King. They say: We are gathered here to pray, not to sharpen our historical memory. They say: Be careful. It is not at all clear what an authentic celebration around Dr. King would be, much less one that takes place within the context of Christian worship. There are lots of ways here to go astray.
I do hear these voices too, every year, along with Dr. King’s, and I know that they have their own truth to speak and I wrestle some with them. But in the end, I have to say, Dr. King’s voice trumps these other voices. His voice rings clearer, is more persistent, more urgent, more compelling than those other voices and it almost always ends up that my heart tells me that whatever I may choose to do with his voice, the one thing I can’t do is ignore it, regardless of what cautionary voices there may be in my head.
Besides, there are some other voices in my head as well. The voice of scripture, for instance. Of course there is Martin Luther King’s own voice quoting scripture, in the “I Have a Dream Speech” for instance, when he quotes Amos saying “but let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.” I remembered King quoting that passage, and I chose it for our scripture this morning. But I also included the earlier part of that passage, where Amos says, quoting God now, “I hate, I despise your festivals. I take no delight in your solemn assemblies…take away from me the noise of your songs. To the melody of your harps I will not listen.” We may gather for worship to try to deepen our spirituality, but whether we’re successful or not may not be of the greatest interest to God. Sometimes we say that it’s important to put our social concerns in the context of worship, to see them in the larger context of our relationship to God. I have been known to think that way and to say things like that. But what I hear Amos saying is different, very different. He turns it the other way around. Sometimes it is not a matter of putting our social concerns in the context of worship. Sometimes it is a matter of putting our worship in the context of social justice or rather in the context of a larger humanity, because without that context our worship services, our prayers, our songs are just noise and may give God a stomach ache. I have been hearing that voice of scripture this last week as well.
And here’s another voice that came into my spirit alongside Martin King’s. It is the voice of Bill Moyers, and in a certain sense I suppose you could think that his voice is pretty far distant from any direct connection to Dr. King, but as I tell you about what the voice of Bill Moyers is saying, I think you will see that the presence of his voice is not completely arbitrary, not just coming from left field. Bill Moyers was one of the speakers at the United Church of Christ General Synod, the national meeting of the denomination and in this case also a celebration of the 50th anniversary of the merger of the denominations that formed the U.C.C. His speech was memorable to a lot of people who heard it that day; it was to me. It has come back to me often in the months since, and it came back to me as I was reflecting on Dr. King and the King holiday this week.
You can read Moyers’ full speech, and it is worth reading, on the UCC web site. I just want to tell you about a small part of it. Referring to when the UCC was formed, just as the modern civil rights movement was gathering momentum, Moyers said: “Fifty years ago America seemed on the verge of at last getting it right…our Declaration of Independence had let loose in the world the radical notion of equality in the sight of God and under the rule of law. Eleven signers of that Declaration were members of UCC predecessor churches. Those words can still cause the heart to race: We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Once those words were abroad, every human being who could hear them could imagine another world possible. They could think differently about the value that society had assigned their life. Yes, it’s true. Slavery still exercised a malignant hold over our young generation, but that couldn’t last long, once those words were loose in the land. The man who wrote those words knew it couldn’t last. As a Southerner, Thomas Jefferson saw no political or social alternative to the peculiar institution, but he knew well that slavery degraded master and slave alike, and that any society that permitted half of its citizens to be despots over the other half was doomed. “I tremble for my country,” he wrote, “when I reflect that God is just, and that His justice cannot sleep forever.” Jefferson knew from his own experience the perversity of owning another person as chattel. For the hand that wrote those words, “All men are created equal” also stroked the breasts and caressed the thighs of a slave woman named Sally Hemings. It is no longer a secret: this learned, philosophical and far-seeing founder had a long-term sexual relationship with his slave, who bore him several children…
Jefferson could not really think that the words on that parchment were markers solely for white men of privilege and property who liked port and politics. He had to know… That the flesh and blood woman in his arms was his equal…but the law had been fashioned by white men of wealth and privilege to keep her outside the gate of promise opened by the Declaration of Independence…and all that Sally Hemings asked from her long sufferance was that her master let her children go.
And he did. But only upon his death. Thomas Jefferson got it right, you see. But he lived it wrong. He got it right for the same reason he lived it wrong: he was embedded in the human condition. Addicted to his own place and privilege, he could send the noblest sentiments winging around the world, but refused to let them lodge in his own home. So much a creature of his time, he could not rise above his times. He knew the truth, and he lived the lie. As we are, today…
Moyers went on to speak at length and to speak persuasively about the gap in our society, the growing gap, the unconscionable gap between rich and poor. And he ended by calling the church not to stand idly or silently by while the certain inalienable rights of God’s children are mocked by the realities of radical inequality. It is not at all surprising to me that his voice returned to me this last week. It is a voice that is not going to completely leave me any time soon, maybe ever.
Just one more voice, or at least it’s a question of voice, that I need to tell you about today. A few weeks ago, almost a month ago now, a group of Sojourners, along with a group from the African American Authors Book Club, which itself has a number of Sojourners in it, went to see an exhibit at the University of Virginia Art Museum. The work we were viewing was by a man named William Christenberry, and it included, as you may recall from the announcements that were made about it, a large roomful of drawings, paintings, and objects having to do with the Ku Klux Klan. Christenberry had had an experience with the Klan as a young man that has apparently continued to haunt him like a nightmare throughout his adult life and so there are suggestions of the Klan throughout his work and this large collection of things specifically related to the Klan, as though he were somehow trying to free himself from these very troubling images, or perhaps at least share them, so that others would be troubled too.
Speaking for myself, encountering this room full of Klan images, being surrounded by them, leaves me almost speechless. I don’t know what to say. We did have a discussion afterward at which a number of appropriate and helpful things were said, but my immediate reaction was to be left speechless. Except that speechless is one thing we cannot allow ourselves to be in the face of all that those symbols conjure. Other than giving expression to his own demons, it is frankly not clear to me what William Christenberry meant to say through his art, but it may be that all he meant to do was present us with our own need to have a voice in response. And that would be enough.
And that, finally, is where all my voices lead me this morning. I started out earlier this week not knowing quite what to do with the various voices that were in my head, except to share them. I wasn’t sure what message to shape them into, but then I realized that they did have a message for me, all of them, or rather a question more than a message. These voices were all asking me—Amos, Martin Luther King, Bill Moyers, the artistic voice of William Christenberry—these voices were all asking me where my voice is going to be. For me, for us, for the Christian church, silence should not be an option. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 13, 2008