Good morning. Martin Luther King was a preacher, and I’m a preacher, so allow me to start with a word of prayer for the courage to speak and to listen. Gracious God, guide us to seek your Truth: come whence it may, cost what it will, lead where it might. Amen.
It is such a profound honor and privilege to have been invited to give this address this morning. Truly. I am overwhelmed that our community would invite me to this moment and doing so in the name of King is a tremendous honor. Now, I hope that the Spirit has given me some things worth saying this morning, but I can tell you that I’ve already been blessed just preparing for this address. Like most people who have studied history and rhetoric, I knew about King’s “Mountaintop” speech, I’ve studied “I Have a Dream,” I’ve been inspired by the “Drum Major Instinct,” and I’ve said that if we ever decide to add more to the New Testament, that King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” is at the top of the list. But in preparation for this morning, I’ve spent hours and hours since Councilmember Anthony Smith so graciously called me and asked me to speak reading King’s letters, speeches, and sermons. It’s been so very good to spend that time with King this week, reading and reflecting on his words.
The theme of this weekend – both as set by our Human Relations Council which does such good and important work in our community and by the King Center in Atlanta – is “cultivating beloved community.” So as I’ve been reading King, and reflecting, and praying about beloved community, I’ll share some of the fruits of my thinking and pray that they nourish you.
The first thing that becomes very clear when we consider Martin Luther King is that it’s not about him. As King said on the night before his martyrdom “It doesn’t matter with me now.” For King, it never mattered about him – it mattered about the One King was following, the One King drew his strength from, the One in whom King entrusted his hopes, the One who gave King his dreams, the One who makes beloved community possible. And that One is Jesus of Nazareth – a poor, brown-skinned man from an oppressed group in Roman-occupied Judea in the 1st century.
Yes, I know this is not a sermon and this event is hosted by our city government – but King made no apologies about which drum major he was following and so if we are going to rightly remember King, we cannot pretend that King is intelligible apart from his faith. We remember King as a leader – and, to be sure, he was and still is. But what made King such a good leader is that he was a follower. King was confident that God was up to something in this world, that God is shepherding us into beloved community. King is remembered as a leader because he was a faithful follower. That’s a lesson to us in a world where everyone wants to be a leader but no one is quite sure where we’re going – we need more faithful followers.
And there is nothing that King said that does not flow out of his commitment to the way of love as it was exemplified by Jesus. However, if we want to use different language about this – we can. If we prefer, we can take a cue from King when he said that the moral arc of the universe bends towards justice. So if you’d prefer, we can say that justice is what is at the center of King’s legacy; because for King, justice had a name and a face – and that is Jesus. This orientation towards justice is what undergirds beloved community.
And I bring this all up because I think King would tell us not to confuse the tip of the finger with what the finger is pointing towards. The theme of cultivating and achieving beloved community is such a good one because it keeps us going in the direction that King was going in. While it is good to lift up and celebrate King on this day, what we can’t lose sight of is that the fullness is King’s legacy is not in his speeches or marches, but rather in one of the things that becomes so very clear when reading King deeply – his legacy is about cultivating beloved community.
Cultivating is a helpful word for this – it’s an agricultural term. And as we know from gardening, the job is never finished. Yes, there’s always more work to do in terms of planting and weeding, but the cycle of seasons never ceases. King picked up the seeds of beloved community from his faith, he watered it with conversations with Jewish Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and with Hindu ethicist Mohandas Gandhi, he sought to pull out the weeds of segregation and violence, and, to be sure, he harvested fruits of beloved community. But there are more seasons ahead of us. Our community needs more of these fruits; there is more to cultivate. And this is why we must do more than remember King, we cannot be content celebrating what he did. No, we must get our hands in the dirt and continue the work that he did of cultivating beloved community.
We throw that term around a lot – “beloved community.” But what does that even really mean? Is it about singing Kumbaya and all sharing a Coca-Cola as we teach the world to sing in perfect harmony? Of course not. But a lot of people dismiss it as such. Like belief in the God who King followed, beloved community can be seen as something quaint from a bygone era. People will tell us to look at Ukraine, to look at Congress, to look at local elections and let them know where we see beloved community. But we are here because beloved community is not some ideal, not some pipe dream, not wishful thinking.
