NIOT Martin Luther King, Jr.
Celebration
Shiloh United Methodist Church
January 20, 2019
The late great Detroit activist, Grace Lee Boggs,
related that geography conspired to make her more of a follower of Malcolm X
than Dr. King. She was a Black Power
activist who saw King’s values of nonviolence and the Beloved Community as
naïve and sentimental. Even when her
Congressperson, John Conyers, proposed the national King holiday, she bristled
fearing that worship of a charismatic leader might diminish the struggle and
endeavor of grass-roots activists. But
as she looked back on King, she began to wonder what might have happened if
Malcolm’s militancy had been blended with Martin’s vision of the Beloved
Community. Boggs saw in King’s last two
years of speaking the heart of a revolutionary—questioning capitalism,
challenging the Viet Nam War, recognizing a deeper and shared struggle to bring
about a new society. King had the heart
of a true revolutionary. “[T}rue
revolutions are about redefining our relationships with one another, to the
Earth and to the world; about creating a new society in the places and spaces
left vacant by the disintegration of the old; about hope, not despair; about
saying yes to life and no to war; about finding the courage to love and care
for the peoples of the world as we love and care for our own families.”[1]
True revolutions are about redefining our
relationships with one another. In
Hebrew Scripture, two words are regularly paired to define God’s character, to
define the foundations on which the universe is made: justice and righteousness. Together these words basically mean “right
relationship.” We do right with each
other. We do right by each other. We spend very little time claiming we are
right . . . . apart from one another. As
King asserted, we are tied together in a single garment of destiny. The Beloved Community is a shared
endeavor. The Great Weaver has made us
as warp and weft to one another:
different, complementary, and woven together. In this day and age, we might also
acknowledge that Dr. King would readily extend the Beloved Community to our
sister, the Yellowstone River, to our brothers, the Beartooths, to our
siblings, the bison, to our cousins, cutthroat trout. We are learning that to do violence to these
our sisters, brothers, siblings, and cousins, is to disrupt the Beloved
Community intended by Creator.
Dr. King did not believe the Beloved Community was
some utopian dream. Rather, he believed
it could be achieved through confrontational and courageous nonviolence. Violence and escalatory violence are the
original sins in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
The first time the word “sin”
appears in the Bible is in the Cain and Abel story, Cain’s murder of his
brother leading to the settling down of civilization, imperialism, and escalatory
violence. The genius in Dr. King’s
practice of the elements of nonviolence is a recognition that those who love
justice are too often driven to be right triumphantly, retributively, and in a
way that drives a stake through the heart of community life. We argue a point to defeat an
opponent. We give up our integrity to
show we are the more true “justice seekers,” the more advanced and grown human
beings, the one who can cite chapter and verse from Bible, Marx, Mother Jones,
or Malcolm. Purity tests never get us to
the Beloved Community.
When we argue a point to win, when we belittle each
other and label each other with little passive-aggressive quotes like, “I can
remember when I used to think like that, be like that, until I grew up, read
that book, became woke” we repeat an imperial, colonialist narrative that does
not recognize our common cause.
Accountability is critical.
Sarcasm is often necessary as a form of confrontation. But ridicule without a want for
reconciliation rips the seam of possibility so that our movement, our common
cause, our community become isolated embers which can burn down whole forests
with a passion for justice that is more barbaric than Beloved Community. Dr. King wanted us to find our salvation in
one another.
Beloved Community is about our willingness to be
transformed by the other, changed by the other, know that it matters little to
be right while the world burns. Conflict
is a necessary part of good diversity.
But more movements and causes have come to an end because burning and
burying our natural colleagues has become more important than growing enough to
ask ourselves, as Claudia Rankine, founder of The Racial Imaginary Institute,
said, “How can I say this so we can stay in this car together?”[2] We need movements, smaller communities,
organizations that are tied together in Billings, people who know their
salvation is bound up in one another so that these movements, communities, and
organizations can move out into the world to imagine and co-create a wider
Beloved Community which stands resolute against racism, materialism, and
militarism. Let the work we do here grow our spiritual
muscle for the challenge we face in the wider world.
The first rule of empire is to divide
to conquer. Do not let it happen. The truth is, the truth is, you were pieced
together by the Divine because you belong to one another.
Right now our nation is caught in a wider, systemic
narrative of hate and cruelty that we must resist, transcend, and
transform.
Archbishop Desmond Tutu once
ruminated, “How desperately sad it is that in a time when the world faces so
many formidable problems that we spend so many of our days arguing in God’s
name over whether two grown men who love one another can marry one another. God is looking down upon us,” he said, “and
weeping, asking, ‘What are my children doing to one another?’” In memory of the recent remembrance of the 20th
anniversary of Matthew Shephard’s death, a beautiful young man from the
University of Wyoming who was beaten, tortured, and killed because he was gay,
and to honor Archbishop Tutu’s question,
I believe we need to talk about the sins of the Christian Church and how
we have destroyed Beloved Community with our own hate and cruelty. Culturally, how we have misinterpreted our
sacred texts to do incredible damage.
