LIVING THE BELOVED COMMUNITY

The Rev. Mark Ward
Unitarian Universalist Church of Asheville

Asheville, NC

January 20, 2008

READINGS

From “Facing the Challenge of a New Age,” Martin Luther King Jr.’s address to the First Annual Institute on Non-Violence and Social Change, held in Montgomery, Alabama, in December 1956.

“The challenge that stands before us is that of entering the new age of understanding. This simply means that the . . . virtues of love, mercy and forgiveness should stand at the center of our lives. There is the danger that those of us who have lived so long under the yoke of oppression, those of us who have been exploited and trampled over, those of us who have had to stand amid the tragic midnight of injustice and indignities will enter the new age with hate and bitterness. But if we retaliate with hate and bitterness, the new age will be nothing but a duplication of the old age. We must blot out the hate and injustice of the old age with the love and justice of the new. . . .

It is true that as we struggle for freedom in America we will have to boycott at times. But we must remember as we boycott that a boycott is not an end within itself . . . . The end is reconciliation, the end is redemption: the end is the creation of the beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. It is this type of understanding good will that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of all.”

SERMON

It is sobering to reflect that it has been more than a half century, outside the memory of the vast majority of Americans alive today, since Martin Luther King Jr. spoke the words you heard David Ray read earlier, words that Dr. King delivered at the time of one of the most crucial victories of the modern civil rights movement, when the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated Alabama laws requiring the segregation of city buses, the victory of Rosa Parks. That event inaugurated King’s career as a civil rights leader. This year we will mark the 40th anniversary of the event that ended it, his death by an assassin’s bullet in Memphis, Tennessee.

All these big numbers add gravity to those events and help us recognize them as the hinges of history that they were. But the distance of all those years also serves to diminish them in our minds. They fade into the past, hallmarks of another time that we may remember with solemn ceremony, while, as Clinton Lee Scott suggests, doing little to heed their example.

Indeed, the distance of time makes it easy for us to paint those days as a halcyon time when, to our eyes now anyway, the right path, the path toward human dignity, seemed so clear, unlike today when the way ahead seems so murky. Of course, anyone who came of age in that time can tell you that there was nothing like clarity in those tense days of the 1950s, nothing like consensus about what the problem of racial oppression even was, no less what to do about it. Murkiness, sad to say, is part of the human condition when it comes to finding a way toward justice.

As important as I think it is that we and many others set aside this day to celebrate Dr. King’s brave witness and prophetic words, I worry that tomorrow we will park his sermons and speeches back on our bookshelves for another year, having praised his “dream” and sung the songs, and leave it at that. Because the truth is that while in 50 years the circumstances of oppression have changed, the work to end it, the work to which Dr. King called us has only begun.

And so today I want to center our thoughts on a pivotal element of Dr. King’s thought, an idea that he did not originate but that through his life and thought he helped to transform and that, if we would attend to it, could, in turn, transform us: the vision of the beloved community.

As far as we can tell, that particular turn of phrase originated with the American philosopher Josiah Royce, a friend and colleague of William James from the early 20th century. “Through the long centuries of human history,” Royce wrote, “there has been building a Beloved Community. All souls that love, all souls that aspire, strengthen its bonds. . . . There are no strangers in the Beloved Community, none against whom doors are shut and harsh words spoken. For they who belong to it are bound together in one living body, apart from which there is no life.”

Royce’s idea was that the Beloved Community was not some ideal toward which we aspire, but instead was a fulfillment of who we are as human beings. Our best selves naturally draw us together in a community of love and justice, which grows stronger as we attend to it.

His idea resonated with progressive thinkers of the time, especially clergy who had been arguing for shifting the focus of religion from personal salvation to the betterment of all. Included among them were the Unitarian minister John Haynes Holmes and the Universalist Clarence Skinner, who said of the Beloved Community, it “is not an organization of individuals seeking private and selfish security for their souls. It is a new adventure, a spontaneous fellowship of . . . [people] seeking a new world.”

The speech of December 1956 that David read from was a remarkable moment for Dr. King. The Montgomery bus boycott had been grinding on month after month, and while the group of ministers that King headed had made some progress in the courts, the city was fighting them every step of the way.

The announcement on November 13 that the Supreme Court had dismissed the city’s appeals of earlier court victories on the boycotters’ behalf was like a parting of the waters, the first clear signal that justice was on their side. King was ebullient and convened what he grandly called “the First Annual Institute on Non-Violence and Social Change.”

In his speech, he set the Montgomery bus boycott in the context of liberation movements emerging across the world, all of it, he said, evidence of an old order of colonialism and oppression that passing away. But he warned the gathering that all this wouldn’t happen by itself, that they would face challenges. And it was in this context that he introduced for the first time his vision of the Beloved Community.

“We are challenged, he said, “to rise above the narrow confines of our individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of humanity, . . . to enter the new age with understanding good will.”

While the temptation of tit for tat, violence to meet violence, is strong, he said, “we have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization.” And that love, King made clear, would not be simple sentiment or affection, but “an understanding, redeeming good will” that accepts and appreciates others unconditionally, for their own sakes, that seeks nothing in return but stands fast in support of the dignity of all people. It is a vision by which, he insisted, divisions among people would be erased and all would be reconciled, in which each of us would be forgiven and all redeemed, a vision of a community where each is valued and where none must relinquish, in his words, “the privilege and obligation to love.”

