A Service for Martin Luther King Sunday.

The Rev. Carol A. Huston

Community Unitarian Church at White Plains, New York

January 17, 2010

 

 

 

First Reading                            from “Negroes Are Not Moving Too Fast”

                                             The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1964)

                                                                           Read by Petra Thombs

 

In 1963, at the time of the Washington march, the whole nation talked of Negro freedom and the Negro began to believe in its reality.  Then shattered dreams and the persistence of grinding poverty drove a small but desperate group of Negroes into the swamp of senseless violence.  Riots solved nothing, but they stunned the nation.  One of the questions they evoked was doubt about the Negro’s attachment to the doctrine of nonviolence.

 

Ironically, many important civic leaders began to lecture Negroes to adhere to nonviolence.  It is important to recall that Negroes created the theory of nonviolence as it applies to American conditions.  For years they fought within their own ranks to achieve its acceptance.  They had to overcome the accusations that nonviolence counseled love for murderers. Only after dozens of Birminghams, large and small, was it acknowledged that it took more courage to employ nonviolent direct action than impetuous force.

 

Yet a distorted understanding of nonviolence began to emerge among white leaders.  They failed to perceive that nonviolence can exist only in a context of justice.  When the white power structure calls upon the Negro to reject violence but does not impose upon itself the task of creating necessary social change, it is in fact asking for submission to injustice.  Nothing in the theory of nonviolence counsels this suicidal course.

 

The simple fact is that there cannot be nonviolence and tranquility, without significant reforms of the evils that endangered the peace in the first place.  It is the effort of the power structure to benefit from nonviolence without yielding meaningful change that is responsible for the rise of elements who would discredit it.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Second Reading                                         from Fist, Stick, Knife, Gun

by Geoffrey Canada, CEO of Harlem Children’s Zone.  (His mother is an active UU in Catherine Torpey’s Long Island congregation) 

 

This book outlines the choices Canada made as a child and youth in order to survive in a South Bronx neighborhood of the 1950s  and 60s.  He learned to fight with his fists, then carried a stick, and later a knife.  Finally, at home during winter vacation from Bowden College, he decided that he needed to have a gun.

 

Once a young person gets his or her hands on a gun there is a very strong temptation to shoot it.  Once you’ve handled a gun you recognize it as simply a tool.  And not many of us get a new tool and put it away unused.  .  .So the temptation is almost irresistible for children to shoot off guns in their possession. They want to see what it feels like.  What it sounds like.  .  .

 

When I look back on the power the gun had over my personality and my judgment I am amazed.  It didn’t happen all at once, the change was subtle.  At first I continued to avoid the gang of teenagers.  I crossed the street or turned down another block when I saw them.  But slowly, as I carried the gun with me day after day, my attitude began to change.  I began to think, “Why should I have to walk an extra block?  Why should I feel that I have to cross the street or look down when I pass those kids?”  .  .  .

 

I was lucky that winter break.  Time quickly came for me to go back to college and no member of the gang had felt the need to challenge the strange young man with fire in his eyes and his hand always in his coat pocket.  Away from the madness of the South Bronx, the gun again became just another useless article from home that I wouldn’t need until it was time to go back.  .  .   (and away from the neighborhood), my Christian upbringing proved to be stronger than my fear of the gang or my need for a sense of control over my environment.  In the end I realized that I didn’t want to kill anyone.  I knew that if I continued to carry the gun I would sooner or later pull the trigger.  I unloaded the gun, wrapped it in newspaper, took it to the town dump, and threw it away.[1]

 

 

 

 

Sermon

 

It seems like I’ve done nothing but complain about the trip to Ireland over the holidays to officiate at the wedding in the family of a close family friend.   Cold weather, impassible roads, a flu bug making its rounds with all of us.  It was good seeing our friends, but otherwise the trip was a low point of travel for one who always loves travel.  Now here’s another thing that has come to mind.  The flight both there and back was full of crying babies.

 

Now this was minor.  It doesn’t really bother me to have the cry of a baby in the background.  I’ve often tolerated it well in this sanctuary.  I don’t resist babies in the sanctuary.  But I do sometimes wonder what the baby is resisting.

