The Hopes and Fears of All the Years

“The Hopes and Fears of All the Years”

A Sermon by Rev. Dr. Jan Carlsson-Bull
for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday
First Parish Unitarian Universalist
Cohasset, MA
January 18, 2009

Just a month ago we would have been seasonally attuned to the strains of that 19th century Christmas carol, “O Little Town of Bethlehem.” Rev. Phillip Brooks, a Philadelphia minister, first authored the lyrics as a poem. He had recently visited Bethlehem and was inspired by the Christmas celebrations at the Church of the Nativity. Brooks later urged his church organist, Lewis Redner, to set his poem to music, and the lasting treasure of this carol came into being. It’s an enchanting carol and one that allows us to envision an enchanted village referenced by the Gospel writers Matthew and Luke in their accounts of the birth of the baby Jesus—in Brooks’ terms, “The everlasting Light.” The first verse concludes with the lyrical reference to what was long hoped for and at long last realized in Bethlehem: “The hopes and fears of all the years are met in Thee tonight.”

The ancient Jews had hoped for a Messiah who would deliver them from yet another oppressive force in a long history of oppression. This time it was the Roman occupation. It was in this milieu that Jesus was born, grew into manhood, taught, and was ultimately subjected to the horrific capital punishment so commonly decreed by the Roman Empire, crucifixion. The powers of Rome feared such a charismatic figure, who would bring to the oppressed a message of liberation. That message came in terms unexpected.

The Jesus deemed the Messiah didn’t arrive as a militant hero who would lead his people into a resistance in the tradition of the ancient Maccabees. He came with a force far more subtle and disarming, a liberation of heart and soul that would transform the hearts and souls and actions of women and men for millennia to come. The power of nonviolence was embodied in the brand of liberation brought by the babe of Bethlehem. Indeed, the hopes and fears of all the years were met in this tiny village, but in ways unexpected. Nonviolent resistance to the power of Rome wrought havoc with the images of what had been hoped for. The call of Jesus of Nazareth was not to take up arms, but to open hearts and minds. It was a Gospel of nonviolence, a Gospel of strategic love.


In the spirit of Jesus, but through a distinctly different window of faith, the person of Mahatma Gandhi brought liberation to an occupied India. It was a liberation just as hoped for and just as unanticipated. Through a decades-long strategy of non-violent non-cooperation, 1900 years after Jesus, Gandhi inspired his fellow countrymen to outwit and undermine the stranglehold of the British Empire. His strategy? Nonviolent resistance. It was savvy, intentional, and effective. Five months before Gandhi’s life came to an end, India won its independence from Great Britain. In January of 1950 the Republic of India was proclaimed. It will be 140 years ago this coming October that “the hopes and fears” of so many years for the people of India were met in Pobandar, a city on the shores of the Arabian Sea in western India, the birthplace of Mahatma Gandhi.

Eleven years after Gandhi’s death, a rookie Baptist minister from the United States would visit Gandhi’s family in India. Martin Luther King, Jr. aspired to liberation in circumstances quite different from those faced by Gandhi or Jesus. Rather than an imperialist occupation, King strained at the shackles of Jim Crow racism in a nation whose early economy rested on the sin of slavery, the practice of buying and selling human beings as property. It is the fault line on which the economy of this nation was built—a tenuous foundation for any society. King’s ancestors were slaves. King and everyone who bore Negroid features carried the legacy of slavery in the brutal realities that marked Jim Crow America. It was a racism that was overt, and not just in the South. Many of the practices that the powers of this nation denied or ignored or both were as barbaric as those of the Roman Empire in Jesus’ day.

King’s meeting with Gandhi’s family was transformative for this 30-year-old Baptist minister from Atlanta. Through them he became intimately acquainted with the tactics of non-violent resistance used so effectively so recently however disparate the political context. He became intimately acquainted with the quality of leadership it had taken for Gandhi to convince his countrymen to adopt such tactics. To follow in the footsteps of Gandhi for the oppressed of India had been no easier than to follow in the footsteps of Jesus for the oppressed of Palestine.

Gandhi, along with the African American Bayard Rustin, served as core influences on this high energy young man with a mission. I find it not coincidental that we so seldom hear about Rustin’s influence, since Bayard Rustin was gay and on the far fringes of the political left. He was also a strong advocate and practitioner of non-violence, and King heeded his savvy counsel. Rustin, after all, bore the burdens of at least two counts of oppression.

King, armed with the legacy of a strong family, a deep faith, a doctorate from Boston University, and a passion for equal rights, became the lodestar of this recent chapter of the Civil Rights movement in these more or less United States. To follow in the footsteps of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., to go to Selma, to march to Montgomery, to picket and boycott and resist nonviolently forces that had the imprimatur of “legal” was no easier than to follow in the footsteps of Gandhi for the oppressed of India or the footsteps of Jesus for the oppressed of Palestine.

As a white person, it is not for me to say what African Americans hoped for during the years of slavery and Reconstruction and Jim Crow, or for that matter, what my fellow Americans who are African American hope for now. I can only speak for myself as a woman who has known oppression as such that there is a seductive inclination to want someone else—some towering giant of a savior or Messiah—to do the job for me. Then I can follow along behind as the accolades are sung and the flowers strung. But such is not the way of discipleship, of non-violent resistance to oppression, of love.

