Martin Luther King Jr Sunday, 2021
Preached 1/17/2021 at SouthWest UU in N. Royalton OH
By Rev. Meg Mathieson
We are about to celebrate the birthday of Reverend Dr Martin Luther King Jr once again in our yearly cycle and it gets exhausting, every year, feeling like, okay, this is the worst it has been.
Our people - I mean Unitarian Universalists - love Martin Luther King Jr. We love him and truly he loved us. Coretta Scott King once said, “We gave a lot of thought to becoming Unitarian at one time, but Martin and I realized we could never build a mass movement of black people if we were Unitarian.”
What do you think she meant? They could never build a mass movement of black people if they were Unitarian. Why not?
What is it about Unitarianism that, on its surface does not appear welcoming to African American people? What about this wonderful belief system, that explicitly encourages kindness, openness - what is it about this denomination that urges - practically requires social justice work - what has made black Americans, decade after decade, look at us and look away? What is so unappealing about Unitarianism that Rev. King knew in his gut that he could not join, for fear of losing his followers?
This is an important question we must ask ourselves. Why.
Rev. King also said that Sunday morning is the most segregated day of the week in America, and that statement is just as true now as it ever was.
In a country that is built on an economy of “haves” and “have nots,” Unitarians have long been the “haves who care.” After having seen our financials up close, I don’t think that there are any truly wealthy individuals among us, but we all have. What do we have? Well privilege. We have what the people who depend on Urban Hope for their meals do not. And we know it and we care about it - about oppression and poverty and inequality. We know that we are the haves, and we care about the have-nots.
And all of these different inequalities that we care about overlap with each other, and Dr. King saw that. He, too, was a “have,” he was one of us. Middle class, educated.
He saw the connections through all of our society’s sins, the connection from war to poverty and from poverty to racism. He called these the “triple evils” and said “Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal opposition to poverty, racism, and militarism.”
Dr. King had more than a dream, he had a vision, he was a prophet. He didn’t just complain about the ills in society, he didn’t just use his body to march, but he used his voice, like all true prophets, to leave a legacy. Dr. King wrote a prescription to cure the triple evils he so hated: Dr. King quoted a part of the Bible that is usually interpreted differently these days - where Jesus tells a seeker that he has to be “born again.” Dr. King says that we all must be born again as well - not in the contemporary fundamentalist sense, but in the sense of changing our worldviews, being willing to totally rethink everything.
(p. 178 of The Radical King, “Your whole structure must be changed.”)
He ends by encouraging us to have “audacious faith in the future.”
We can dare to have audacious faith in the future because our people, Unitarian Universalists, have stood with Dr. King from the beginning. If you have ever watched the movie Selma, about Dr. King’s marches on Selma in the 1960s, there is a devastating moment when a white minister, James Reeb, is mobbed on the street and killed by a group of white supremacists. Rev. James Reeb was a Unitarian Universalist minister who gave his life in martyrdom for the cause. Many, many Unitarians were there with Dr. King in his march, the march to Selma and all of the others.
This is why we can dare to have audacious faith in the future: because we are not in the movement, we are the movement. Unitarian Universalism has shown up and done the work.
We have done the work because it is in our stated beliefs to do so.
Or is it? Our seven principles remind us that we agree on the inherent worth and dignity of every person. They remind us that we are all part of an interdependent web. They remind us that our goal is world community and peace, justice and liberty for all. However, they don’t actually outright call for action.
Many people think we should adopt an 8th principle that calls for direct action in dismantling oppression in ourselves and in our institutions. I think we should. I think Dr. King would support it.
Okay, I can’t know for sure whether Dr. King would support it, but I will say that literally every single time I have had a conversation with a black person, regardless of their personality, religion, creed, what have you, every single time I have described the 8th principle to a black person, they have responded with “Why wouldn’t the church approve that?”
So let’s go back to my question - why didn’t Dr. King believe that he couldn’t build a mass movement of black people in America if he was Unitarian?
Let’s reframe that question a little: What might have helped? What could the Unitarian Universalist church have done for Dr. King to make ourselves more attractive to his followers?
What can we do to be more welcoming? To be the allies that we strive to be? One very small, easy, simple thing would be to support the 8th Principle.
It’s exciting to read about Dr. King’s revolutionary ideas around socialism and liberation. It’s exciting to hear him call the US “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” and he’s not wrong. But this is also the man who said that the moral arc is long. He stressed that his movement would not be an immediate, a sudden one. On the one hand, we acknowledge that a “dream deferred is a dream denied,” and this is why we never stop. But we also recognize that the moral arc is long, and we allow ourselves small steps. A small but powerful step would be coming together, perhaps in the summer, perhaps in a year, to vote as one body to affirm and accept the 8th principle.
It’s one small step that would open our doors just a little wider and work to desegregate Sunday mornings.
I’ll end this message this morning with a poem, “Prophets” by Clinton Lee Scott
Always it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision.
It is easier blindly to venerate the saints than to learn the human quality of their sainthood.
It is easier to glorify the heroes of the race than to give weight to their examples.
To worship the wise is much easier than to profit by their wisdom.
Great leaders are honored, not by adulation, but by sharing their insights and values.
Grandchildren of those who stoned the prophet sometimes gather up the stones to build the prophet’s monument.
Always it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision.