Bending the Arc

June 21, 2015

Letter from the Birmingham City Jail

Before sharing the reading for this morning, a word or two on what’s going to unfold in worship here this summer. As you may have noticed, last month I invited you to share with the worship planning team suggestions for readings for the summer, with a particular eye to non-scriptural texts or Bible passage that are not part of the Revised Common Lectionary’s three-year cycle of readings from the Bible.

The canon – the Bible as we know it – was fixed by sometime around the year 400. It’s impossible to date it with certainty because the records of many early church councils have been lost to time.

Indeed, St. Iraneaus, writing almost 200 years earlier, had observed:

“It is not possible that the gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are. For, since there are four-quarters of the earth in which we live, and four universal winds, while the church is scattered throughout all the world, and the 'pillar and ground' of the church is the gospel and the spirit of life, it is fitting that she should have four pillars breathing out immortality on every side, and vivifying men afresh… Therefore the gospels are in accord with these things.”

And, therefore, more than 1,500 years ago, the institution of the church decided that, when it comes to “Holy Scripture,” God had said all that God needed to say.

Personally and theologically, I think that’s wrong, but when it comes to ecclesiology – that is to say, when it comes to the church – I’m willing to go along. Most of the time. It makes sense, to me, that we should struggle together with the texts that have been the center of Christian faith and life for 2,000 year, and it’s also quite clear to me that the richness of the established canon has wisdom that remains for the church to discover and live into.

Nevertheless, I agree whole-heartedly with our UCC sisters and brothers who famously marketed a slogan a few years back declaring that “God is still speaking.”

God is still inspiring women and men to put words together praising the Creator, challenging the church, comforting the afflicted, and afflicting the comfortable. The church should pay attention, and it should do so in worship.

So, this summer at Clarendon we will. Thus, our readings will come from a variety of sources, and we begin this morning with a reading from a text around which there has grown, over the past half century, a movement to have it considered for inclusion in the canon of scripture. Listen, then, for a word from God in this passage from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from the Birmingham Jail.”

There was a time when the church was very powerful. It was during that period that the early Christians rejoiced when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was the thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Wherever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed and immediately sought to convict them for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators." But they went on with the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven" and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contest. Things are different now. The contemporary church is so often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's often vocal sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. I meet young people every day whose disappointment with the church has risen to outright disgust. I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future. I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham, even if our motives are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson scratched across the pages of history the majestic word of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. For more than two centuries our foreparents labored here without wages; they made cotton king; and they built the homes of their masters in the midst of brutal injustice and shameful humiliation -- and yet out of a bottomless vitality our people continue to thrive and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail. We will win our freedom because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our echoing demands.

This is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

I hadn’t intended to preach from King’s letter this morning. I had planned to begin this summer on a lighter note. When the worship team looked at the various suggestions for the People’s Lectionary, the group noticed a common theme running through the readings: persistence. That’s often another word for faithfulness, and one that comes with the suggestion of struggle – against opposition, against nature, against exhaustion.

As I read comments and commentaries in the aftermath of last Wednesday night’s shooting at the historic Emanuel AME church in Charleston, exhaustion was a common theme.

“Too tired of it even to be outraged anymore,” wrote one friend on her Facebook wall.

“I ache at this bloody reminder of the power of the system of racism to shape our behavior,” wrote another friend.

Finally, the comments that President Obama made rang with exhaustion: “I’ve had to make statements like this too many times.”

How long, O Lord, must your people cry out before you deliver them? How long?

The question I find myself asking is, do I have the faith that Dr. King had as he sat confined to a southern jail cell?

“I hope the church as a whole will meet the challenge of this decisive hour,” he wrote. “But even if the church does not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future.” Can I say the same thing, a half century further on?

Given that he was younger than my parents, it would have come as no stunning actuarial surprise were Dr. King still living. There are many things that likely would have surprised him had he lived even his full three score and ten, but I think King’s biggest disappointment would be the collapse of the very hope that sustained him amidst the mountains of despair he carved through in his own short life.

“I have no despair about the future,” he said more than once. Indeed, on the night before his assassination he declared:

“Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now, because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind.

“Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land!

“And so I'm happy, tonight.

“I'm not worried about anything.

“I'm not fearing any man.

“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

That is perseverance. That is faithfulness. And that places a prophetic demand before the church in the year of our Lord 2015. For so many of us today will look at the ongoing systemic racism, injustice, and violence in America, throw up our hands and say, “I am just sick and tired of it; there is nothing I can do.”

It’s understandable that we, as individuals, can come to feel that way. I have certainly felt that way more than once in this congregation’s long struggle for LGBTQ equality. So, sure, feeling tired and fed up and even hopeless, is going to happen to us as individuals from time to time.

But that cannot be the response of the church. Though he all but predicted it in the passage I read to begin this morning, what I still think would most have surprised Dr. King had he lived was the remarkable and swift decline of the role of the church as an effective advocate for justice in American life.

We have conceded the role of prophet, and turned in on ourselves to become nothing more than spiritual balm for individual souls.

A half century ago, King warned us:

“If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.”

Well I’ll be damned if I have given my life to a social club.

So, borrowing a phrase from the title of a book King published the year before his death, where do we go from here?

I remain convinced that the community of the followers of Jesus remains central and crucial to the work of reconciliation. We have been given the ministry of reconciliation as the central calling of the people of God, according to St. Paul’s word to the early church. That ministry remains our most pressing work, and the work to which we must remain persistently faithful no matter the circumstances that press against us.

By the grace of God and through the gift of the church, we don’t struggle alone. We are part of a larger movement in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) that has consistently worked for racial justice, for reconciliation, and against gun violence. These issues are as real and pressing and local for us as the economic – and racial – divide between North Arlington and Nauk, or the placement of a gun shop between a flower shop and a frame store in the midst of a residential neighborhood about a mile or so from our doors. A Sunday morning sermon is not the time to dig into the details, but the larger point is this: we are not alone; there are good resources on anti-racism and strong networks of advocates within the larger church for the work to which we are jointly called.

To be sure, the arc of the moral universe is mighty long, but it does bend toward justice. When you and I do the work of love, we bend that arc just a little closer to holy ground.

This week, the bodies of nine of our sisters and brothers will be committed to that ground. The ground will be watered by the tears of survivors; it can, if we so choose and commit, be consecrated by the work that those of us still living do to further the cause of reconciliation, justice and shalom. May it be so, and by that work of hearts and hands and faith, may we all overcome someday. Amen.