Fierce Love
John Shuck
Southminster
Presbyterian Church
Beaverton, Oregon
January 17, 2016
Martin Luther King
When I speak of love I
am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that
force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying
principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to
ultimate reality.
--Martin Luther King
“The arc of the moral
universe is long but it bends toward justice.”
That powerful statement of hope has been attributed to Martin
Luther King. But when King said it he was quoting someone
else. That someone else was Rev. Theodore Parker.
Theodore Parker was a Unitarian
minister. He was a Transcendentalist in the school of thought
of Ralph Waldo Emerson. A graduate of Harvard College and
Harvard Divinity School, he embraced higher criticism of the
Bible. He dismissed orthodox Christianity including the
Trinity and the divinity of Christ. He rejected the miracles,
realized the Bible was filled with errors, and he thought that religion should
be located in personal experience.
He believed in the immortality of the soul. He
was a theist. He believed that God was known through personal
experience and intuition. He was also a
universalist. He believed that God would lose no
one. He said that Calvinist Theology was “cruel and
unreasonable.” Most pulpits in Boston would not let him
preach. They didn’t consider him a Christian and his views lost him
many friends.
Nevertheless he found his voice and a place to share it. In
1845 his supporters formed the Congregational Society of Boston and installed
Parker as minister. His congregation included such notables as
Louisa May Alcott, William Lloyd Garrison, Julia Ward Howe, and Elizabeth Cady
Stanton. It grew to 7000. He died at the age of fifty
from Tuberculosis just before the beginning of the Civil War.
Parker was involved in almost every reform movement you
could name. An early biographer of Parker’s provided a
list: "peace, temperance, education, the condition of women,
penal legislation, prison discipline, the moral and mental destitution of the
rich, [and] the physical destitution of the poor." He denounced
the Mexican War and urged his fellow Bostonians to protest the war.
No reform issue was more pressing for him than the abolition
of slavery. He urged people to violate the Fugitive Slave Law
passed in 1850 that required the return of escaped slaves to their
owners. Many fugitive slaves were part of his congregation. He hid
slaves in his own home. He walked the talk. He
supported abolitionist John Brown who many had considered a
terrorist. He supplied money for munitions to the free states in the
battle for Kansas.
By the time he died in 1860 the abolition of slavery was in
no way assured. Yet he held on to hope and wrote:
"I do not pretend to understand the moral universe;
the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the
curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by
conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice."
That is the original quote. Over one
hundred years later when our nation seethed with inequality and hatred, when
African-Americans faced daily humiliation and injustice in a violent,
segregated society, 100 years after a Civil War that was fought over slavery,
another preacher, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. reframed Rev. Theodore
Parker’s hope in one simple sentence:
“The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends
toward justice.”
Martin Luther King never thought the civil rights movement
was about him. He never pretended to have started it or to have
birthed the theology that instructed it, or created the rhetoric that inspired
it. King knew and stated that he stood on the shoulders
of those before him. His speeches and sermons are filled with
the wisdom of the ages. Much of that wisdom came from
the Bible. Much of it came from thinkers and activists from a wide
variety of traditions, including Theodore Parker.
I think King would be ambivalent about a national holiday
that bears his name. He would be in favor of a day, one day
better than none, that calls our focus and attention to the struggle, the
ongoing struggle for dignity, for racial equality, for nonviolent resistance to
all forms of oppression, for the demolition of the military industrial complex,
and for the reorienting of priorities toward the poorest of our citizens as
opposed to the welfare of the wealthiest corporate elite.
That is a lot to do in one day.
King might be in favor of at least one day of the 365
devoted to the incarnation of love. This is not a sentimental
love or an ivory tower theological love. This is a feet on the
street love, a pen to paper or finger to keyboard love, a chained to a bulldozer
love, a fingerprinted and mugshot-framed love. This is a
standing up to bullets and bullies love. This is a love that won’t
take “sorry, this is just the way it is” for an answer.
This is a love that knows the mocking and derision by those
in power. Love knows that arrogant
smirk. Love knows and feels the rage of injustice and Love knows the
desire to lash out, to return evil with evil. Love knows
it. Love feels it. Love feels the pain of rejection and
humiliation. Love hears the name-calling. Love
understands that hopeless, small feeling. Love knows that
self-doubt. Love feels the burn of shame.
Love knows something else. Love knows something
far more powerful than the so-called powerful. Love
knows that it will last at the end of things. Love knows as
Martin Luther King put it that the choice is not between violence and
non-violence. The choice is between non-violence and
non-existence. Love knows that if the human species, this
evolutionary experiment, is to survive for even another century it will only be
because of Love. Love is the energy of gut-wrenching
rage at injustice transformed into actions of justice and
reconciliation. It is not Love unless and until it includes the
enemy. Love is a miracle. Love is the miracle
of the desire, in fact, even the justice for revenge, melted down and reshaped
into a new creation.
