Once To Every Soul and Nation

Once To Every Soul and Nation A sermon for Martin Luther King Sunday offered by Rev. Wayne Arnason Sunday, January 20, 2013 West Shore Unitarian Universalist Church Rocky River, Ohio Reading - Mark 4: 1-11 Then Jesus was led by the Spirit into the wilderness to be tempted [a] by the devil. 2 After fasting forty days and forty nights, he was hungry. 3 The tempter came to him and said, If you are the Son of God, tell these stones to become bread. 4 Jesus answered, It is written: Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. [b] 5 Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple. 6 If you are the Son of God, he said, throw yourself down. For it is written: He will command his angels concerning you, and they will lift you up in their hands, so that you will not strike your foot against a stone. [c] 7 Jesus answered him, It is also written: Do not put the Lord your God to the test. [d] Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. All this I will give you, he said, if you will bow down and worship me. 10 Jesus said to him, Away from me, Satan! For it is written: Worship the Lord your God, and serve him only. [e] 11 Then the devil left him, and angels came and attended him. Sermon - Part 1 This Biblical passage of Jesus in the wilderness being tempted by Satan is one of the most powerful stories in western religion, and it s an archetypal story that has made its way into our popular thinking about ethical decision making. The expression Get Thee Behind Me, Satan, the phrase in the King James version of the Bible, gets spoken by people who are talking about resisting temptations that can range from bribes to cupcakes. 1 In my childhood imagination when I first read the story in the Bible, Jesus looked like this: a noble figure, protected by the shield of God s word, and a halo of righteousness surrounding him, turning decisively away from Satan s temptations in order to do the right thing. These days, when I think of this story, I am more likely to call to mind an image from Martin Scorsese s film of The Last Temptation of Christ, an image of Jesus that actually looks like he just spent forty days in a desert wilderness, surrounded by a circle of temptations, within which he glumly sits, trying to decide which way to go. When we think about the great spiritual, political, or literary heroes of human history, it is too easy to tell their stories in ways that reduce their ethical struggles to a series of outstanding courageous decisions. Faced with a choice between a tempting attractive evil, and a noble good, our heroes chooses the noble good every time and even if that leads to great suffering or sacrifice, even the ultimate sacrifice of one s life, the legacy of the hero s and that fact that their story lives on is vindication of their decision. In the years since 1986 when the battle to have a Martin Luther King Jr. National holiday was finally won, those of us whose lives have overlapped with that of Dr. King s have watched a living breathing man, who we followed in the news and saw on television and perhaps maybe even in person be turned into a historical icon, and for some, a kind of saint. The children s books and the statues and the named streets and squares all honor King s heroism and leadership but fail to convey how hard it was to live the day to day life that he both created and accepted as his fate. With the release of all of Dr. King s works for publication by our UUA s Beacon Press, with

the completion of recent biographies of King, and with the amazing three volume history of the Civil Rights Movement written by Unitarian Universalist Taylor Branch, we have a much more accurate picture of King the human being, with all his flaws and struggles, alongside the picture of King the icon and saint. I, for one, am more interested in King the human being than King the saint. I learn more about how to live my life, how to stand up for justice, and how to make difficult choices, from the honestly told history of the struggles of a real person rather than a mythic figure. So with the fiftieth anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington coming up in August of this year, and with our theme this month of Deciding Moments, I began to wonder about the deciding moments that made the March on Washington possible, and what we could learn from them? What I found out both troubled me, and taught me, as I considered the real-life hard choices that great leaders sometimes have to make. So let me tell you a story about a deciding moment from the life of Martin Luther King Jr. that happened fifty years ago -- a deciding moment that changed him and that changed this country as well. First, let s remember what was happening in early 1963. Fifty years ago this week, the year began with the new governor of Alabama, George Wallace, taking his oath of office, and declaring in his first speech that he would support segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever. In April of that year, Dr. King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference decide that they will focus their actions in Alabama in Birmingham, the most segregated city in America, in a nonviolent effort to confront the city s racist leaders and laws, and force President Kennedy to support a new Civil Rights Act. After the first marches, Dr. King and Rev. Ralph Abernathy spend eight days in Birmingham Jail, and King writes a letter while in jail to white supporters of the civil right movement. On