A sermon by Senior Minister John B. McCall, January 21, 2008
The Legacy of Martin Luther King. Jr.
I want to spare you the discomfort by posing the obvious question: what does a middle-aged white preacher from the state of Maine have to contribute to a conversation about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.?
I’ve been asking myself that question ever since Bill Imes invited me to give the first of two “keynote” sermons this afternoon. This isn’t a peripheral query but rather my starting point. I must leave it to much wiser commentators to look at the great sweep of Dr. King’s legacy. I have a narrower focus: I hope that in offering my own experience I can prompt you to ask what you would say if you were standing here.
Dr. King’s voice and message fundamentally shaped me as a person and a parson. Or, more accurately, the person I was becoming in my late teen years was drawn like a moth to the flame of his message.
Long before that, I was shaped:
• by missionary grandparents who served 30 years in Japan and the South Pacific
• by our parents who were ordained together in 1938.
• by our childhood home where the world and the Gospel got into frequent debates at the supper table, and where a rainbow of guests enlarged our world.
• by our father who was UCC Conference Minister in Southern California and was branded a communist by the John Birch Society; which he wasn’t.
• by our mother who pioneered the national UCC priority for women in church and society in the early 1970’s and was branded a pushy feminist by many of her male colleagues; which she was.
• And from that remarkable trip to Selma, Alabama, 43 years ago, when I felt claimed by God in a way that has never faded.
In 1965, I was a 17 year old college freshman at UCC-related Beloit College in southern Wisconsin (I’ll give you a second to do the math). We lived in our own alternative reality of long hair, denim work shirts, anti-war sentiment, and Star Trek. We proudly celebrated when one of the fraternities was kicked out of the national for pledging a black student. Many of us fancied ourselves young radicals – though not revolutionaries – holding occasional sit-ins at the college President’s Office which were kind-spirited and more like a pep-rally than a confrontation.
On Sunday evening March 7, 1965, we religious-types gathered in the chapel as we did every week. That day our guest speaker was theologian and sociologist Gibson Winter from the Urban Training Center in Chicago. He reported the Bloody Sunday attack just hours earlier. Marchers had set out from Selma, Alabama to the county seat in Montgomery to register to vote. Gov. George Wallace pledged to prevent them. Sheriff’s police and state troopers had used tear gas, and some had ridden into the crowd on horse back with billy clubs and bull whips and scattered the marchers into a bloody retreat.
Dr. King called on people of good will from across the nation to come and march in solidarity two days later. He knew the every television station and newspaper headline would expose the truth.
Within hours I was one of six students who set off on a life-changing pilgrimage. As word spread on our campus, countless people stepped forward with donations to cover the expenses, even from some who questioned what we were doing. With prayer and the laying on of hands we were commissioned and sent on our way before the sun rose Monday morning.
Many of you can remember those days. Some of you may have been there at the Edmund Pettus Bridge as well. None of you needs me to impress on you the profound impact of such an experience on a young adult seeking God’s will and call.
I was there when Dr. King called us to confront the powers with complete trust in non-violence as the only means of changing the nation’s soul.
I was there on Tuesday, March 9, among 2500 marchers who headed toward the bridge as angry white mobs and National Guard troops stood along the route, and television cameras recorded every moment. We were turned back to try another day.
I was there when we heard the news that a small, angry band had beaten Unitarian Universalist Minister James Reeb, and that he’d died in Birmingham after the hospital emergency room in Selma had turned him away.
And I was there long enough to accept a welcome gift from the local organizers – a carton of Lucky Strike cigarettes that hooked me on smoking for the next fifteen years.
Our little band of college protestors reluctantly headed back to Wisconsin, home to the familiar college community where we were newly sensitized to the injustice in our own back yard.
• Several of us pushed hard to start a tutoring program on campus where kids from the neighborhood elementary and high schools could come for help with their class work.
• We pressed the college administration for a more-proactive effort for minority student recruitment.
• We stood beside members of the college employees’ union when they went on strike for better wages and working conditions.
I was completely disinterested in book-learning and felt a deep struggle about what I should do:
• should I transfer to one of the historically black UCC-related colleges?
• Should I leave school all-together and join the ranks of the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee?
• Just what – if anything – was God saying?
My parents patiently coached me and persuaded me to stay in school, to continue on my path toward parish ministry. I graduated from college in April, 1968, two weeks after Dr. King was assassinated in Memphis. On June 5, Senator Robert Kennedy was murdered, and in mid-August I arrived on the campus of the Chicago Theological Seminary just as the Democratic National Convention convened. Those were cataclysmic times.