Martin Luther King didn’t invent this love. He
did bear witness to it. But he wasn’t the only one by any
means. Of course. He would be ambivalent to
have his face, his name, and his birthday be the focus of something that is so
much larger than him. Yes, we need to know the history
of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. We need to
know the events, and the dates, and people and places and to teach them to our
children. But this history is much more than what happened
from 1954 to 1968. We need to know that we are not today
recollecting a series of past events. This history is an
ongoing story. It is the ongoing witness and practice of
scarred Love.
Love is not pretty. It is not a red Valentine’s
Day heart with a naked Cupid shooting his arrow. Love is not a
sentimental wish on a Hallmark Card. Love is not soft music
and a white light of escape. Love is not a saccharine niceness that
says, “Bless your heart” to your face then gossips behind your
back. Love is not a big church sign that says, “Everyone
is welcome.” Then when you go in you learn the unwritten
rule. You are welcome unless you are Black or Gay or
welcome only if you are Theologically Correct or Politically Connected or
Dressed for Success or whatever else you are not. Love
is none of that phony stuff.
Love is a scar. The central
symbol of Love in the Christian tradition is the crucified
Christ. Despite many of its misrepresentations, it is the most
powerful symbol I know of scarred Love. The
crucified and risen Christ symbolizes the truth of pain, injustice, hatred,
violence, and humiliation, transformed into hope, dignity, new life, renewed
relationships, joy, and possibility. The image of the
risen Christ bearing the scars of the cross is not there to beat up on us for
our sins or to be morbid. It shows us that the deepest
pain and humiliation and hopelessness is not beyond
hope. Love is larger than any one life.
Scarred Love is seen anytime a person is able to take their
pain and allow it to be transformed into a gift. It is
counter-intuitive. You can’t tell people to do it. It is
not a commandment. It is only Love when it is freely
entered. When a person could by all means keep and hold the pain and
anger for a lifetime and by all rights never would be blamed for doing so,
nevertheless, when she or he chooses and allows that pain and mistreatment to
become something else, something reconciling, that is scarred Love.
Emmett Till was a fourteen year-old boy. He lived
up north in Chicago and was visiting his cousins in Money,
Mississippi. The year was 1955. He didn’t know the ways
of the South and the unwritten rules that had been in place for
generations. He didn’t know that his place as an African-American was to
be silent. He didn’t know about the importance of downcast eyes and
moving to the side when a white person approached.
He didn’t know it was more than a joke one day in a
drugstore to act on a dare and talk fresh to a white
woman. “Bye Baby” he said to her on his way
outside. I am sure he thought that at most he would receive a
stern reprimand for speaking disrespectfully to an adult.
He had no idea that two white men would come to his uncle’s
house, to the home of Mose Wright, and demand at gunpoint that he come with
them for a ride. He had no idea that getting in the car with them
would be the last ride he would ever take.
When they found his body at the bottom of the Tallahatchie
River, scarred, beaten, and shot through the head, it was so disfigured that he
was unrecognizable save for his ring. In fact, one of the lame
arguments of the defense was that his body was so disfigured it couldn’t be
proved that it was Emmett Till.
His mother, Mamie Till, decided to have an open casket
funeral. Photos were taken of his body in the coffin and they
appeared in Jet Magazine. She wanted the world to see what they had
done to her boy.
At the trial an all-white jury found the defendants not
guilty. Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till, said she hadn’t expected anything
different. It was the way it was in 1955 in
Mississippi. In 1956, protected by double jeopardy, in a
magazine article, the two white men who had been found not guilty, admitted to
killing Emmett Till.
But Mamie Till said something else on national
television. She said that while nothing could be done for her baby
that maybe if the world knew and if change could come, her boy wouldn’t have
died in vain. The murder of Emmett Till, and the injustice of
the trial was another spark for the civil rights
movement. She travelled the country telling the
story of her boy. The story of scarred Love.
Her pain and the scarred body of her son could have been the
end of that family’s story. No one would or could blame her
for that. It could have been a quiet funeral. She
could have stayed away from the cameras. She could have in her grief
refused talk about her son, refused the hostile questions asked by the white
press. She didn’t. You couldn’t command her
to do what she did. You couldn’t expect her to do what she
did.
Scarred love is not sentimental. Scarred love is fierce love. It is longer and larger than any one life,
but it knows every life. Love requires the greatest of
courage. Love is the power to tell our experience, to show our
scars, and to trust that the scars are not the last word but an entrance to the
eternal word.
It is a word that rings true and will ring
true. In the midst of all the pain, love will endure.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward
justice.
Amen.
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