Sermons from Park Hill Congregational UCC Denver, Colorado Rev. Dr. David Bahr [email protected] January 14, 2018 “Dr. King: His Life, Our Time. His Need and Ours” Psalm 139: 1-14 O Lord, you have searched me and known me. 2 You know when I sit down and when I rise up; you discern my thoughts from far away. 3 You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. 4 Even before a word is on my tongue, O Lord, you know it completely. 5 You hem me in, behind and before, and lay your hand upon me. 6 Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it is so high that I cannot attain it. 7 Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? 8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. 9 If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, 10 even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. 11 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” 12 even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you. 13 For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. I feel fortunate that every year, to prepare a sermon for Dr. King’s birthday, I get to peruse through volumes of speeches and sermons and listen to audio recordings and watch video clips to find inspiration. There is so much rich material that, at the beginning, the task feels daunting. But every year, some aspect of his life and our times calls out for attention. And this year, my attention was caught by a sermon he delivered in August 1957. We remember the context of that time period. The bus boycott in Montgomery began in December 1955, just days after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white man. Local pastor Martin King was named the president of the organization that would lead the boycott. It is said he was chosen because he “had the advantage of being too new in town to have made enemies; young (only 26 years old), well-trained, generally respected,” not to mention, “if the boycott failed, with his family connections he could probably find another pastorate.”[1] Even so, his primary responsibility was still as the pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. Someone who had to preach on Sundays, conduct funerals, teach Bible study, visit the sick, and watch over the church’s bottom line. That last part was made clear this hot August Sunday. Before he launched into his sermon he gave the announcements, including a funeral the next day, details about pallbearers, and then, I had to laugh. Accustomed to his soaring rhetoric, I was amused by his announcement about financial statements available after worship. Adding, “I would like to say that I noticed several members are behind in their pledges for some reason. I don’t know why that is, but I would like to urge you to catch up in your pledges, for our responsibilities are the same.” OK. But he kept on going, “We have a budget to carry out in the summer months, just as in any period of the year. And I’m urging you to bring up those pledges before too long, so that we can face the many responsibilities that we have ahead in our church.” He gave a few more announcements and then invited the ushers to come forward. “Let us prepare to give liberally,” he said, blessing the offering. And then he went back into his plea. “As I said just a few minutes ago, many of our members are behind in their pledges” and kept going in the hot August Alabama sanctuary for a little while longer. Some things in church life don’t change! And it clearly doesn’t matter whether you are becoming the nationally renowned Dr. King, or just Pastor Martin who also picks up trash in the bushes on Thursday afternoons. But back to the point. If you remember, the bus boycott lasted an entire year and 15 days, ending just before Christmas in 1956. This particular August 1957 sermon was entitled “Conquering Self-Centeredness.” A time when King’s celebrity had exploded and he described this to his Sunday morning congregation: “Living over the past year, I can hardly go into any city or any town in this nation where I’m not lavished with hospitality by people of all races and of all creeds. I can hardly go anywhere to speak in this nation where hundreds and thousands of people are not turned away because of lack of space. I can hardly walk the street in any city of this nation where I’m not confronted with people running up the street, ‘Isn’t that Reverend King of Alabama?’” Pastor Martin told his congregation, “Living like this it’s easy to think, it’s a dangerous tendency, that I will come to feel that I’m something special, that I stand somewhere in this universe because of my ingenuity and I can walk around life with a type of arrogance because of an importance that I have.” I appreciated this window into his internal challenges. And his answer to the temptation: I pray this prayer every day: “O God, help me to see myself in my true perspective.” It’s a universal prayer whether our star is rising or our future is fading and our accomplishments are failing. Somehow, it both humbles when needed as well as lifts us up. He said he prays every day: “O God, help me to see myself in my true perspective. Help me to see that I’m just a symbol of a movement, something that was getting ready to happen in history. And that a boycott would have taken place in Montgomery even if I had never come to Alabama. Help me to realize who I am, that this movement happened because of the forces of history and because of the fifty thousand Negroes of Alabama who will never get their names in the papers and in the headlines. O God, help me to see that where I stand today, I stand because others helped me to stand there.”