CTS was alma mater for both my parents and one of my brothers; my sister had studied there and Jesse Jackson’s legacy still roamed the halls. He’d studied sporadically before finally dropping out in 1966 when he realized his call to ministry wasn’t dependent on a traditional theological degree. My most famous classmate was Jean Alexander, our former Conference Minister here in Maine.
Naturally seminary courses reflected a deep mistrust of the institutional church and a clear message that parish congregations as we’d known them were pathetically irrelevant. We regularly prophesied their total collapse under their own weight in the very near future. I guess that’s nothing new, though many are still making the prediction.
So we imagined we were preparing for ministry in a post-parish world. Graduate courses informed us about encounter groups, ministry with street gangs, house churches, contemporary celebration (rather than worship) and the like. We had seminars on “phenomenological photography” which ultimately was the theme of my Master’s thesis. (Don’t ask)
Then, as a second year student, I took part in a field ed experience in suburban Des Plaines, Illinois, and became one of three student assistants in the large UCC congregation there.
In that setting I experienced a spiritual train-wreck. I voluntarily went to the very environment in which I had been nurtured as a Christian, but which I now thought I had rejected as beyond saving.
I was deeply judgmental toward all those comfortable Christians and their irrelevant lives. But culturally they were my kin. Talk about ambivalence!
I expressed it in my first faltering sermon and in the weekly sessions as the supervisor puffed on his pipe. He was a Ph.D. psychologist by training and I think had been ordained as an afterthought – more a Fred Rogers than Bill Coffin. But one day he had had enough of my judgments that urban ministry with the marginalized was righteous and suburban ministry wasn’t. In front of several others he called me on the carpet:
“McCall, you naïve, arrogant, smart-ass. The suburbs need churches, too. I can go out and play golf with the right people for a few hours and raise more money for a good cause than you could in a year of working in the slums?”
Good point… I wrestled with it hard for a couple of years. Then, as I prepared to graduate from seminary, pragmatism and principle collided. I needed a job. I found one as (drum roll…) an associate minister in an entirely white, suburban, upper-middle-class UCC church, where our mix-raced adopted son seemed to be the only person of color in the neighborhood.
Parenthetically I sat for my ordination exam with the Church and Ministry Committee of the Chicago Metropolitan Association. Despite my deficiencies they let me in. Two days later I phoned the Association Minister and told him I thought could have done their work better. He countered with a challenge: if I thought I could do better, there was a vacancy on the committee. I accepted… and in some kind of poetic justice they elected me chair the next year.
Shortly after that some lay leaders from a little UCC church on the South Side of Chicago came to us with the young man they had called as their new pastor. They expected great things from him, so much so that they had bought a key-man insurance policy in the amount of one million dollars. His name was (and is) Jeremiah Wright.
Today, 43 years after Selma, I’m in my 19th year as senior minister of a largely white, suburban upper-middle-class UCC church. Did I sell out? No. I have rather lived my call among people like me, but still have managed to stretch their understanding of the Gospel – and they have certainly stretched mine. I’ve lived what the old country preacher once said: “God loves you just the way you are… but loves you way too much to let you stay that way.”
I share all of this auto-biography with you not because it’s unusual but because it’s so utterly ordinary. While this particular story is uniquely mine, each of you has had your encounter with the living Spirit in some way that you have interpreted as a call to ministry. You have decided how you will live the Good News in whatever place you find yourself.
Over the 37 years since ordination I’ve been blessed by countless good, caring people who’ve tried in some measure to hear the Good News and be the Good News. I don’t think any of us has substantially reshaped the world – but every one of us has done something to reflect God’s love for the world and Dr. King’s dream in our corner of the world.
Dr. King left many legacies. I tell you my story to illustrate just one of them. Steeped in the Gospel, and determined to apply Jesus’ principles to real life, he recognized who he was, what the world needed, and just how God could use him in facing the evil of racism.
His life calls each of us to discern the particular gifts God has given, and to use them right where you are, with passion. As he so wisely said: “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
How has God equipped you, and to what has God called you? If it’s teaching, teach with energy. If it’s organizing, organize tirelessly; if it’s serving, serve with joy. And if it’s preaching, preach with conviction. Break the silence and feed God’s hungry people with a message that can change lives. Pay attention. Shine the light of faith on whatever is bogus and corrupt and unjust. You don’t have to go to Selma to make a difference.
What are you passionate about? Have you ever had someone walk out during a sermon? Have you ever had a little group of folks show up and tell you to stop preaching about peace, and economic justice, and the need for healing in your community?