King’s notion weaved together several threads: the Christian teaching to love one’s neighbor that he grew up with as a Baptist pastor, Mohandes Gandhi’s notion of love force, or satyagraha, that he learned from the organizers of the Montgomery bus boycott, and the progressive idea that all people are bound up in common destiny, which he absorbed in his academic training.

With Royce he shared the notion that human existence is ultimately social, that we are dependent on each other. In King’s words, “we are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.” In that vision, as Royce said, there are no strangers. “Injustice anywhere,” in King’s words, “is a threat to justice everywhere.”

From Gandhi, he learned that nonviolence promised the only way to enduring success, for, he said, “when the battle’s over, a new relationship comes into being between the oppressed and the oppressor.” And his Christian grounding gave him the images and vocabulary that would resonate across ethnicities.

Still, he found the confidence of his convictions tested. Jailed in Birmingham, he chided so-called “white, moderate” clergy who insisted that he was in “too great a religious hurry” to demand equal rights for African-Americans. Theirs, he said, was “a tragic misconception of time.”

“We must use time creatively,” he wrote, “and realize that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy. . . . Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.”

He watched the tragic murders of civil rights workers, black and white, including the Unitarian Universalist minister James Reeb, beaten to death in Selma, Alabama. And still he saw moments of possibility, such as after the march to Montgomery in the spring of 1966 when he stood in an airport waiting for a plane to arrive.

“As I stood with them,” he said, “and saw white and Negro, nuns and priests, ministers and rabbis, labor organizers, lawyers, doctors, housemaids and shopworkers brimming with vitality and enjoying a rare comradeship, I knew I was seeing a microcosm of the mankind of the future in this moment of luminous and genuine brotherhood.”

In the last year of his life as he watched the civil rights movement begin to fracture, Dr. King struggled to bring his followers back to the place where he began. In his last speech to the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, having posed for himself the question, “Where do we go from here?” King insisted that the place to start was that, “we must massively assert our dignity and worth . . . amidst a system that still oppresses us.”

That assertion, he said, was to be accomplished by marrying power with love. He acknowledged that may sound odd to those who consider the two opposites, who view love as yielding and power as heedless. Yet, he insisted that it was the only way. “Power without love,” he said, “is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. And this is what we must see as we move on.”

Timothy Tyson, the University of North Carolina history professor, has written that as inspiring as the story of Dr. King is, the problem with it as a goad to racial justice is that it asks so little of us. We can listen and be moved and congratulate ourselves for broadening our sympathies. We can tell ourselves that the bad old days of Jim Crow are gone, that, as Tyson puts it, “Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down.”

This narrative, he says, “is soothing, moving and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened,” no resemblance to the truth, Tyson says, that it was fear for domestic stability, not high-minded ethical principles that led the federal government to intervene in racial politics, that, rather than celebrate, most whites – and many middle class blacks – in his words, “recoiled in fear of these changes and huddled in suburbs of their own indifference,” and that in the end the knocking down of legal barriers to racial equality did little to affect the power imbalance in American society, leaving African-Americans still on the outs. To bring about real change, Tyson says, we must give up the hope of transcending that history and, instead, confront it.

Tyson’s words were among those that I read last fall to open meetings of the 30th session of Building Bridges, Asheville’s community anti-racism program, which were held at our church. The meetings, attended by up to around 90 people, including 20-some from this church, over a period of nine weeks, consisted of about an hour in the sanctuary here to see a video or hear a presentation and another hour of meetings in small groups.

It was a remarkable experience to be with such a group: men, women; old, young; black and white. Together we dug into some of the ugliest truths surrounding race today. We talked about the stereotypes we carry about each other, about how racism pops up, right here in Asheville, in the schools, the hospitals, the work place, the mall. We talked about institutional racism that results in African Americans earning less, paying more, and dying earlier. And we talked about the privilege that comes with a white skin – doors opened, accommodations made that most of us never take note of, yet that are unavailable to those with darker complexion.

It wasn’t always fun. We asked embarrassing questions, learned some shocking and discouraging things and owned up to our cluelessness. But we found each other forgiving and compassionate. Honesty was applauded and tears were honored. And by the end of nine weeks I believe not a one of us wasn’t changed.

It was my second session of Building Bridges, and probably not my last, because I know that I’m still learning. There is probably nothing more difficult in America today than talking across races with understanding and compassion, and I still don’t do it well. But even more, this work brings me closer than I think I have ever come to glimpsing the vision that Dr. King held up. The beloved community is not a distant vision, a city on a hill. It is the fulfillment of our very humanity, where each of us, people of inherent dignity and worth, is honored and appreciated with an all-embracing love. And we build it not with bricks and mortar but with our own actions and intentions.

We build it, as Dr. King suggested, by dedicating the power at our disposal to the work of love. Each of us has different talents, skills and predilections, but we are each capable of the work of love. And as Dr. King said, “I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love. I’m talking about strong, demanding love”: Love that won’t be moved in the face of hate and oppression, love that is steadfast, enduring, and courageous.

No, the beloved community cannot be built. It can only be lived into existence, lived by how we conduct our lives, by opening our minds and growing generous hearts, by enduring discomfort for the sake of understanding, and risking disapproval for the sake of integrity. For the truth is that we are bound together, people of rich and beautiful diversity, and yet one: one in hope and one in love.