Interfaith Service for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
First Congregational Church of Great Barrington
January 21, 2008
"Martin Luther King, Jr.:
On Mixing Religion and Politics"
Rev. Kathy Duhon
In this political season, we hear a great deal about religion, a surprising amount, really – sometimes you’d think that they were running for religious office, instead of political office. The candidates want to be seen as faithful and committed, as motivated by their religion, and they don’t want to be penalized for their religious affiliation. Forgive me, but I wonder if sometimes some of our politicians are using religion for political gain.
Politics and religion do belong together, but how? Gandhi said, “Those who say religion has nothing to do with politics do not know what religion is.” Martin Luther King, Jr. is a prime example of someone who mixed religion and politics. Rather than using religion for political purposes or gain, though, King lived his religion so actively, so truthfully, that it thrust him into the political scene, reluctantly at first. His values of compassion and nonviolence sent him to the streets, to jail, and to the nation’s capital, calling for what he said should be “a radical revolution of values”.
We heard today from the Good Samaritan parable, one that King spoke about often. This is a story that Jesus tells in response to a question, but it changes the perspective. The questioner wanted to know, “Who is my neighbor?” In other words, who do I have the duty to treat as a neighbor, and Jesus wanted to broaden the understanding that we all should be compassionate neighbors. And to also notice how we can all mess up in our role as neighbors.
When King spoke about this parable, he took up the point of view first of the two who did not stop, who did not “project the ‘I’ into the ‘thou’”, as he’d noted the Samaritan did, drawing on the wisdom of the great Jewish theologian Martin Buber. Were they busy going to church meetings?, King says we might wonder, and they didn’t want to be late. Was there a religious law that they could not violate, such as touching a dead man just before worship? King says they might have even been going to organize, to a Jericho Road Improvement Association, to deal with the problem at its causal root, something a Martin Luther King, Jr. himself might have done.
Then King spoke of his own trip to Israel, in which he had traveled this very road, the Jericho road, and it was a dangerous road, even in modern times. It meanders down a steep descent, a good place for being ambushed. King said that maybe the priest and the Levite didn’t stop because they realized the robbers might still be around, or because they thought that the wounded man might be faking it and about to attack them.
When you study the Good Samaritan parable, the scholars present a few reasons for why the priest and the Levite passed by without helping, but I have never seen as many excuses figured out as by Martin Luther King. Why? Because he lived them. You might think he was such a good Samaritan himself that he wouldn’t have understood why people don’t stop, but he knew what making excuses was all about, because that is what he did too, before he finally decided to take action.
He forgot one excuse, though, one that people use all the time. They didn’t know; they didn’t notice; they weren’t aware. Maybe part of why Martin was more in tune with excuses was because he was more aware of those who were lying by the side of his Jericho road. You have to notice before you can consider action. We are often blind to the needs of others. Part of being religiously political is raising awareness, getting folks to notice who is broken and bruised by the side of our journeys. To be aware you need to be emotionally present, and educated and informed. Then you won’t have the excuse of not knowing, not noticing, anymore.
Once you notice, once you are aware, that is when you start making excuses. Martin said that the question those who did not stop to help asked themselves was, “If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?” The excuses start flowing. The Good Samaritan reversed the question, and asked, “If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?” That question doesn’t allow for excuses.
And of course, King said that this is our question. Not, “If I stop to help others, will I have time to do my job? Will I be endangered? Will I risk humiliation? Will I be overwhelmed and tired? Will I make things harder for my loved ones?” Our sacred, patriotic, religious, loving, Good Samaritan question is, “If I don’t stop to help people in need, in my own community, and around the world, what will happen to them, and what will happen to all of us?”
In his last year, King became an anti-war activist, a radical step to take in 1967 and 1968. He saw the Vietnamese as people in need, and the American poor who were bearing the greatest burden of the military, as people in need, and he could not pass them by without doing something. What would happen to them if he did not live his values of compassion and nonviolence in every way he could, including politically?
It’s not that he didn’t have plenty of excuses not to act. He resonated with this parable precisely because he had to wrestle with his own reluctance. King wrote about how terribly hard it was the first time he did an action in which he knowingly risked arrest and jail-time. Later, when he spoke to his followers on those perilous marches, he led courageously, but he felt fear in the midst of the dangers they all faced. Martin struggled with decisions about what would be the moral actions, the right thing to do, the best way to follow the will of God, the way to live in “cosmic companionship”, as he once called the relationship with the divine.
It wasn’t enough to stay still, go to church, to simply help the poor in one’s own community. Yes, religions need to be involved in feeding the hungry, as we do as a community at the People’s Pantry, BCAC, and Breaking Bread suppers; and in housing the homeless, as we do with Construct and through the many trips people locally have made to New Orleans and Central America and other places to build housing with and for those in need; and in caring for the sick and distressed, as we do with Hospicecare, Community Health Program, Volunteers in Medicine, and with all our deliveries of casseroles and concern, and our various fundraisers for those who are seriously ill or injured and inadequately covered by insurance, but such wonderful Good Samaritan-like work is only the beginning.
If you stay with the traditional understanding of religion as prayer and charitable service, but eschew anything political, then you have actually taken a very political stance, as the Rev. William Sloane Coffin pointed out. For you see, you have given your support to the status quo. Martin Luther King said, “We will have to repent … for the appalling silence of the good people.” Not living our values of compassion deeply, actively, on behalf of all the world’s woes, is like walking by on the other side of the Jericho road, leaving the suffering behind in their place.
In his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, Martin Luther King answers his critics – a bunch of ministers, wouldn’t you know – who chastised him publicly for endangering folks by his leadership, for reaping violence though they had used peaceful means. King explained that the demonstrators were standing up for the best in the American dream and the most sacred values from our religious heritages, and that the time had come to confront oppression and to make a different kind of peace. And so he worked tirelessly for civil rights, for justice, with nonviolent means, but not so much for peace.
While King had always been peace-oriented in the larger sense of a positive peace without oppression and with nonviolence as its tool, when it came to deciding to join the peace movement against the Vietnam War, he felt that he was slow. Exactly one year before his assassination, he made his first public statement against the Vietnam War, at Riverside Church in New York City, on April 4, 1967. He describes his journey to that decision in various writings.
First, he had always generally deplored violence and war. Most folks do. Most religions are against war. Even when some religions allow that there may be a justifiable war, it is always still an evil, something to prevent, and to be profoundly contrite about. King was against war and against oppression and for civil rights. He had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 for his work in creating peace through justice. But his conscience was uneasy over the Vietnam War for years. At first, he hoped that President Johnson was moving toward negotiation, and he kept his silence, because, as he wrote, “I believed that it was essential for all Americans to publicly avoid the debate on why we were waging war in the far-off lands of Vietnam. I believed that the crucial problem which faced Americans was how to move with great speed and without more bloodshed from the battlefield to the peace table. The issues of culpability and morality, while important, had to be subordinated lest they divert or divide.” He was trusting of the administration, and considerate of the process, and silent on Vietnam. He left his wife to do more of the direct peace work, but he began expressing his concern about the peace process.
King was used to criticism, and to making decisions despite the criticism, but this issue was more complicated. As he began to express mild concern about the Vietnam War, people representing the civil rights issue, white and black, chided him. He realized that the movement he had worked so hard for could be harmed by his peace stance. He also was friendly with President Johnson, who had signed the Voting Rights Act and waged a War on Poverty, and it was hard for King to criticize him.
As Martin Luther King was trying to make the decision to become a peace activist, he did what any of us do when we decide to stand for our principles – he considered the costs. He asked the question of the priest and the Levite in the Good Samaritan story, “If I stop to help, what will happen to me?” Not only would there be personal risk and sacrifice, but a price would be paid by his loved ones, friends, and the organizations he cared about. This is hard – what are our principles worth in terms of what others will have to sacrifice because we stand up for them?
Faced with the major decision of whether to become a peace activist, King went away for two months to write a book and to think over the matter. He prayed and meditated, read and reflected. He did not want to rush into it. One night he read an article on the children of Vietnam and he said to himself, “Never again will I be silent on an issue that is destroying the soul of our nation and destroying thousands and thousands of little children in Vietnam.”