Dr. King filled the shoes of leadership, but he was not a Messiah or a lone-star Savior. Charisma he embodied and used brilliantly, but he would not and did not “save” the oppressed. He led the oppressed. It took life-threatening sweat equity to walk the walk alongside him. The hopes and fears and yearnings of African Americans and every committed white ally were met in the Atlanta of King’s birthplace 80 years ago this month only in our glazed over memory; because King was a mesmerizing, remarkable, visionary, courageous leader, but neither he nor Gandhi nor Jesus Christ himself was a high riding derring-do superman of a Messiah.

King stood on the shoulders of Rustin and Gandhi, who stood on the shoulders of Jesus, who stood on shoulders that have faded into a certain degree of historical myopia, because, in the words of the late Unitarian Universalist minister, Clinton Lee Scott:

“…it is easier to pay homage to prophets than to heed the direction of their vision.”

Of Jesus of Nazareth, we have just an inkling of the life that he lived. The Gospels give no clues as to Jesus’ “shadow” sides. Of Gandhi, it may be said that he did not properly affirm the rights of women. Of King, it may be said that he strayed too easily into the affections of women other than his wife. All were humans with feet of clay. All were leaders who inspired and perspired and embodied hopes and fears that took root over years and years in people oppressed by fellow humans who were tied into the seemingly permanent knots of their own fears and who chose privilege and power over the common good.

It is no less so in our own day. While many in this congregation are hurting amid an economy that has been on a roller coaster ride for years—not months, years; while some in this congregation have known the oppression of other systems of government and yes, other approaches to faith so intensely that they can barely acknowledge the scars; while some in this congregation have known the oppressions of sexism and classism and ableism; while a few in this congregation have known the oppressions of racism and homophobia; and while almost all of us in this congregation have been complicit in some form of oppression—IF we are paying attention at all, we know that our nation is at a crossroads of moral choice.

Gathering as we did yesterday morning to honor the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a program of fellowship and discernment, gathering as we are this morning in the framework of worship to honor the life and legacy of Dr. King and to anticipate a historical presidential inauguration, gathering as we are this morning with our children echoing the words of Dr. King, gathering as we are this morning with the increasingly familiar cadences of an eloquent President-Elect singing in our ears, we are at a crossroads of moral choice that is above all communal. What hopes and fears do we harbor? What hopes and fears do we own? What do we hope for? What do we fear? We stand uneasily on the shoulders of the prophets. We stand anxiously in this slice of history. And we hold hope. We hold hope.

How to dismount from the shoulders of the prophets? How to transform an uneasy stance into a steady walk? As people of faith, we’re called to meld our aspiring spirituality with that of the prophets—with Amos’ cry to “let justice roll down like water” (Amos 5:24); with Micah’s call “to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly…;” with Jesus’ discomforting response to the trick question: “Who is my neighbor?”; with Gandhi’s perseverance against imperialist odds; with King’s unswerving proclamation that “We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now;” and with Barack Obama’s declaration of our choice between “a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism” and the will to “come together” and take on the hard issues of our time in the service of a union that “may never be perfect” but “can always be perfected.”

What will it be? Come Tuesday, we will inaugurate Barack Obama as the 44th president of this nation, this union. Come Wednesday, we cannot expect President Obama to do the work for us. Without our will toward the common good, this union will falter. Without our will to transform an economy that serves the privileged few; without our will to transform what it means to be a functional member of the family of nations; without our will to pay our citizen’s fare share so that every woman, man, and child knows the rights of health care and decent housing and fine schools; without our will to justice that is as compassionate as it has been harsh; our 44th President cannot lead as I believe so many of us hope he will.

We are the vanguard. The hopes and fears of all our years will be met in a covenant of leadership whose promise can be realized only if we take up the mantle of everything we espouse—the worth and dignity of each of us and the connectedness of all—and “take one more step, say one more word, say one more prayer, and sing one more song” and then do it all again and again and again until our hopes for peace and compassionate justice are met and our fears of whatever power and privilege any of us might lose en route will dissolve in a great sigh of enlightened gratitude.

This is our now. It’s fierce, and it’s urgent. Amen.

Sources:

Amos, Micah, and The Gospel According to Luke in the Bible (Revised Standard Version)

Phillip Brooks (lyrics) and Lewis Redner (music), O Little Town of Bethlehem, described in Best-Loved Christmas Carols, Ronald M. Clancy, Edited by William E. Studwell, Christmas Classics, Ltd., North Cape May, NJ 2000, 68-69.

Indian independence movement, from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_Independence_Movement

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahatma_Gandhi#cite_note-55.

Martin Luther King, Jr., “Beyond Vietnam—A time to Break Silence,” Speech delivered at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City, April 4, 1967,
http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm.

Martin Luther King, Jr., from wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr#Influences.

Barack Obama, “A More Perfect Union,” Speech delivered in Philadelphia, PA, March 18, 2008, http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/hisownwords/.

Joyce Poley, “One More Step,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 168.

Clinton Lee Scott, “Prophets,” in Singing the Living Tradition, The Unitarian Universalist Association, Beacon Press, Boston, 1993, 565.