Sermon by Rev. Kathleen McTigue, January 19, 2003
This is the Sunday on which we traditionally honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his legacy to our nation. In past years I've used this Sunday in a variety of ways to remember and honor Dr. King, and to look at our racial struggles -- sometimes historic ones and sometimes the struggles still with us in a new century, because the demons of racism and inequality still plague us.
Many of you are aware that this weekend there is a mobilization in Washington, DC and some other cities against the building war in Iraq. It wasn't an accident, of course, that anti-war demonstrations were called to coincide with the remembrance of Martin Luther King. It was a deliberate evocation not only of King's consistent commitment to nonviolence, but also his explicit opposition to the war of his day, the Vietnam War. King spoke out against that war for the first time in 1967 and then continued to voice his opposition and the reasons for it until his death. Sometimes, especially in the earlier times, his anti-war statements met with great antagonism even from those who had been his allies in the civil rights struggle.
King's speeches and sermons against the Vietnam War are not nearly as well-known to most of us as are his civil rights statements, so it seems an excellent time to devote this Sunday to resurrecting some of those passionate arguments against war. In times of struggle and conflict, especially in times of war or pending war, when so terribly much is at stake, we need the voices of our heroes. We need to study the wisdom they brought us, even if it was anchored in a different time and circumstance, to see whether there is something we can glean to enlighten our own decisions and struggles. Usually there is. That's what we mean by 'wisdom' anyway -- insight and guidance not confined to one set of circumstances or one historical people, but something available to all of us engaged in the human struggle.
What would the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. say about our current war against terrorism, if he were still among us today? What would he say about our government's massive preparations for war against Iraq? It's impossible to know with any certainty, of course; people change as they move through their lives, and if he hadn't been killed in 1968, King would have had thirty-five years of change behind him by now. Maybe he'd be long gone from the public spotlight, anchored as a professor or minister emeritus and retired from activism.
But it doesn't seem likely. It seems much more likely that the trajectory he was on when he died would have continued. It was a trajectory of expansion. His vision for justice expanded beyond racism to look at economic justice and the struggle against poverty. His religious grounding expanded, allowing him to enrich and deepen his own Christianity by learning from Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism. His commitment to nonviolence expanded beyond a specific application in civil rights protests to include a firm opposition to war. So I think it's reasonable to assume that if he were alive today, King's commitments would be congruent with what they had become at the time of his death. What did he have to say back then about the path of war?
Some of what he had to say was reflected in our reading, and I will share a few more excerpts with you as I go along. But as I read the relevant sermons and speeches during this last week or so, one of the things that struck me most powerfully was not the specific stand he took or the language he used. It was King's profound and consistent understanding of himself not only as a man of faith, but as a patriotic American. This is what I most want to hold up for us today as we remember Martin Luther King and as we face the moral struggles of our own times. Where are we grounded? If our nation is about to enter a war, we had better be grounded. Whether we support or oppose that war, we need to know where we stand and why we stand there.
You have no doubt noticed that there is an American flag hanging from the pulpit today -- something we don't usually see in this sanctuary. I put it there not as a casual decoration for today but because of its power as a symbol of patriotism, and the deep need I feel for us to all think long and hard about what it means to be a patriotic American today.
What does this flag mean? Like most powerful symbols, it holds more than one meaning, and the ways it speaks to us have shifted and changed over time. It means something different to some of us than to others because of our generation, or because we are veterans of war. It doesn't always carry the same weight of meaning even among veterans, because not all wars are equal. If you fought in Vietnam you probably see this flag through a different lens than those who fought in World War II or in Korea.
It is a complex and painful symbol to many people of my generation because of the conflict in which we came of age. When I was just beginning to pay attention to the wider world around me, around the age of 12, it was 1968. My adolescence was shaped by the Vietnam War and the eventually massive protests against it, and during that painful national conflict, something happened to the flag. It became a symbol not for our nation but for our government. Flying the flag came to mean you supported what our government was doing. If you refused to wave it -- or more violently, if you burned or defaced it -- that meant you opposed what our government was doing.
And it seems to me the flag is still locked in that small cage of meaning today. There was a brief break for freedom right after 9/11, when everyone could fly the flag and we all knew it meant we were keening out our grief together. But now it seems that we're back to the old unspoken consensus about what the flag means. If you're flying it at home or pasting it on your bumper, it seems to mean you support the government in its choices right now, including the choice for war against Iraq. If you oppose that war, you are probably not flying the flag.
Well, and so what? It's just a symbol, after all -- right? It is a symbol; but it's a big mistake to use the word "just" or "only" to qualify the word "symbol". Symbols are not small things. They bear an enormous weight of meaning, and they speak volumes to us without a word being uttered. When we see them in the right context or at the right moment, they shake us awake, they break our hearts, they change our minds, they identify friend and enemy, they engender rage or relief, they provoke us into action. They stand for our loyalties, and sometimes they stand for our lives.
Martin Luther King understood himself as a passionately patriotic American, and he had the wisdom to claim the symbol of that patriotism in the form of the flag. It is amazing how many of the old photos of the civil rights era show American flags being carried, not by one person at the head of the march but by dozens of people. In video footage of the civil rights marches, when the marchers are rushed by the police or by the jeering whites along the roadside, if you see one of those flags go down into the dust of the road, it is profound in its power.
It was the dissenters who owned the flag in that struggle. Why did they own it? Not because they merely carried it to their march. They owned it because they understood what they did as a struggle for the 'soul of America', as they sometimes put it. They understood their movement not as a rising up against their nation, but rising up for it: a passionate demand that their nation live up to its ideals.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness…" What could be clearer, what could be more powerful, more prophetic, than to recall the words this nation was founded on and send out the call that we live up to them? When King and others brought the American flag to their demonstrations, no one thought it symbolized support for the government or its policies. They knew that it was a statement of faith: faith in the extraordinary and revolutionary ideals on which this country was founded.
What has happened to our own faith in those ideals? We need to give some thought to this question, and urgently. However disappointed we have been in our country, however chastened by the arrogance of our government or the apathy of our people, don't we still believe in the profound and ringing language that first gave shape to our nation? Don't we? Isn't it absolutely fundamental to who we are and how we view the world, to claim this faith in the equality of human beings, the inalienable, basic rights to life and dignity?
I think the answer is "yes". And if it is yes and we do believe these things we say, then it is still the heart and soul of patriotism to call our nation back to those ideals over and over and over again. If we dissent from what our government chooses to do; if we dissent from the vision of America that our government projects into the world, it ought to be on the basis of what our country first proclaimed itself to be. Our dissent, like Martin Luther King's dissent, should be one that we recognize as fundamentally patriotic. We ought to be flying the flag.
In 1952 Adlai Stevenson defined it this way: "[Patriotism] is a sense of national responsibility which will enable America to remain master of her power -- to walk with it in serenity and wisdom, with self-respect and the respect of all [human]kind; a patriotism…which is not short, frenzied outbursts of emotion, but the tranquil and steady dedication of a lifetime."
I see Martin Luther King as one of our great national leaders who embodied what it truly means to be a patriot. It means that you live with a profound sense of responsibility for the actions of your nation. It means that you see your nation's power not in relation to what it can accomplish but what it should accomplish. It means love of your nation's virtues without ignorance of its failings. It means a lifetime commitment to bring that beloved nation nearer into alignment with what we say we believe, what we say we stand for.
So what would Martin Luther King say to us if he were among us today? I can imagine that he would raise his voice immediately against the violence, not only of the pending war but of the sanctions we have imposed so stringently against Iraq's people. I think he would have traveled by now to Iraq, maybe more than once, with some of the religious communities delivering medicine and food, and he would have spoken out against the suffering he found there, and demanded that we stop our complicity in that suffering.
Having seen the suffering he might say, as he did in 1967: "Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is [the] vocation of brotherhood, and because I believe that [God] is deeply concerned for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy, for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers [and sisters]."
If he were with us today, I think King's profound commitment to nonviolence would lead him to oppose this war, not only because of its consequences in Iraq but because of its consequences for our own nation. Thirty-five years ago King quoted a Vietnamese Buddhist whose words are frighteningly relevant now, so perhaps he would repeat them for us: "Each day the war goes on, [anger] increases in the …hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism."
Surely if he were with us today, King would also remind us that we are not getting guns and butter in the current military build-up, but only guns. One of his strongest motivations in raising his voice against the Vietnam War was his recognition that so much of the progress he had begun to see toward economic opportunity for the poor was derailed by the military build-up. He might say to us, as he said then, "I watched the [poverty] program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. I [am] compelled to see war as an enemy of the poor…"
Another reminder King would offer us, particularly critical in this undefined war against terrorism, is that there is no safety without a willingness to know, to listen to and to understand the adversary. He didn't invent this truth; he learned it from Mohandas Gandhi and from the teachings of Christianity; but we could certainly use the reminder.
Most of us have the maturity, in our individual lives, to realize we need to listen carefully to criticisms, even from those who are very angry with us, and weigh them mindfully to see whether we've got to change our ways. Most of us can even welcome this chastening, when it's got some truth to it, because we don't want to cause harm to others or betray our ideals. We want to know when we have caused some sort of damage so we can make it right again.
How did we manage to lose that conscience on the national level? Why have we been so unwilling to listen, as a nation, to those who we have harmed or offended, so we can learn through the listening and correct our ways? King said, "Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when they help us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers [and sisters] who are called the opposition."
And if he were with us today, I think that above all King would find a way to speak from hope, and to remind us of the potential not only within each of us individually but within our nation. He would call us back again and again to the love of country that is the truest patriotism, the kind that demands that our nation live up to its ideals. He said, "America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can lead the way in a revolution of values. There is nothing…to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood." May it be so. AMEN.