So let’s talk about Sodom and
Gomorrah, those two cities in the Jordan River Plain, two cities that God saw
as unredeemable, sins too serious for God to bear. Culturally, almost all Christians were taught
that the sins of homosexuality were the reasons for Sodom and Gomorrah’s
annihilation and for so much hate and cruelty throughout the years. But the Biblical text does not bear that
out. The story is sandwiched between
Abraham and Sarah granting hospitality to Divine visitors and thereby receiving
the promise of progeny and Abraham’s servant going to find a girl from
Abraham’s people to marry Abraham and Sarah’s son. The servant decides he shall know Abraham’s
people by who gives hospitality to him.
According to the Jewish midrash, the land of Sodom and Gomorrah was abundant,
rich in natural resources. It was a
blooming oasis in the midst of a sweltering desert. It was a land abundant in food and gold and
silver, a land so rich in promise that the inhabits of that land, Sodom, said,
“Why should we open our borders to foreigners who will come here only to
deprive us of what is rightfully ours?”
So they yearned to close their borders to outsiders. And yes, they were thieves. We learn that anyone who arrived at their
border who looked wealthy would be welcomed in and be seated against a wall,
and then when the stranger was not suspecting they would pull the wall down and
crush the person and seize the person’s purse to deprive them of their
coins. They were sophisticated in their
thievery. So when a craftsperson who
laid bricks within the land would lay out their handiwork, every neighbor would
come buy and take one brick. And then,
when the owner would demand restitution, because all of their work was stolen,
the Sodomites would say, “I only took one brick. I’m not responsible. It’s not my fault. I cannot be responsible for a larger cultural
pull that is happening here.” But that
was not worst. They had beds in Sodom
that would be too short for certain travelers.
So they would make the bed fit by amputating the traveler’s legs. If too short, they would stretch and torture
the traveler to their death. If a poor
person came into the town, each resident would give the poor person a coin with
their name written on it. And they would
all refuse to sell the poor person bread, until the poor person slowly starved
to death in front of them. When the
person had died of hunger, they would take the coins off the person, and secure
the one with their name written on it.
The rabbis tell the story of a young
woman who ached for this poor man she saw as she left her house each day. She wasn’t like her neighbors. She was counter-cultural. And so she would sneak out bread and flour
for him. When the residents of Sodom saw
that this man lived instead of dying, they tracked this girl, doused her in
honey, tied her to the city wall where bees devoured her.
The conduct of Sodom was rooted in one core ethic,
“What’s mine is mine and what is yours is yours.”[3] The greatest crime in Sodom was their
isolation. They shut their hearts down
to everyone else’s problems. They drew
distinctions between themselves and everyone else and they felt it was their
responsibility to care for their own, to look out for their own, and they
identified everyone else as their enemy.
What brought the wrath of God on Sodom was not homosexuality, or even
thievery. It was human cruelty and
arrogance and greed and callousness. It
was a culture that supported and perpetuated violence. We got the sin of Sodom wrong. It is wanton cruelty and violence and its
othering and its targeting of those deemed most vulnerable.
God burned those cities to the ground for the very
culture that invades our nation today.
Look at us. What’s mine is mine
and your pain is not my concern. Look at
America. It would appear that the only
balm to our pain is othering you.
If we dedicated an ounce of the energy that we, as
churches, synagogues, and mosques, have historically dedicated to quashing the
LGBTQ+ community and their personhood, and humanity, just a sliver of the
fervor to dedicate our energy to fighting cruelty, callousness, and greed and
violence . . . can you imagine it? Can
we dedicate a sliver of the fervor to finding the humanity in one another, the
relationship Creator intended for our sister, the Yellowstone River, our
brother, the Beartooths, our sibling the bison, our cousin the cutthroat trout? Can we, on this day, choose not to be Sodom
and begin piecing together, stitching together the Beloved Community?
One more midrash story from Sodom. It once happened that two young girls went
down to draw water from the well. One turned
to the other and said, “You don’t look so well.
You ok? What’s happening?” The other girl began crying, “My family has
no food left. We are going to die.” And so the first girl filled her pitcher with
flour and gave it to her friend. When
the Sodomites heard this, they abducted her, they tortured her, and burned her
to death. And Creator, the Holy One
said, “Even if I chose to remain silent, justice for that young girl would not
permit me to be silent.” That was the
moment, God decided, that those cities needed to be destroyed.[4] Even if I wanted to be silent, justice would
not permit me to remain silent—for Matthew Shepard, for a Native elder, for the
chronically inebriated, for the immigrant and refugee, for those with no faith,
little faith, and all faith so that justice might be done, right relationship
would be restored, and we might finally walk the Red Road of God’s Beloved
Community. Amen.
[1] Grace
Lee Boggs, “The beloved community of Martin Luther King,” Yes! Magazine, May 20, 2004.
https://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/a-conspiracy-of-hope/the-beloved-community-of-martin-luther-king.
[2]
Claudia Rankine, “How can I say this so we can stay in this car together?” OnBeing
with Krista Tippett, January 10, 2019.
https://onbeing.org/programs/claudia-rankine-how-can-i-say-this-so-we-can-stay-in-this-car-together-jan2019/.
[3]
Mendy Keminker, “Sodom and Gomorrah:
Cities Destroyed by G_d,” Chabad.org,
https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/2017931/jewish/Sodom-and-Gomorrah-Cities-Destroyed-by-G-d.htm.
[4]
This was wholly stolen from Rabbi Sharon Brous, “The Real Sin of Sodom,” IKAR Community, October 27, 2018. www.ikar-la.org.
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