This is the text of the sermon I preached on Sunday, March 8th, 2015 at the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church - Unitarian Universalist in Charlottesville, VA. If you'd like, you can also listen to a podcast.
Opening Words: The Road fromSelma by June Brindel
Sermon:
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“When a person places the proper value on freedom, there is nothing under the sun that he will not do to acquire that freedom. Whenever you hear a man saying he wants freedom, but in the next breath he is going to tell you what he won't do to get it, or what he doesn't believe in doing in order to get it, he doesn't believe in freedom. A man who believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire... or preserve his freedom.”
That’s
Malcolm X talking (and I kept his gender specific language in place for
historicity’s sake). “A person who
believes in freedom will do anything under the sun to acquire... or preserve that
freedom.” “Whenever you hear someone
saying they want freedom, but in the next breath tells you what they won't do
to get it, or what they don’t believe in doing in order to get it, that person
doesn't believe in freedom.”
It
doesn’t take a lot to see that in this Malcolm is taking a crack at the Rev.
Dr. King, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Student
Nonviolent Coordinating Council, and the hundreds of people who fifty years ago
today were in Selma nursing the wounds of “Bloody Sunday,” and the thousands of
people – white and black – who were on their way there to stand in solidarity
and to march, eventually, all the way to Montgomery. The folks President Obama was talking about
yesterday, the ones he described as, “ordinary Americans willing to
endure billy clubs and the chastening rod; tear gas and the trampling hoof; men
and women who despite the gush of blood and splintered bone would stay true to
their North Star and keep marching toward justice.” These are the people Malcolm X is dismissing
as not really believing in, not really understanding, freedom.
What
we have here is a clash of ideologies or, perhaps even more accurately, of strategies. Malcolm X said, "We declare our right on
this earth...to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given
the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which
we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary." If Dr. King said that “We must pursue
peaceful ends through peaceful means,” then Malcolm X was essentially saying
that those seeking freedom must have the freedom to choose how they’re going to
do it.
“I don't favor violence,” he said. “If we could bring about
recognition and respect of our people by peaceful means, well and good.
Everybody would like to reach his objectives peacefully. But I'm also a
realist. The only people in this country who are asked to be nonviolent are
black people." He also said, “"I
don't mean go out and get violent; but at the same time you should never be
nonviolent unless you run into some nonviolence. I'm nonviolent with those who
are nonviolent with me. But when you drop that violence on me, then you've made
me go insane, and I'm not responsible for what I do."
Martin
Luther King, on the other hand, believed that “hatred and bitterness can never
cure the disease of fear, only love can do that [and that] we must evolve for
all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression, and
retaliation.” He said, “Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts
without wounding and ennobles the [one] who wields it. It is a sword that
heals.”
Malcolm X said, “Concerning
nonviolence: It is criminal to teach a man not to defend himself, when he is
the constant victim of brutal attacks. It is legal and lawful to own a shotgun
or a rifle. We believe in obeying the law.”
What
we have here is a clash of ideologies or, perhaps even more accurately, a clash
of strategies. And this clash reveals a
paradox – can violence ever achieve peace?
Can limits ever lead to freedom?
It’s this later one that I really want to dig into this morning.
Miriam Webster’s Dictionary defines
“freedom” as, “the quality or state of being free,” which it
further defines as “liberation from slavery or restraint or from the power of
another (in other words, independence),”
and, “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or
action.” And by this definition it seems
as though Malcolm X was on to something – if freedom is “the absence of
necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action,” then how can you
achieve freedom if the road you’re going to take to get there is, of necessity,
constrained in advance by a principle like nonviolence?
And I’ve got to
tell you, the more I read about what went on in Selma 50 years ago the more
respect for I have for the discipline, the restraint, the limits that those
peaceful freedom fighters placed on themselves, and the strength and courage it
took to remain true to them.
Last week I talked
about Mark Morrison-Reed’s book, TheSelma Awakening. This week it’s
Richard Leonard’s Call to Selma: eighteen days of witness. Richard Leonard was the Minister of Religious
Education at the Community
Church of New York 50 years ago, and he was one of the hundreds of clergy and
lay people who responded to Dr. King’s call and headed down to Selma to stand
in solidarity. He went expecting to be
gone just a couple of days. He stayed
for eighteen. (But don’t worry, by the
seventh day he finally managed to call home and tell his wife and kids that
he’d gone.) This book, published back in
2002, is the story of his experiences during those days, as reconstructed from
the notes and journal he kept at that time.
What makes Call to Selma so
moving is that it is the story told from eye level. It’s doesn’t depict the perspective of the
leadership, but the rank and file. It’s
not the story of the people making the decisions, but of the ones who, in faith,
acted on them.
And what a story it is.
