Sunday, January 17,
2016
Two sinners, flawed people who make
mistakes and fall short of God’s glory.
Two extraordinary men – there have never been
any like these men and their contributions to humanity are greater than can be
measured.
Great men?
Sinners fallen short of God? These
men are both. Consider their lives,
their words, and the profound importance of each as I hold each up alongside
the other.
First, Martin Luther King Jr. In 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial
in Washington DC, he said,
We have
also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now.
This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the
tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of
democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of
segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our
nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of
brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's
children.
“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.”
Has his dream been realized?
However accurate or inaccurate or
partially accurate, the perception of many, maybe most black people is that
they can’t get a fair shake in business, in education, in health care, in
housing, and in numerous other ways in every day. Statistics bear this out. Black Americans are less likely to be
admitted to the highest universities, less likely to be identified and put in
academically gifted programs, and more likely to be suspended from school for
offenses that if done by whites often go unpunished. In nearly every formal institution in our
country, blacks get less opportunity for advancement; and, they suffer more
harshly and more frequently than whites who commit the same offenses and rules
infractions.
Has Dr. King’s dream been
realized?
Many African Americans have achieved
incredible success. Condoleezza Rice is
a brilliant academic, a political scientist, and former secretary of
state. Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of America’s
leading astrophysicists. Colin Powell is
one the great generals in U.S. army’s history.
Ben Carson is a brain surgeon and a presidential candidate. Clarence Thomas is a Supreme Court
justice. And of course our president,
Barak Obama is an African American who has achieved the highest office in the
land. No matter what your personal
opinion is of these named, they all merit respect. This high level achievement and leadership
among persons of color had not happened when Dr. King gave that speech.
On a more personal level, in our day
biracial families are accepted as the boundaries for what is considered normal
expand. I did not imagine when we
adopted H__ and M__ that we would meet other families just like ours in
preschool and then again in our neighborhood, but we have. Chapel Hill is progressive town and there are
places in North Carolina and in other parts of America that are less-welcoming
of such diversity. However, I think across
America, there is now a social consensus that racism is evil. Since Dr. King gave the “I have a Dream
Speech” things have changed.
They have not changed nearly quickly
enough. His poignant phrase “the
tranquilizing drug of gradualism” needs to be taken to heart. Right now, most of the perspectives I get from
black people in my circles are different than the perspectives of white people
in my circles. I hate saying “black
people think …” or “all white people …” do such and such. I think the generalizing is unfair. However, I do feel safe in saying that most
black people expertience the world differently than most white people.
Dr. King’s context was America,
embroiled in racial conflict. The man I
have thought about alongside Martin Luther King Jr. is John the Baptist whom we
meet in Matthew’s Gospel. John burst
upon the scene calling the people of Judah to “Repent! For the Kingdom of heaven has come
near.” He allowed no margin for the
luxury of cooling off. Repentance is a
turning – to turn from looking and living in one direction to looking and
living in an altogether different direction.
God is over here, but you are
oriented over there. You have to radically turn your lives because the way you
are currently headed is away from God.
Essentially, this was John’s
message. As America today needs to turn
away from greed, materialism, racism, elitism, and xenophobia, John said the
people in the first century needed to turn away from sin and turn to God.
Otherwise, we will miss the presence of Jesus
even though, he is here. This season,
epiphany, the time after Christmas – this is Jesus’ ‘coming out party.’ We won’t see it, not now, not if we aren’t
watching. To miss it is to live apart
from God. If we live apart from God now,
we will be apart from him at the Judgment.
When Jesus returns in the Second Coming to call his own into the
Kingdom, we will not be among those counted as his own. We need to turn.
We need to turn because currently our gaze is
fixed by human wisdom in the direction of today’s definition of success. Philosophies like individualism, naturalism,
and patriotism do not appear inherently evil, but when one of these ways of
thinking and seeing define our worldview instead of Jesus defining our
worldview, it pull us away from the God who wants to saves us from self-destruction.
“Repent!”
Turn from where we are looking, from what we are thinking, from who we
are admiring, from how we are living; turn from this to God.
In the Gospels are stories of people who met
Jesus in person and still could not turn to him because they could not turn
away from the allure of wealth or the entrenched racism of their day. In the New Testament world, the segregation
was Jew-gentile. Today it is
white-black, or English speaking-non English speaking; or it is
citizen-immigrant; or it is Christian-Muslim.
Whatever divides people by objectifying those not-like-me as “other” –
whatever that division point is, it is evil and we must turn from it. We must in humble confession turn to
God. John preached that.
Dr. King claimed that God showed him
a vision of life – the life to come if people could learn to live in peace and
harmony and love for each other; people from all backgrounds. He said,
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!
John also had a sense of what would
it would be like when the words he preached became reality. He said,
11 “I baptize you with[b] water for
repentance, but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not
worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with[c] the Holy
Spirit and fire. 12 His winnowing fork is in his hand, and he will
clear his threshing floor and will gather his wheat into the granary; but the
chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.”
So, two prophets; one
condemned racial inequality, the other sin run rampant among the chosen people
of God. King’s denouncing of racism is a
damning of sin – a specific arena of sin and for us in 2016, one that arena,
racism, continues to trouble our communities because it exists and people of
color continue to suffer injustices. Likewise
John the Baptist issued a call that we must heed; we must turn from the ways of
the world to the ways of God as we know God in Jesus.
These two prophets who preached with
force and drama had vision. They imagined
the fulfillment of their dreams. John
the Baptist spoke and it was electric; he
baptizes with the Holy Spirit and with fire.
He will gather the grain, and the chaff. The chaff he will burn with
unquenchable fire. People from all
walks of life abandoned the comforts of Jerusalem and flooded out to the wilderness
to be baptized by him and hear him talk about the one who was to come.
Who was this Savior John forecast?
What would life be like upon his arrival? John offered the stark call – repent! And, he offered the promise of baptism by
spirit and fire.
Dr. King named the evil of racism and
imagined a world without it.
So what of it? What do we make of the preaching and the
vision of either man? Were their dreams
realized? Today we have Travon Martin
and Michael Brown and Tamir Rice. Today
secularism is on the rise; Christianity it so politicized, it is stripped of
anything in it that resembles faith.
John was anointed by God. Dr. King awakened America to God’s compassion
for the downcast and God’s hatred of racism and injustice. Both spoke with power as they cast compelling
visions. So, what do we do with the
world as it is?
Imagine John there in the Jordan. Everyone is spellbound. In those flowing waters, he appears to be the
most powerful man in the world and all who come defer to his passion and his fiery
teaching. The royal official, the temple
soldier, the priest, the Roman centurion; before John, they all shrink. Submissively, they go to the waters.
Then, Jesus comes. His eyes meet John’s. John finds himself tongue-tied. Matthew writes, “Jesus came … to be baptized by him [but]
John would have prevented him, saying, ‘I need to be baptized by you, and do
you come to me?’”
He who had cast the pre-vision of the Kingdom fell to pieces
when the Kingdom stood before him in the person of Jesus. John would have stopped Jesus at the start of
his ministry. Why? I believe seeing Jesus is so overwhelming, we
forget everything. At the same time, we
see everything.
We inherit John’s call to repentance and the 1960’s iteration
of it in Dr. King’s call to end segregation and build harmony and love across
racial lines. We repent and we work for
equality recognizing that when one group of people is wounded by prejudice, we
all are.
We anticipate the dreams of these prophets. God gives glimpses and so we can say with
John, Jesus baptizes with the Holy
Spirit. With MLK, we get glimpses of
the Promised Land where black boys and girls and white children and Jewish and
Syrian and Chinese and Mexican children all laugh and run and play together,
without fear. We can imagine it. We spend our lives working for it, reaching
for it.
Still we know that we won’t finally reach it until Jesus
meets our gaze as he did John’s. In that
moment, face to face, completely exposed before him, completely vulnerable, we
feel ourselves wrapped in his arms of love.
Then, we are finally home.
We know that day will come.
Until it does, we honor the prophets who have gone before us by working
for love and brotherhood and sisterhood as we understand things in light of the
way of Jesus. We can’t fully say what it
will be like when the dream comes true.
So, we imagine, we work for it, we pray for it, and with hopeful
expectation and full readiness, we wait for it.
AMEN
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