 

What is a baby on a plane resisting?  Boredom, the nervousness of parents.  Discomfort of unaccustomed ear pressure changes.  Usually the baby stops crying when the landing is complete and they are caught up in the bustle of departure through the airport. 

 

But on our return trip, there was a two year old who never stopped protesting, never stopped resisting with loud cries as we got off the plane.  His mother got the stroller back, but the protests from the child never broke rhythm as he moved into the stroller and then moved on in line.  The line was slow, there was that to resist for all of us.  And meanwhile there was the crying in the background, on and on, often punctuated with screams of No!  Mother was trying to negotiate.  Would you like your blanket?  No!  Would you like to take your coat off?  Would you like some juice?  No!  And finally, in answer to Would you like a cookie? came the loudest sound of all.  NO, THANK YOU! 

 

About 100 feet of line broke into laughter.  The poor kid with the poor mother continued to cry, but the tension was broken for all the rest of us.  We no longer had to resist the fact that we were all bothered by this.  Babies cry.  That’s it.  It is part of the job of being a baby to resist things that hurt or irritate, or things you don’t understand. 

 

It seems like it is also one of the jobs of teenagers to resist certain things.  We hope that they will resist drugs and sex and the wrong kinds of friends.  But sometimes they resist their parents’ better ideas as well.  They too resist things that hurt or irritate – either themselves or their parents.  What they often are trying to do is to resist giving up independence, identity. 

 

The theme this month is “resistance,” and I am finding that a bit harder to define for myself than other themes we have encountered this year, because it can so obviously be positive or negative.  Resistance to pain, displeasure, the unknown, change, are probably natural in our development and survival.  The baby human or chimpanzee, or puppy cries and usually gets assistance that may be the difference between life and death. Resistance to things like pain and fear is natural and positive. 

 

But there are resistances that are dysfunctional.  What are you resisting or avoiding in your life?  Seeing a doctor?  Making a difficult phone call to a friend or associate?  Taking a stand on some issue in your workplace?  Learning to get along with a new person who has come into your life?  We have little corners of resistance in our lives, often based on fear or at least fear of change.  Sometimes we are aware of these resistances.  Sometimes they operate subconsciously or passively in our lives.  I hope you will use some time while we are on this theme to find the corners of dysfunctional resistance or avoidance in your lives.

 

In my family, we resist talking about money among us until we really have to and then those discussions are more difficult than they might be.  I resist cleaning my desk off, so I often find myself apologizing for how it appears. The fact is that I rarely lose a sheet of paper as long as it has a place in one of the piles on my desk.  I’m more likely to lose something when I have slipped it into a file – not sure which one.  So there is some sense to my resistance of that cleaning, sorting process.   Still – it remains one of my new year’s resolutions, to clean off my desk.

 

But on this Martin Luther King Weekend, I want you to think about those times when resistance, rationally chosen, provides a path for many to follow.  As I said last week, much of the literary and film and TV narrative and documentary that we attend to brings stories of resistance, resistance to pain, fear, and change.  Your resource list includes films that show resistance to treatment of animals, the mentally challenged, the politically marginalized.  I should add films like “Milk,” “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” “Avatar” – which portray resistance of  societal forces that would destroy gays and lesbians, women and children, nature and society livingt.  So much of literature is about resistance, rationally chosen, clearly expressed.

 

Martin Luther King grew up in a society that gave him many things to resist.  He was an intelligent and thoughtful man, and he probably could have led a more a longer, more simple life as an academic or as a pastor.  But the world of the American South in the 1940s and 1950s called him to resist the injustice he saw for his community.  It called him to resist personally and to lead others in that resistance.

 

And he made the connection that his movement needed with non-violent resistance.  Petra Thombs and I toured the Alabama, Mississippi, and western Tennessee in 2006 with a group to see sites related to the Civil Rights movement, and I think we both came back with a reinforced respect for the non-violence resistance which guided that campaign.  Non-violent resistance is hard work.  It demands self-control, it demands trust in your community.   The black men and women on the front lines of this form of resistance had to learn to turn up every day and face rejection every day.  You had to sit at the counter or get in line to register to vote, and when you were turned out one day, you came back the next.  You had to be prepared to face injury and attack and not strike back.  This demanded persistence and courage.  And you had to recognize that your quiet response would evoke fury in your adversary.  Last week I read a passage from “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Herman Melville passage, and we will have the opportunity to talk about that short story next week.  The words from Bartleby, “I would prefer not to,” brought confusion and anger to his peers and his superiors, but it disarmed them as well. 

