Sermon given by Rev. Frank Clarkson, January 15, 2023.
This month we’re learning about and reflecting on beloved community, as articulated by Martin Luther King, Jr., and embodied in the civil rights movement. Beloved community is not a place, it’s a process, that’s always asking for our attention and participation. It’s like heaven here on earth, which we do catch glimpses of from time to time, but it’s never a place where we get to say, “We’ve arrived, we’re done.” Beloved community asks us to practice expanding our hearts and minds, so we come to new and deeper understandings; it asks us to keep on moving forward. As we try to live more and more into this way of being, called beloved community, the spiritual we just sang could be a good prayer or mantra to have with us on our way:
Guide my feet, while I run this race,
hold my hand, stand by me, search my heart,
For I don’t want to run this race in vain.
I don’t want to run this race in vain, and I know you don’t either. Which is one reason we come to church, and are part of this community, because we find inspiration and encouragement here; we sense the Spirit moving in our midst. And we start to understand it’s a shared practice—living out our hopes and our intentions in community, with one another.
There were twenty-five of us on Zoom Wednesday night for the first session of the Transforming Hearts class that is being facilitated by Clare, Tori, and Zan. That class is about helping make our congregation and our world more welcoming to transgender people, and the first session was all about beloved community. It was a good reminder that this work of building beloved community is work, and we do it with others, and it invites us to stretch and grow and change. So things will get better, especially for those who are marginalized and suffering under the current system.
This is what the American civil rights movement set out to do, starting back in the 1950s. Not unlike the Black Lives Matter movement of today, it started with Black folks saying, “Stop killing us, stop harassing us, stop denying us our humanity because of the color of our skin!”
Sometimes I’m struck by how much things have changed in my lifetime. In the South I grew up in, public spaces was still segregated when I was a child. There’s still segregation right here in New England, and so much for us to work on. But when we despair for the state of our world, can we take heart that things have gotten better? On this weekend, when we remember Rev. Dr. King, it can seem that beloved community is still more like a dream, and still a long way off. But we have come a long way. And even though there are new challenges and threats, thee’s no way we’re going back to those bad old days.
What we need, on this day, is to take hope, and to take courage, so we can help do our part to keep us moving forward. To that end, what I’m feeling called to do, on this day, particularly as white, straight man, with all kinds of privilege, is to lift up and amplify some voices of those who have walked the talk of Beloved Community. Because they are ones who can help hold our hands, and stand by us, inspire our hearts and guide our feet. Cause we don’t want to run this race in vain.
One of the gifts of Martin Luther King’s public ministry was how he took his Christian faith and theology and applied it, not only to people’s behavior, but the systems and structures our unjust society. He took seriously Jesus’ call to love your enemies, and he called his followers to practice this with their oppressors. Listen to his words:
“To our most bitter opponents we say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.’ ”
“We shall meet your physical force with soul force.” Isn’t this what is needed these days? Soul force, which King learned about from Gandhi; the strength and the presence and the spirit to be stronger than those who would undermine our progress and tear things down. The ability to rise above our human tendency for vengeance and retribution.
Isn’t this why the Civil Rights Movement is so inspiring? Not because King was a great orator, which he was, but because of the many ordinary people who showed such extraordinary strength and courage in the struggle.
John Lewis was such a person. As a young man following Dr. King on the march from Selma to Montgomery, he was severely beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, and still he kept on working for justice, eventually becoming a congressman from Georgia. John Lewis was a person of deep faith and courage, which we heard in his words earlier. He said, “I discovered that you have to have this sense of faith that what you’re moving toward is already done. It’s already happened. And you live as if you’re already there…”
John Lewis lived his life that way, as if the beloved community was already here. And he backed this up by doing his own work. Listen to a few more lines from that same interview several years before his death:
“… those of us in the struggle… we studied. We prepared ourselves. It’s just not something that is natural. You have to be taught the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence. In the religious sense, in the moral sense, you can say that in the bosom of every human being, there is a spark of the divine. So you don’t have a right as a human to abuse that spark of the divine in your fellow human being.
…if you have someone attacking you, beating you, spitting on you, you have to think of that person. Years ago that person was an innocent child, an innocent little baby. What happened? Did something go wrong? Did someone teach that person to hate, to abuse others? So you try to appeal to the goodness of every human being and you don’t give up. You never give up on anyone.”
John Lewis was, in his being, such an embodiment of soul force. In the email I sent out this morning, I included the recording of this interview, which I encourage you to listen to, as a way of connecting with and honoring the spirit of this Martin Luther King weekend.
Bernice Johnson Reagon is a singer, composer, scholar, social activist, and founder of the women’s a cappella group, “Sweet Honey in the Rock.” She used her voice in the Civil Rights Movement as one of the Freedom Singers, who led singing at rallies and mass meetings. She says,
“I don't have any sense of the civil rights movement existing without the singing we did in marches and mass meetings and in jails. There is no separation, and for me, if I hear a program about the civil rights movement, if you're not listening to some of these recordings, I feel you've missed an opportunity to understand the energy and the voice, the articulate voice of the masses of people who stepped out of the old ways of being and just got in the way to change and give us a new situation…
“If we were there, then we sang… if you're there with masses of people, you are able to have a proactive, positive experience, and the major carrier of that interpretation is the singing.”
She says, “Sound is a way to extend the territory you can affect. Communal singing is a way of announcing you are here and possessing the territory. When police or the sheriff would enter mass meetings and start taking pictures and names, and we knew our jobs were on the line, and maybe more… inevitably somebody would begin a song. Soon everyone was singing and we had taken back the air in that space.”
To help build beloved community, don’t forget to sing! It helps you to access that soul force, to touch that power and that depth. It’s not about performance or perfection, it’s about coming together, announcing your presence and taking back that space.
I’m going to share one more voice. This one is from the liberation movement in South Africa; from that movement’s spiritual leader, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died just over a year ago. His faith and courage, his humility and sense of humor, made him a needed and powerful leader in a very difficult struggle. Tutu confesses that there were times in the fight against apartheid when things look bleak, and he would say in his prayers, “God, we know you’re on our side. But couldn’t you make it a little more obvious?”
Listen to these words he addressed to their oppressors in the South African government, military, and society, those who upheld that unjust system:
“You have already lost! Let us say to you nicely: You have already lost! We are inviting you to come and join the winning side! Your cause is unjust. You are defending what is fundamentally indefensible, because it is evil. It is evil without question. It is immoral. It is immoral without question. It is unchristian. Therefore, you will bite the dust! And you will bite the dust comprehensively.
These voices, and many others, were powerful and needed witnesses in the liberation struggles of their day. And they speak to us in these days too, in our work to carry on building beloved community. They tell us to have faith, to act as if we have already won the struggle. They remind us that soul force is bigger than any of us; that when we tap into it, when it unites a people or community, it becomes a force “that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance” (Robert F. Kennedy). They remind us to keep on moving forward; to keep showing up, trusting that we are on our way. They remind us to keep on singing. Now, and always,
Amen.