Let his legacy be the rising tide of Christian leaders who have Gospel-informed convictions and who faithfully express them. Don’t forget the scolding we read in Revelation, chapter 3, when the angel of the Lord says to the Church:
I know everything you have done, and you are not cold or hot. I wish you were either one or the other. But since you are lukewarm and neither cold nor hot, I will spit you out of my mouth. You claim to be rich and successful and to have everything you need. But you don’t know how bad off you are. You are pitiful, poor, blind, and naked.
We who make our lives in the Church today need to hear that! God forbid that my epitaph reads: “He never upset anybody,” or your legacy is “She always kept her head down!” Dr. King said: “We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.”
Wherever and however God has called you, don’t ever underestimate the power of the Gospel to change lives and to transform communities. Those of us who are progressive Christians, who want to honor diverse perspectives, must remember the danger that trying to be all things to all people, risks our becoming nothing to anybody.
So, I point first Dr. King’s legacy: that we discern what gifts God has given us, and use them with passion, right where we are.
Secondly, Dr. King’s legacy is a call for us to stand together – all people of good will, all people who envision a creation that is moving toward justice and mercy and peace.
With whom will you stand as ally and advocate? Whom has God put in your life and within your sphere of influence, who needs your voice and witness?
• It matters when we stand together for economic justice;
• It matters when we march in the Gay Pride parade; • it matters when we assemble for an NAACP forum;
• it matters when we serve at the soup kitchen;
• it matters when we testify at the state house;
• it matters when we write our letters to the editor and identify ourselves as Christians.
It matters, too, that we bring a countervailing voice to the culture wars that rage around us. Good people are turning their backs on our churches because they have come to believe Christians are narrow, bigoted, judgmental and self-righteous.
In his remarkable Letter from the Birmingham Jail Dr. King spoke of the fearless actions of the church in its earliest days, he wrote: “Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo.
Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often even vocal sanction of things as they are.”
But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.
Ironically we often think if we’re silent we’ll fare better. In truth, people are hungry for the Good News, anxious for signs of the Spirit at work. Our congregation in South Portland is known in the community for our broad, extravagant welcome in Jesus’ spirit.
We have a food pantry, and children’s clothes closet. And we also have a significant ministry of direct financial assistance to people in crisis. Each year we give away more than twice as much money as the combined public assistance budgets in the two towns we primarily serve.
We have also been an Open and Affirming congregation since 2000 and have unapologetically shared that welcome. Last November our Diversity Committee hosted a showing of the movie “For the Bible Tells me So,” an award-winning account of five Christian families facing the realization that a son or daughter is gay.
About 200 people gathered in our sanctuary with a joyous sense of welcome. In the crowd there were many who finally felt safe to enter a sanctuary again after years of feeling they’d been living in exile.
In the crowd, too, were representatives of the so-called “Christian Civic League” who later wrote that they didn’t know what to expect when they entered “Satan’s territory.” Some tried to intimidate the crowd by taking pictures that they later posted on their web site along with names and employers of anyone they could identify… all of this in order to show the love of Jesus.
They called us heretical and apostates (oh, my!) and gave us more free publicity than we ever could have engineered. Aside from a few nasty notes I received in the aftermath, we heard from countless people both within and beyond the church who were so grateful we weren’t silent.
Can we join together and show the world that following Jesus
• is a banquet where everyone is welcome, not a feast for the privileged few?
• is a table where each one will be served, and none will be sent away empty?
• is about liberation, not condemnation?
Can we join together in this age of radical self-indulgence and lift up the larger needs of the whole community?
Bluntly, as a white, straight, economically-blessed male, I’ve been surrounded by power and entitlement all my life. It’s like the air I breathe. Rarely can I even see it, but I know doors are opened for me because of the accident of my birth. And I know that when I stand with others – no matter how different they may appear to be – I’m living the legacy and embodying the Gospel message.
Some might look at me and say I’ve lost my zeal. It’s true I’m more patient, softer around the edges (ALL the edges), but am more able to hear different sides of an issue, more able to see my own mistakes, and more tolerant of others.
It’s true that South Portland is a long way from Selma.
It’s true my life and ministry have been framed by a whole array of saints, conspicuous among them Dr. Martin Luther King; his legacy has been this:
• To wrestle with my angel and figure out the blessing of where I belong.
• To find my authentic voice and live with integrity.
• To resist the temptation to keep my head down and fall silent;
• To stand in solidarity with folks of good will who share the vision and dream of a people reconciled and a world redeemed.
May God grant us the courage and vision to live this legacy, and to create our own.