 

But the Martin Luther King reading that Petra offered today showed that Dr. King saw non-violent resistance in a complicated way.  “(N)onviolence can exist only in the context of justice.  .  .(Without) necessary social change, it is in fact asking for submission to injustice. Nothing in the theory of nonviolence counsels this suicidal course.”  Dr. King wanted everyone to resist violence, certainly.  But he also called us to resist injustice, by whatever means, and that passage shows that King would have given the priority to the resistance of injustice.

 

Geoffrey Canada learned that a gun can be an “irresistible” force in his hands, but he struggled to resist it.   The moment when he throws that gun away is powerful.  He probably could have lived his life out in Maine and resisted or avoided the need to face urban violence in his daily life.  But that is not what he did.  He returned to New York.  For a long time he taught martial arts to help children feel safe on the streets without sticks or knives or guns in their hands.  And he is now at the head of a comprehensive family education program that is showing the potential to change individual lives and the community as a whole.  His life-long work has been to resist the status quo, to resist and redirect the way people can handle fear on the streets.  I am going to try to get him here to speak to us at some point in the coming year.

 

Resistance to change, to aggression, to inhumanity is built into us.  But sometimes we need to engage in acts of will and courage to resist attacks on our identity, attacks on our sense of justice.

 

In his last sermon, delivered in Washington just a few days before he died, Martin Luther King said this:  “On some positions, cowardice asks the question.  Is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, Is it politic?  Vanity asks the question, Is it popular?  Conscience asks the question, Is it right?

 

“There comes a time when one must take the position that it is neither safe nor politic nor popular, but one must do it because conscience tells us it is right.”[2]

 

Cowardice, expedience, vanity can give us reason to resist many actions that we might make in life.  On these small things, it might not make much difference if we are stopped by these roadblocks.  We don’t need to resist everything.  We can choose our battles.  But on the larger matters of life, may we listen to conscience and find in ourselves the courage to follow.

 

 

 

 

The closing hymn is “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”  Written about 100 years ago for a Lincoln Day celebration, it is held dear by the African Americans, called the national anthem of the black community here in the United States.  I have always valued the fact that we carry this hymn in our hymnal.  We sing it here at CUC two or three times a year, and when we attend a Martin Luther King event, as some of us will tomorrow, we are able to sing out in solidarity and in respect for the struggles that African Americans have faced.  Hymn 149.

 

Resource List for January Theme – Resistance

Books

Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street  by Herman Melville; text available on-line and in many editions.

On Civil Disobedience  The classic work by Henry David Thoreau

My Experiments with Truth, BN Publishing; 2008. The autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi.

An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum, Henry Holt & Co.; 1996.  Diary of a Dutch Jew who lived in Amsterdam during World War II.

 

Children’s Books

Wings by Christopher Myers. This children’s book reworks a traditional Greek myth.  Here, Icarus becomes Ikarus, a boy of color, who learns to fly in spite of the society in which he lives.

Biographies of Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, Whitney Young, Harriet Tubman and other leaders, available at a variety of reading levels.

 

Films

Star Trek: First Contact (1996) “Resistance is futile.” But not really.

I Am Sam (2001) Sean Penn as a developmentally disabled man fighting for custody of his daughter.

Good Night, and Good Luck (2005) Against the threat of Communism and McCarthyism, Edward R. Murrow (David Strathairn) and Fred Friendly (George Clooney) of CBS News found the courage to take a stand against fear.

The Secret of NIMH (1982) To save her ill son, a field mouse must seek the aid of a colony of super-intelligent rats, to whom she has a deeper link than she ever suspected. (Family)

Amazing Grace and Chuck (1988) The top pitcher of the little league team decides to quit playing little league until nuclear weapons are disarmed.  Can one kid’s act of resistance make the world listen? (Family)