May 2, a thousand junior high and high school age youth are arrested after a Children s March in Birmingham that King hesitated to endorse out of safety concerns, but 2 could not stop, because the enthusiasm and commitment of the youth was so strong. On May 4, Sherriff Bull Connor begins turning his dogs and firehoses on the marching demonstrators, and national television coverage makes the marches world news, and Birmingham a national and international disgrace. President Kennedy is forced to intervene, using his influence to insist on a resolution. The coverage of the settlement in Birmingham, and the publishing of the letter from the Birmingham Jail makes King even more of a celebrity political figure. His first stop on a speaking tour after Birmingham is Cleveland OH on May 15, where in six whirlwind hours, he is motorcaded and mobbed at six different speeches to overflow crowds. Taylor Branch calls the rally he held at St. Paul s Episcopal Church the first white mass meeting of the civil rights movement. At a meeting a week later, President Kennedy watches the momentum of national support for new civil rights legislation grow, and wants to be ahead of the curve. He says he wants to meet with King, but later in the process of considering new legislation. Otherwise, he tells his advisors, it will look like he got me to do it. The President says. King is so hot these days it s like Karl Marx coming to the White House. By June 11, the President makes a surprising and extraordinary decision to announce his support for new civil rights legislation in an almost ad-libbed speech that very night. On the same day, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference announces that they will demonstrate in Washington for new civil rights legislation. Late that same evening, civil rights leader Medgar Evers is assassinated in Jackson Mississippi. As you can see, the pace of events in 1963 was stunning. King and the SCLC could not and should not plan a March on Washington alone. A coalition of the Big Six African American leaders and organizations was necessary. One of the Big Six, the union leader A. Philip Randolph, the respected elder among them, had led an African American labor March on Washington in 1941, and was already arguing

for a march in the fall of 63. Within his staff he had the man everyone knew needed to be the lead organizer for the event, Bayard Rustin. Rustin was an old colleague of King s from the Montgomery Bus Boycott, but three years earlier King had distanced himself from Rustin when faced with a threat to use Rustin s homosexuality against King. Rustin had also introduced King to the man who became his closest white friend, a Jewish lawyer and fundraiser named Stanley Levison. A key figure in Levison s success as a fundraiser for the SCLC was Jack O Dell, a black Catholic labor activist from Detroit. As a young minister and theologian, and the drum major up front in this political movement, King had relied on the experience and organizational prowess of all three of these men at different stages of his career, and had personally embraced them as friends despite their differences in religion, in sexual orientation, and in race. In the build-up towards this dramatic year of 1963, the leadership of the SCLC had embraced help and leadership from any experienced organizer committed to the cause. Now that the organization was at the center of this coalition of civil rights groups and white liberals that could make this great March on Washington a reality, there was one vulnerability that Dr. King had up until this point ignored, and that was this: all these organizers had once been involved with communist organizations. It may be difficult for people born after 1980 to appreciate the fear that gripped America in the fifties and sixties regarding communism. Today, the closest thing to being branded as a communist in 1963 would be to be branded as a terrorist. Even though Senator McCarthy s witch hunts and the House Unamerican Activities Committee had been discredited, the tensions with the Soviet Union over the Cuban Missile crisis and with China over their threat to Taiwan had been critical foreign policy issues for the Kennedy Administration. The FBI, a domestic law enforcement body led by J. Edgar Hoover, devoted significant resources in the sixties to spying on Americans in an effort to uncover communists. Hoover had enormous power, and 3 was obsessed with communists. American political leaders could not believe that the ineffective American communist party, largely involved in supporting labor movement organizing, should be viewed as anything else than a branch of a foreign government intent on overthrowing the United States. Here, at this critical juncture of planning for what the March on Washington might become, and whether the President of the United States would embrace it, as supportive of his own civil rights legislation, we arrive at one of Martin Luther King s deciding moments. In the second half of the sermon, I ll tell you what that deciding moment was and we ll talk about whether it was a defining moment for him, for the civil rights movement, and what it teaches us about making similarly difficult choices in our own lives. But first, since we have mentioned Martin Luther King s great fundraiser Stanley Levison, let s take a few minutes to recognize and respond to a reality of any organization that has a mission it sincerely wants to fulfill whether it is a church or a service organization or a political