[2] It was a prayer he commended to his congregation to conquer self-centeredness, to see ourselves in true perspective, and though the members of his congregation were probably among those never listed in the newspapers or given headlines and might not have needed some of the particularities of his advice, even so, I appreciate this insight into his life. And, I also have to wonder, maybe ours too? The circumstances are certainly different, and maybe our struggle isn’t with ego, but on the flip side, don’t we all at times have a way of considering ourselves uniquely burdened by cares that no one else could possibly understand or bear? Nobody knows the troubles I alone have seen. There is something collectively true about our ability to make things about ourselves. But, in every way, we can all still pray, “O God, help me, today, to see myself in my true perspective.” After his quite lengthy sermon on a hot Alabama morning, he invited people to give their lives to Christ and offered a few more announcements, including how the evening service would only be one hour; one hour, one hour, he repeated several times to his sweltering church, but nothing more about pledges. In that sermon, he reveals the fierce pressure of his growing celebrity, of the temptation to find himself more important than the movement. In the coming years, that pressure would only increase, especially after winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964. In response, he could have offered all kinds of psychological opinions, alternate solutions to the problem of getting a big head, but it was prayer, he said. Daily, and praying without ceasing. Perhaps it’s not surprising that he would say this – after all, he was a pastor and it was in a sermon. But while Dr. King’s skills at oration are praised all the time, it was this intimate moment that revealed the depth of Reverend King. His prayer life. And that is what caught my attention this year. The way his life meets our times. His need. And ours. There is much to remember about King’s life that inspires us to do justice, but he would also counsel us not forget to his focus on the Source of inspiration. And pray. You can’t fully appreciate or understand his speeches without an understanding of his faith. For that matter, it is impossible to understand King apart from the Black Church. And you can’t note the scriptural references throughout his speeches without also noting that many of his favorite scriptures are prayers,
We know this because a book about Dr. King’s prayer life was released just a few years ago, the first of its kind, noting its striking omission by scholars for 50 years. How could prayer be missing from scholarship about his life? And that’s especially odd, said the author, Lewis Baldwin, because “King never separated intellectual ability, moral responsibility, and social praxis from deep personal spirituality and piety.”[3] For King, the resources of heart, mind, soul, and spirit were a necessary precondition to social change. While some people would elevate the importance of protest over prayer, saying that prayer is just a waste of time, or that Christians should choose to focus on prayer over protest, just spitting in the wind, King would remind us that prayer and praise and protest, confession, intercession and adoration, are all one in the same – and without one, the others wouldn’t have meaning, not to mention, we couldn’t keep doing any of it. That is so true. As we get to the first anniversary of a year in which we have been constantly on edge from one tweet and outrageous comment after another, for which we have no more words in reply; news day after day from the Department of Injustice, the Department of Selling Off Our Natural Resources, the Department of Ending Public Schools; constant reminders that white supremacy still rules – seriously, publicly declaring a preference for Norwegian immigrants over Haitians? It’s only been one year, during which we have been constantly reminded to keep up the resistance, to express outrage… So, no wonder why it was that King’s prayer life called out for our attention in these times. Fittingly, one of his prayers is entitled “I Can’t Face It Alone.”[4] During the bus boycott he was constantly harassed and threatened. But it was a month after the boycott ended that he received a particularly disturbing telephone call from a white supremacist who threatened his life, his home, and his family. King, sitting in his kitchen, collapsed and prayed, “Lord, I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But I am afraid. And I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.”