King saw beloved community as a realistic and achievable goal. There is a phrase that King uses almost synonymously with “beloved community” and it shows us how and why it is possible. That other phrase is “non-violence.” King is very clear on this: only love has the power to lead to true and lasting transformation. If we are focused on loving, we cannot, at the same time, do violence. Only love can absorb the evil of the world without adding to it. Love is creative and redemptive. Love is our privilege and obligation. Love is about eliminating our enemies, not by defeating them, but by befriending them so that we are no longer enemies. King once wrote as if he were St. Paul writing to the American Church, “The greatest of all virtues is love. It is here that we find the true meaning of the Christian faith. Love is at bottom the meaning of the cross… Love is at bottom the heartbeat of the moral cosmos.”
We must remember that King always talked about beloved community as non-violent resistance. He was no pacifist though. He was a resistor. And I wonder sometimes if we’ve dropped the resistance side of things. If we instead just roll over and accept things as they are instead of dreaming of what they could be. Like love, non-violence is not passive. Love is not about how we feel, it is about our actions. It’s why marriage vows include things like “have and hold, honor and cherish” instead of saying “I’ll think and say nice things about you.” Just as love is about pursuing the good of the other, non-violence resistance is about actively resisting the attitudes and systems that degrade other people.
And if you’ve ever loved anybody, then you know that love is hard work. This is why people dismiss the idea of beloved community – because, in truth, they don’t think it’s too pie-in-the-sky, but because they know it is gritty and challenging. In one of his speeches, King invites us to be dissatisfied. We should not be satisfied with underfunded and under-resourced public schools. We should not be satisfied with disparities in our criminal justice, education, business, entertainment, and finance industries that fall so clearly and consistently along racial lines. We should not be satisfied with a dysfunctional government that does not work for the People. We should not be satisfied when violence is seen as the solution to any problem. We should not be satisfied with an economy that allows a few to flourish and most to flounder. We should not be satisfied with ignorance or anything less than the truth, because as Flannery O’Conner put it, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.”
Well, we live in a world that is all about being satisfied, or perhaps pacified is the better term. King was quite critical of the downsides of capitalism, and we would do well to heed his warnings, which stand in line with those of the Biblical prophets. We are so distracted by our own pet projects and our struggles with one another that we forget about the larger issues that are holding us back from beloved community. King is very clear on this – beloved community is not about defeating enemies, it is about becoming united to defeat injustice. If we are going to achieve beloved community, we have to be dissatisfied not with those who we disagree with, but dissatisfied with division and injustice.
For King, the goal of beloved community is not merely the emancipation of those suffering under the oppression of Jim Crow and its modern manifestations, but beloved community really is about the whole community. King notes that racism and prejudice come from fear and misunderstanding, and King knew that “perfect love casts out fear.” Those who benefit from and perpetuate injustice and racism, are not powerful; rather they are quite weak. They are captive to fears and their imaginations are narrowed. King’s commitment to love drove him to want liberation for them as well.
A refrain throughout his work is that we are tied together in an inescapable network of mutuality. What affects one directly affects all indirectly. Beloved community is as much about freeing those who are scared of change or unable to visualize the most excellent way of love as it is about eliminating injustice. Beloved community is not good news for some and bad news for others – no, it is good news for all. Again, good news can still be hard work. Transformation might be exactly what we need, but change can be a challenge.
The Human Relations Council’s theme centers around cultivating a beloved community mindset. So with a sense of the importance of both love and community in defining beloved community, I want to turn now to reflect on what that mindset might be that can take us there – because that mindset is what allows us to meet these challenges head-on instead of pursuing answers to the wrong questions. There is a mindset that King consistently pointed towards and sought to cultivate. It comes from the work of Martin Buber, a Jewish philosopher. Buber wrote that what causes so many issues in our world is that we end up having the wrong mindset when it comes to one another. Buber writes about this and King picks it up and applies this to beloved community – we confuse I-Thou relationships with I-It relationships. In other words, we treat people like an “it” and we treat things like people. Our loves become disordered, our priorities skewed, our communities fractures, and the result is the animosity and brokenness that we have come to accept as normal. And because, for King, humans are made in the image of God, to relate to any person as an It is a form of heresy. For those of us in the Church, we must name racism, poverty, and injustice as heresies which deny the very first chapter of the Bible and we must refute this as strongly as we do any other religious issue.
In a different context, the great bishop and civil rights champion of South Africa, Desmond Tutu, spoke about the idea of ubuntu – which can be translated as “I am because we are.” In other words, our humanity is grounded in community, not our ability to self-justify. It is the I-Thou mindset that sees the other as a gift from God, a person worthy of dignity, as a subject and not an object that allows us to cultivate beloved community. Will we prioritize this connectedness, or will we continue down the road of individualism? In one letter, King notes that we are all extremists about something. The question is what will we be an extremist for? For hate or for love? For inclusion or our comforts? For the status quo or for the inbreaking of the beloved community?
And, particularly for those of us in predominantly and historically white churches – we must clearly denounce racism as antithetical to our faith. It has been the white church’s complicity and commitments that have, largely, created the issues of injustice and we must take responsibility for these actions. Does it matter that we weren’t here in 1619, or 1776, or 1861, or 1906, or 1964? No. I am blessed to have two wonderful daughters who mostly stay out of trouble. But if they do something that causes damage to another, is it not my responsibility to address that wrong? Of course it is. As King said, not only are we our brother’s keeper, we are our brother’s brother, and our sister’s sister. The white church and community was, undeniability, involved in the creation of the injustices we are dealing with and must see it as our sacred duty to address this in the name of the God who is love.
All of us, regardless of our age, race, gender, class, or any of those other identities that we claim in addition to being an “I” have before us the question of whether we relate to others as a “Thou” or an “It.” It’s a question of whether or not we are cultivating the dream of the beloved community or if we are adding to the nightmares of selfish individualism and division. As Bryan Stevenson has encouraged us to do, we must get proximate to one another. One of the biggest barriers we have to beloved community is our distance from one another.
I suppose it has been the work that we’ve done at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church that ended up getting me invited to speak this morning. Goodness knows, we’re not perfect and we’ve got a lot more to do – but I’m so proud of that congregation for getting proximate to difficult issues and having hard conversations. We’ve explored our history, considered our present, and added icons which reflect a blessed diversity to our historic worship space so that we can be closer to the ideals of beloved community.
And there are plenty of others who are doing this work in our community and should be seen as examples I-Thou relationship building: Actions in Faith and Justice, the Human Relations Council, Women for Community Justice, the Salisbury-Rowan NAACP, and Racial Equity Rowan. I want to briefly lift up the work of that last group – Racial Equity Rowan. I am on the Steering Committee for this group and we have been bringing Dismantling Racism workshops to our community since 2019. Our next workshop, all of which are hosted at Hood Seminary, will be on March 23-24. You can learn more at racialequityrowan.org and I would commend it to all.
Erica Chenoweth is an economist at Harvard University and has done extensive research into what it takes to really get a movement going. What she has found is that it takes 3 1/2% of a population to be actively involved for that cause or idea to be considered mainstream and successful. Just 3 1/2%. We might think about the Arab Spring, or Black Lives Matter, or what climate activists are trying to get us towards – we just need 3 1/2% of our community that is fully dedicated to cultivating beloved community for it to take off. Based on the population of Rowan County, we’re talking about a little over 5,000 people. If there’s one thing this pandemic has shown us, it’s how fast things can spread.
What will we do with King’s legacy of beloved community. Writing from prison, he critiqued the Church – noting that it used to be a thermostat in society, that it influenced morality and principals, that it provoked a crisis of conscience when that was needed, but now it is merely a thermometer that records and judges what is going on all around it. Whether you’re a part of the Church or not, it’s a question for us to wrestle with. We’re all here on a Monday morning to celebrate the legacy of King and cultivate beloved community – but will we do that as thermometers that simply tells our society that we have a problem or will we be a thermostat that turns the heat up on institutions that have failed us while at the same time lowering the temperature of our divisiveness as we strive to truly see the other as a Thou and not an It?
I’ve already mentioned that Gandhi had a significant influence on King. Whether or not King knew of this particular Gandhi quote doesn’t matter, because he would have certainly recognized the truth of Gandhi’s words: “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” My brothers and sisters – we have much living to do. Beloved community is within reach. Transformed I-Thou relations can happen among us. The resistance and risk of love is worth pursuing as if today is all we have. And at the same time, we must always be learning because we do not know it all; we do not, as individuals, have all the answers; we will never exhaust the depths of love. So we keep on engaging in dialogue and learning. And as we learn, we strive for beloved community like there’s no tomorrow.
I thank God for each of the Thous that I see before me and I am thankful to be a part of this community that is learning how to recognize and cultivate a more beloved community. May we who have heard the call of justice have both the passion and grace to pursue it and also may be given the courage, wisdom, and power to achieve beloved community.