organization. It needs money to fulfill its mission. At this point in our service, we recognize that need both tangibly and symbolically by inviting you to contribute as the offering plate goes around. Most of us at West Shore pledge our support and plan regular payments, so that we can responsibly plan our work a year ahead, and we either put our pledges checks in the plate or put in some cash as a participatory act, a liturgical act. Some people prefer to support the church through the plate rather than the pledge, so we welcome those gifts, and to our visitors, we often say please be our guests and feel free to let the plate pass you by. READING - From Defining Moments by Joseph Badaracco: It s unusual to use a reading from a modern source in our church services from a book on management and business ethics, but we offer one today because Joseph Badaracco s reflections on what he calls defining moments and sleep-test ethics have provided some

inspiration for the second part of the sermon today. Mr. Badaracco writes: What to do when one clear right thing must be left undone in order to do another, or when doing the right thing requires doing something wrong?..these problems are especially complex Right vs. Right problems typically involve choices between two courses of action, each of which is a complicated bundle of ethical responsibilities, personal commitments, moral hazards, and practical pressures Right vs. Right choices are best understood as defining moments. These are decisions with three basic characteristics: they reveal, they test, and they shape. In other words, a right vs. right decision can reveal a manager s basic values and, in some cases, those of an organization. At the same time, the decision tests the strength of the commitments that a person or an organization has made. Finally, the decision casts a shadow forward. It shapes the character of the person, and in some cases, the organization. Sermon - Part 2 We pick up our story the day after Medgar Evers was killed, when President Kennedy extended an invitation to King to meet him at the White House. After some backtracking and jockeying, a meeting was finally arranged, but it was in the context of a meeting with all the Big Six civil rights leaders. Roy Wilkins and Dr. King would have private time with the President ahead of the larger meeting. Arriving early and awaiting his turn, King was surprised that a Robert Kennedy aide took him aside and told King that he had problems in his staff, and that if he was going to have support from the administration he would have to get rid of the communists in his organization. King was surprised and skeptical, and responded neutrally. He did not truly believe that this was coming from the Attorney General. The aide upped the ante, and asked him if it would be willing to speak to Robert Kennedy about this matter. King said that of course he would. Robert Kennedy had gone to J. Edgar Hoover for everything that Hoover had on Levison and O Dell and now undertook a full court press. He 4 told King that the highest levels of American intelligence had confirmed that these men were agents of foreign governments and that his organization was being used by the communists. King argued with him, and dismissed the accusations, He was not sure whether this could be true or whether it was a way to show King that the government knew everything there was to know about those close to him, more than he himself knew. History has proved King s suspicion true but on that day he could not know King was truly dumbfounded when he was finally admitted to the Oval Office and the President beckoned him to come out to the Rose Garden. According to Taylor Branch, Kennedy first said: I assume you know you are under very close surveillance. ( Even in the Rose Garden, King thought.) Kennedy then put his hand on King s shoulder and then told him himself that he had to get rid of Levison and O Dell. The President repeated Robert Kennedy s accusations, and went further to claim that Jack O Dell was the number 5 communist in the United States. Still, King argued with the President. But as they continued to talk, it was clear that the price of a partnership with the President on civil rights was the heads of these two men. The larger meeting at the White House went forward and the Kennedy Administration negotiated with the Big Six about the timing and content of the March of Washington. Martin Luther King decided to pay the price for being able to go from delivering the I Have a Dream speech directly to the White House to talk strategy with the President. The symbolism was powerful. The price was dismissing two of his most loyal and valued staffers. The Administration was outraged that it took four days for King to fire O Dell after Kennedy talked to him. Stanley Levinson spared his friend the pain, for as soon as he found out what had happened, he quietly resigned. The March on Washington was both a deciding moment and a defining moment not only for Martin Luther King and for the Civil Rights Movement, but for the country. While there had been civil rights marches before,

