| Martin Luther King Sunday January 15, 2006 | Church of the Covenant
Robert J. Campbell, D. Min. D. D. Printer-Friendly Version |
Your Faith Can
Make You Well
Psalm 139:1-6,13-18
Mark 5:22-43
It was a Sunday morning in late spring. The community where we lived woke to the news that the KKK had burned a cross Saturday night. Their location of choice was a rural children’s home started by a prominent person of color, Pittsburgh Steeler Mel Blount. A number of the children at the residence were a different skin color than their neighbors. The flyers stuck on car windshields in the shopping malls were pornographic at best. Over the years there were other encounters and we were privileged to help form a group called "The Committee for Racial Equality." Each year we worshiped together, choirs sang together, and we trained for intervention emergencies. But most of all, it was a gathering of people who sometimes drove this "Type A personality” nuts and influenced my life so very much. We were not about action, but we were about the stories and the telling of life experiences, which is where the rubber hits the rode when it comes to race. We are our history, good and bad, and our stories put faces on reality and they are points of connection.
Today the hidden wound of racism, in all its medusan forms, is alive and well feeding on the winds of fear and blowing across this land of promise.
Standing high in this pulpit each Sunday I am so very moved to look out upon our diversity. This is a church that is not reflective of what King called the most "segregated hour in America." Yet I know many of you worry about the future of African-American leadership within this congregation. We embrace families at a funeral as we did for Fred Middleton and Ione Biggs, but where from come their successors? Diversity is both one of the hardest things to live with and the most dangerous thing to live without. We worry as we gather for worship, but worship is where we must begin.
The French writer, Marcel Proust, in his book "Swan's Way," tells about the view he gets from the belfry of his family church. He states,
"No doubt about it, the view from up there is enticing. On a clear day you can see at the same time places which you normally see only one with another."
I know what he means. Believe it or not I have been to the top of our tower. My knees will attest to it! When you stand up there on a clear day, you see Case Western Reserve University, the Cleveland Clinic, Lake Erie, the Heights, East Cleveland, Fairfax, Little Italy, the sky scrapers of downtown, art museums, Severance Hall, the grand and the small, and dozens of steeples.
"On a clear day you can see at the same time places which you normally see only one with another."
And let us not lose sight that the vantage point is from the church, it is from that lofty location one sees the connections that are not always apparent in the flats (1). People with big cars, other people with oil, and war becomes the by-product. Factories that spew out waste, forests indiscriminately cut, frogs dying in Central America, the high cost of pharmaceuticals, deep pocket lobby efforts with ever flowing streams of cash to political playmates, crimes against women and demeaning advertising, election rhetoric, and a nation divided by fear. Connections.
I just heard of one of the best efforts to reduce teen pregnancy in South Western Pennsylvania where they have had their budget cut by $250 thousand dollars so that the money could be sent to Katrina relief. What’s the connection? A right wing congressman, constituent appeasements with no increase in social spending, religion, and vote margins. These are connections we might not always see, but connections that are always there. From the high places of worship they become more pronounced or at least they should.
Mark tells us about them. The most fundamental social principle in Mark’s gospel centers on those kinds of connections are those who would be first becoming last and those who would be high bending their knees in service.
That’s the account of the religious leader and the social outcast. It’s a double story that for years scholars thought was a mistake. We assumed someone copying an ancient manuscript started out with one story, went to dinner, came back to a new page, then caught the mistake and went back to the first page figuring to clean up the mess later, but never got around to it.
Not so! There is an intentional message here for the in-crowd! Jesus is on a mission. A privileged person of faith has a daughter who is in trouble. But Jesus interrupts his journey to take care of the needs of someone suffering from what Chad Myers calls, "triple-disenfranchisement.” (2) She was a woman in a male society and according to her religious doctrine she was unclean. She was poor because the medical industry was exploiting her illness. In our day she might have been a trans-gender person of color with AIDS. Yet, that woman took the incentive to seek liberation. That woman reached out and upon contact power flowed from Jesus to her. And then he says, "Your faith has made you well." But in fact there is more to it than an end to her medical ailments and a lifting of her faith. Jesus welcomes her into a new kind of community. A community like this one. A community that chooses to see the world differently. Jesus confirms her as redeemed and makes her part of the in-crowd. This marginal, nameless, non-person becomes a daughter at the center of Marks story.
But his action is not without consequence. The tale carries with it the same impact that the gospel always brings to established ways. A daughter of privilege has died while Jesus was wasting time caring for someone who mattered not. And Jesus tells that person of religious prominence to learn from the faith of "this woman." In the economy of social wholeness, according to those of social rank, there isn’t room for two daughters. Why had Jesus wasted valuable time?
There are those who argue that the civil rights movement in America is about law and public policy. Some argue that it was simply an issue whose time had come, admitting now that its time is delayed. Still others have seen it as the last battle of the Civil War. These are valid points of view, but if I learned anything from Martin Luther King it is that underlying everything else the civil rights movement was a movement of God’s Spirit. It was a moral crusade with the content of the morality being determined by a sense of biblical justice and equity before God. It was the clear understanding of "what should be" as seen from that lofty mountaintop of faith. It is nothing less than the connection between moral responsibility and social practice, faith that has taken the initiative to reach out. To a degree we have lost that moral vision, lost our willingness to demand healing on holy ground, and we have lost the opportunity to be healed.
There is no question that Martin Luther King was a master strategist, orator, and in the end he was a martyr. But first and foremost let us never forget that he was a minister of the good news! His thought and cadence were framed by an understanding of God’s design for God’s world. Measured by feet it was but a short distance from King’s pulpit to a front seat on Rosa Parks' bus.
Friend and foe alike affirmed that the trouble with Martin was that he believed in America and in America’s understanding of God more than America did. He rescued the American people from the flats where they had chosen to live. He saw the connection; he saw this land’s potential, and called her to live up to her moral ambition. Martin Luther King didn’t invite this nation to a revolution much to the annoyance of the more radical advocates. His cause was to urge this land to reach for its better self that it might become that "city set on a hill," and that must be our cause.
His challenge to each and every person, young and old, was to connect the dots and see the whole picture of what this land could be. But to get to that Promised Land he knew that we who sit at the table of privilege, have to learn from those who wait in the margins, and he knew that you couldn’t set a captive free if you are not willing to confront those who hold the keys.
There is only one way to define racism. Prejudice plus power! When racism is defined as an individual thing it is reduced to attitude adjustment. If we change enough attitudes we end prejudice. Nothing could be further from the truth! To put an end to all forms of racism those of us who enjoy power and privilege have to have the courage to reach out and demand our own healing knowing full well that prejudice always disfigures the observer, not the observed. We have to affirm the connections admitting that we are all victims of the fear that allows us to be driven by self-serving people with one primary agenda, the retention of their power, their place, and their political positions!
Connections are in high places of worship. In Mark’s account one daughter is healed as Jesus is on the road to help another daughter who needs his attention. One child is from the in-crowd and one is a castoff. One takes the initiative and gets attention to the annoyance of those who embrace the other. But Jesus says not to worry; the second is just asleep.
Martin Luther King’s message is still ringing clear. It is only when everyone is included that healing can be restored. All we need to do is wake up.
1) Earnest Campbell
2) Chad Myers, Who Will Roll Away the Stone?
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