As King was deciding to oppose the Vietnam War, he first had to be completely clear about the evil of the situation and about his own shame and guilt. We might find it hard to imagine that this prophet who did so much good would feel complicit with the evil, but he did. He wrote, “…I had for too long allowed myself to be a silent onlooker….So often I had castigated those who by silence or inaction condoned and thereby cooperated with the evils of racial injustice. Had I not, again and again, said that the silent onlooker must bear the responsibility for the brutalities….” His vulnerability is here expressed so fully – he had always said he wasn’t a saint, but a sinner like all the children of God. Now, not only had he found himself wanting in his silence that allowed evil to happen, but he also noticed that he had been judging others in the past in ways that he himself had fallen.
King made the decision to become a peace activist partly because he loved America, because he believed that American could be better. He said, “I do not believe our nation can be a moral leader of justice, equality, and democracy if it’s trapped in the role of a self-appointed world policeman.”
King became a peace activist because he asked the same question as the Good Samaritan. “If I don’t stop to help people in need, what will happen to them?” The people in need were the children of Vietnam first, and then the disproportionate number of African Americans and poor people who were fighting the war and dying, and then all the brothers and sisters who were hurt by the violence, which included the whole world, really. This question stirred his soul and gave him a truth-force, much as was so for the activist he admired so much, Mahatma Gandhi. King lived by principles of nonviolence which he found in Jesus’ message, but which transcend any one religion. He also lived trying to do the will of God. And he spoke of the importance of the kind of love known as agape, which is the understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all.
His political life as a peace activist did not preclude his work for justice issues of all kinds, including the Poor People’s Campaign, which he envisioned and outlined. And do you remember what he was doing when he was assassinated in Memphis? Not classic peace activism, nor civil rights work. His religious faith had brought him to the side of folks who were striking for decent wages and conditions – to the sanitation workers, the garbage collectors. He engaged in all kinds of political and social issues of his time, but always because his faith called him to do so.
How will we face the question, “If I don’t stop to help people in need, what will happen to them?”? We may need some reflection time, some time to think, and we’ll certainly need some principles to live by. The will of God, or agape love, or our deepest values may be the instruments that help us to wrestle with the decisions this calls for from us.
We face hard choices when we try to live by our religious principles. Suddenly, the ‘thou’, the neighbor, is clear, and clearly needs us. Our hard choices will be personal for some, community-oriented for others, and global for everyone. Are you led by your principles to change your life? To change how things are done at work or school? Do you come to realize that you must change the way something is done in your town or your state or your country? Some of us will find ourselves working, in whatever way we can, for affordable housing, decent health care for all, or a fair and living wage. Some of us will confront the structures of racism and sexism and heterosexism and oppression in all of its ugliness. Some of us will decry torture, genocide, and all such monstrosities. Some of us will be called upon to work on global issues of peace and justice, to preserve the liberties we have as Americans, and to work for human rights for everyone around the world. I hope that all of us will answer the call in some way to work on insuring the survival of life on our planet Earth.
None of this is easy. We will have to decide to sacrifice some pleasures, some time with our loved ones, some comfort in our way of life. We will necessarily be asking others to sacrifice because of the decisions we make. Some of us will be called upon to challenge those we are friendly with, but who are acting in ways that spread evil. Some of us will know criticism, humiliation, suffering, maybe even death.
Becoming a peace activist was one of King’s last answers to the question of his principles, of how he felt called to politics through his religion, and to the Good Samaritan question of “If I don’t stop to help people in need, what will happen to them?” In Martin Luther King, Jr.’s last sermon, he said, “It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence.” King was answering the question on behalf of the whole world. And he wasn’t afraid any longer, he said. He’d been to the mountain and seen the promised land. Even if he’d never see the fulfillment of his dreams, he said he was happy, for he had seen the glory of God.
That happens when you mix religion and politics, when you dream dreams of peace and justice and follow your faith into action. If we follow Martin Luther King, Jr.’s example, or better, our own values, to that mountaintop, then we will see the promised land. So may we be blessed. Amen.