there had never been anything like 300,000 people, black and white together in this one place for this one cause. It was the earthquake that eventually pushed the tsunami wave of political support forward that was needed to pass the Civil Rights Act. The Devil s bargain that King made with President Kennedy turned out to be mainly a manipulation by J. Edgar Hoover, and was the first act in a concerted FBI campaign Hoover mounted over the next four years to discredit King by any means necessary. As a backroom deal, it foreshadowed an America where a secret police would exist and run unchecked for the rest of the sixties and into the seventies, as disgraceful a reflection of this country s values as the ultimate success of the civil rights movement was a validation of those values. Would you have done the same thing as King? As Joseph Badaracco tells us: when one clear right thing must be left undone in order to do another, or when doing the right thing requires doing something wrong these problems are especially complex. There are many books of ethical theory and moral argument that have been written over the centuries that seek to help human beings solve these kinds of complex problems and even though these theories of moral philosophy can be kind of heady, they are usable and helpful. The two most important conflicting ethical principles that we might apply to King s decisions are virtue ethics and utilitarian ethics. Virtue ethics would say: You always must choose the course of action that represents the most noble virtues that a wise person can hold. Utilitarian ethics would say: You must choose the course of action that produces the greatest good for the greatest number. In King s case, he struggled between these two principles: Was loyalty to his friends and supporters a higher virtue than trust and obedience to a direct request from the President of the United States? Was the personal hurt and betrayal suffered by these two loyal activists worth the support and collaboration of the President towards civil rights legislation that could change the lives of millions? 5 We see these same kinds of tensions and questions week after week in the political debates in Congress virtues and principals are frequently in collision with utilitarian calculations about a politically achievable good outcome that will benefit the most people. In our own personal deciding moments about difficult ethical choices, choices like whether to end a pregnancy, or ask for a divorce, or take a risky political stand, I think that there is one other ethical theory that all of us are familiar with even as we consider the most virtuous choice or the most utilitarian choice and that is the sleep-test theory. Joseph Badaracco describes the sleep-test as based on the question: Will this decision keep me awake at night? It s an ethical theory that recognizes the role of the gut our personal intuition as to what would be the right thing to do. Sleep-test ethics is something that people who have faith in the basic goodness of human beings should pay attention to. We know that our gut can t always be trusted completely, but we also know that any tough decision we make should be one that we can not only live with, but sleep with. It s striking to me that a version of the sleep-test was endorsed 2400 years ago by one of the greatest moral thinkers in human history: Aristotle. Aristotle is the Greek philosopher who taught us that Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all. Although Aristotle believes that virtues must be taught and cultivated, he also believed that a person of character and maturity who knows the facts and who lives within the broadly recognized social boundaries of right and wrong should trust their gut as well as their minds to do the right thing. As we remember the life and the example of Martin Luther King Jr. this weekend, and we tell this story of one deciding moment for him, we have to recognize that the life of a public figure whose career arose at a crossroads of history will contain many moments like this. We learn from the life of such a person how we ourselves might live not by isolating one decision, but by looking at where and how it came about in the flow of that person s life and the swirling events that surrounded it.

However, one decision can be emblematic. It can represent a turning point in a career, and this decision that Martin Luther King made had that quality to it. The success of the March on Washington and King s speech and role in it became the event in his career for which he is most remembered. It assured him his place as the foremost civil rights leader of his generation. It also assured J. Edgar Hoover that King was vulnerable and could be harassed around the charge of harboring communists, or being a communist, and that harassment would dog King for the rest of his days. If I had to choose one more deciding moment from the remaining years of King s life that showed him at another turning point and acting on his gut as well as his analysis, it would be his decision to publicly oppose the war in Vietnam and stand against another president, Lyndon Johnson, who had been such an important ally in the passage of the Civil Rights Act. At the end of that anti-war speech, delivered a year and a day before his death, King closed not only with his own words, but with the words of James Russell Lowell, and we will close with them today: If we do not act we shall surely be dragged down the long dark and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight. Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter - but beautiful - struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history. As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated: Once to every man and nation Comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth and falsehood, For the good or evil side. May it be so. Amen. 6