[5] He didn’t say “anymore.” He said I can’t face it “alone.” And less than a week later, his house was indeed bombed. “I’ve come to the point…” “I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it anymore.” Haven’t we all been there. But he said, “Face it alone.” Feeling that same way doesn’t require us to have had our homes threatened or bombed, for wildfires to destroy our possessions, for mudslides to erase our legacy, for hurricanes to clear away any semblance of normality… It doesn’t take a diagnosis of cancer or the realization of addiction… It doesn’t take foreclosure or unemployment for us arrive at the conclusion, “I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone” anymore. Yet, for no matter what reason, the response can be the same every time: O Lord, you have searched me and known me. 3 You search out my path and my lying down, and are acquainted with all my ways. 7 Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? 8 If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in hell, you are there. 9 If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, 10 even there your hand shall lead me, and your right hand shall hold me fast. 11 If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” 12 even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to you. 13 For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. 14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; that I know very well. Not many months into the bus boycott, people were rightfully weary of the inconvenience. Though Rev. King was personally comforted by its words, in an April 29th sermon he reflected that many people do not want to be known by God.[6] He said, “one of the strange facts of human life is that there is within every man an underlying urge to escape God, the mad desire to flee from the presence of Almighty God.” Why? One reason I can think of is that to be known by God is to know God and to know God is to love God and to love God is to love God’s people and to love God’s people is to do the right thing. And when we don’t, or rather, don’t want to, who wants a presence on every rock, heaven, hell, the farthest sea, and everywhere in between reminding us of that? Leave me alone! We’d all rather do our own thing. We get weary of always hearing about the right thing. King cited Jonah in that April sermon. Well, when we too have “come to the point,” we can try to turn off the news, we can log off Facebook, we can stop coming to church, we can stop talking to our neighbors, but we cannot escape God. Now, is that a promise or a threat? We might say, angrily, God won’t leave me alone. Or we could rest in the knowledge that God does not leave us alone; God, who knows our deepest needs and our most desperate longings, who joins us in disgust for the blatant racism of our leaders, the callous disregard for war or the suffering of millions in our country and far beyond… God continues, every day and in every way, to hold out to us the path to life and meaning. God has even prepared our path. Because God knows the way to our health and wellbeing, which, of course, as King so poetically described it, our wellbeing, mentally, spiritually and politically, “is inextricably tied to the same garment of destiny” as the rest of the world. It was Dr. King’s need and ours to hear the encouragement of the Psalm: God is always there, God knows how hard it is, and when “we’ve come to the point” to give up, God is always ready to start again, with prayers like the one in your bulletin written by Pastor Martin: One: O Thou Eternal God, out of whose absolute power and infinite intelligence the whole universe has come into being, All: we humbly confess that we have not loved thee with our whole hearts, souls and minds, and we have not loved our neighbors as Christ loved us. One: We have all too often lived by our own selfish impulses rather than by the life of sacrificial love as revealed by Christ. All: We often give in order to receive. We often love our friends and hate our enemies. We go the first mile but dare not travel the second. We forgive but don’t dare to forget. One: And so as we look within ourselves, we are confronted with the appalling fact that the history of our lives is the history of an eternal revolt against you. All: But thou, O God, have mercy upon us. Forgive us for what we could have been but failed to be. Give us the intelligence to know your will. Give us the courage to do your will. Give us the devotion to love thy will. One: In the name and spirit of Jesus we pray. Amen.[7] [1] https://www.britannica.com/biography/Martin-Luther-King-Jr/The-Montgomery-bus-boycott#ref71123 [2] Sermon “Conquering Self-Centeredness” Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama, August 11, 1957 https://books.google.com/books?id=qW-NYdIefPgC&pg=PA255&lpg=PA255&dq=Help+Me+to+See+That+I%E2%80%99m+Just+a+Symbol+of+a+Movement&source=bl&ots=68eYCC-r33&sig=bG7y614CaHNiYSvwJ6_Ml0d0d0M&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjRhoajz9DYAhVCz2MKHQAsAUUQ6AEIJzAA#v=onepage&q=Help%20Me%20to%20See%20That%20I%E2%80%99m%20Just%20a%20Symbol%20of%20a%20Movement&f=false [3] Lewis Baldwin, Never to Leave Us Alone: The Prayer Life of Martin Luther King Jr, 2010 [4] http://www.mercymidatlantic.org/PrayerServiceMLK.pdf January 30, 1956 [5] He adds, “The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter.” [6] https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/fleeing-god [7] http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/Vol06Scans/5July-6Sept1953Prayers.pdf One of several prayers prepared for radio broadcast in 1953 from his father’s church in Atlanta. I formed it into a litany.
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