We know, I hope, about that first march, the
one that happened 50 years ago yesterday, the one where the marchers hadn’t
even gotten all the way over the Edmund Pettus bridge when they were set upon
by police with billy clubs and tear gas – Bloody Sunday. And we may know about the march two days
later, on March 9th, that came to be called Turnaround Tuesday,
because the marchers voluntarily turned around in order not to violate the
federal court order prohibiting a march (to show their respect for the law),
yet also having gotten just a little bit further than they had two days before
(to demonstrate their resolve). And then
there was that third march, which started on March 21 and ended with 25,000
people marching up to the state house in Montgomery on March 25th.
In between there was the lesser
known stalemate at the so-called “Berlin Wall.”
With the road to Montgomery blocked by a federal injunction, and
hundreds of people wanting and needing to do something, organizers decided on March 10th, the day
after Reverends Reeb, Miller, and Olsen were attacked, the organizers decided
to march to the Dallas County Courthouse.
Almost immediately they were met by Mayor Smitherman and Chief Baker, and rows
and rows of police officers stretching across Sylvan Street, blocking their
way. This faceoff would continue for six
days – night and day, good weather or rain (and there was apparently a lot of hard rain that week). At one point Chief Baker strung a clothesline
across the street to physically demarcate what we might call now “a line in the
sand.” The story of the hours and days
on that line is powerful stuff, no less powerful than the stories of the
meetings between King and Johnson, for instance.
But
to bring us back to that paradox, here were hundreds of women, children, and
men who were fighting for their freedom, yet who were incredibly disciplined
about it. They knew that an “anything
goes” kind of anarchic freedom could get them all killed and, maybe worse, hurt
their cause. Leonard tells of seeing at
one point a hand, coming out of the rows further back, with a pair of scissors
poised to cut Chief Baker’s “Berlin Wall,” and then, almost immediately,
another hand reached out and pulled the first hand back. There were times when folks wanted to push
through that line, to break through those “stiff ranked troopers / white as a
shroud / rimming the road from Selma” the way our Opening Words imagined the
ghosts of Reeb and Jackson, Evers and Till, and those four little girls from
Birmingham doing. Oh they wanted to, but
they didn’t. Their actions were dictated
by necessity; seriously constrained and restricted. There were things many of them wanted to do
but that they would not do. They gave up
freedom to gain freedom.
And
that may be an important point to highlight.
These weren’t constraints placed upon them from the outside; these were
limits voluntarily imposed on themselves.
If you choose to limit your own freedom, is your freedom truly limited?
That’s
something I think Malcolm X may have missed.
And you’d think he would have understood this. After all, members of the Nation of Islam
denied themselves the pleasures of the use of alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs
… eating meat. Members adhered to a
strict dress code and what’s been described as a military discipline. Yet they accepted, even embraced, these
limitations to their freedom because of the sense of greater freedom such
discipline made possible. (The word
“Islam” itself, the Arabic word, means “submission” as in “submission to the
will of Allah.”) All of this Malcolm
understood and it didn’t bother him at all.
Here he understood that an unbridled, no-limits freedom was potentially
dangerous and damaging.
King
understood the power of self-control, of discipline, of making the choice to
limit one’s choices on behalf of a greater freedom. His belief in the power of nonviolence came
from two very different sources. One,
the Hindu Mohandas Gandhi, whom King once called “the guiding light of our
technique of nonviolent social change.”
Gandhi is remembered as saying about meeting violence with nonviolence,
“They may torture my body, break my bones, even kill me. Then they will have my
dead body, but not my obedience.” The
other inspiration, of course, would have been Jesus who exemplified devotion to
love and truth even if that meant his own execution. Jesus who was remembered as, even from the
cross, asking for mercy for those who tortured him.
So
why talk about all this this morning? In
part because this is the 50th anniversary of those events in Selma
and we need to remember because, despite how far we’ve come as a nation there
is still so much farther we have to go.
But
there’s another reason as well. The
dominant culture in which we swim tells us in ways both subtle and overt that
we should let nothing stand in the way of our “pursuit of happiness.” The culture of conspicuous consumption and
on-demand … everything … is presented as the highest ideal, and we are
inculcated with the notion that our highest goal should be the freedom to do
what we want when we want. We’re told,
in short, that bondage is bad and freedom is good.
Yet
without its banks a flowing river becomes a swamp. “Make channels for the streams of love where
they may broadly run,” goes the hymn.
Without those channels forward movement is dissipated. This is true of a fight for civil rights;
this is true for the living of our own lives.
When
I hear somebody talking about freedom – or anything of value that they seek –
and then, in the same breath, hear them say what they’re not going to do to get
it, or what they don’t believe in doing to get it, then I feel certain that
they eventually will.
Pax tecum,
RevWik
Pax tecum,
RevWik
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