What Shall Become Of The Dreamer's Dream?
Preaching
Gathering Up the Fragments
Preaching As Spiritual Practice
And he said to me, "You are my servant, Israel, in whom I will be glorified." But I said, "I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God." And now the Lord says, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him, and that Israel might be gathered to him ... "It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth." Thus says the Lord ... to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers, "Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves, because of the Lord, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you."
-- Isaiah 49:3-7
The National Civil Rights Museum is built inside the old Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Hanging from the balcony where King died is an enormous fresh flower wreath and alongside it, a plaque inscribed with a passage from the biblical story in Genesis of Joseph's brothers plotting to get rid of him: "Here comes the dreamer. Come now, let us kill him ... and we shall see what will become of his dreams" (Genesis 37:19-20).
The museum is laid out as a walking tour, starting from the ground level, going in an upward spiral until you stand outside the room where King slept the last night of his life. The first floor is dedicated to the historical antecedents of the Civil Rights Movement: slavery in the South, the Civil War, reconstruction, and white backlash against blacks throughout the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It highlights the importance of the black churches and of changes in mid-twentieth-century American society that laid the foundation of future struggles.
The first exhibit is devoted to the long legal effort to desegregate public schools, culminating in the historic 1954 Supreme Court decision, "Brown vs. the Board of Education in Topeka," that declared school segregation unconstitutional and subsequent showdowns between black students and the resisting white minority in places like Little Rock, Arkansas.
The next exhibit describes the movement to desegregate city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, which began when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat when a white man demanded it. The exhibit has an actual bus you can get on, with a white section in the front, a Negro section in the back, and a statue of a black woman sitting down in the front. Rosa Parks is typically remembered as a woman too tired to stand up. She was, in fact, a quiet and determined young woman, the secretary of the local NAACP, strategically chosen to challenge bus segregation. The movement that followed was equally strategic in its planning.
Martin Luther King Jr., a newcomer in town, the 26-year-old pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was elected leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association. He was more than ready for the challenge, having moved back to the South after his doctoral studies in Boston in order to be an agent of change. He devoted himself to the boycott, holding mass meetings, conducting training in nonviolence, and coordinating the million details associated with a protest that lasted over a year. What inspired him were the thousands of people who walked or carpooled everywhere they needed to go for 381 days. They walked and walked and walked. "My feet are tired," said one elderly woman on her way to clean houses on the white side of town, "but my soul is at rest."
The resistance, as you know, was fierce. King's home was bombed, and threats were made against his life and that of his wife and baby daughter. Others were harassed and beaten. Taxis were forbidden to pick up protesters and local companies cancelled the insurance of Negro car owners. King and his colleagues were arrested for violating hastily enacted anti-boycott laws. Indeed, King was due to be sentenced for his "crimes" on the day the US Supreme Court upheld a lower court's decision that Montgomery's bus segregation was unconstitutional.
Through it all, King kept an outward persona of calm and moral confidence, but the internal pressure was staggering. By the time the boycott was a month old, the Kings were receiving thirty to forty threatening phone calls and letters each day. One night, after he received a particularly vicious call, he paced the floors of his house wondering what to do. He went downstairs, made a cup of coffee, sat at the kitchen table, and prayed: "Lord, I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But Lord, I must confess that I'm weak now, I'm faltering. I'm losing my courage. Now, I am afraid. And I can't let the people see me like this. They are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I've come to the point where I can't face it alone." In that lonely hour, King had the first transcendent experience of his life. He heard the quiet assurance of God's voice telling him to stand up for righteousness and truth. God would be at his side. With that, his uncertainty disappeared. He was ready to face anything.1
The next exhibit is dedicated to the student movement that organized sit-ins at lunch counters throughout the South. This was a spontaneous movement, born of the idealism and frustration of young people determined to change their lives. King, now the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and living in Atlanta, saw the power of their efforts and supported them however he could. He encouraged the young people to hold fast to non-violence, no matter the violence that met them. In one year, the student movement successfully abolished lunch counter segregation in 27 cities.
The next exhibit highlights the Freedom Rides, again a student-led effort to desegregate interstate bus travel. This exhibit also has a bus, but you can't get on it. It's a burned-out shell, like several of the buses destroyed by angry mobs determined to do whatever was necessary to put black people in their place. Several people died in the Freedom Rides, hundreds were beaten and arrested. By 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission posted signs on all buses and bus stations that banned segregation.
A large exhibit is dedicated to the 1963 campaign to challenge a full range of segregation laws in Birmingham, Alabama, a place with more unsolved bombings of black homes and churches than anywhere in the country and where police brutality reigned. The Birmingham campaign, like the one in Montgomery, was carefully organized, beginning small and working up to larger and larger nonviolent protests. King was again jailed. This was where he wrote his now famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in response to local religious leaders who openly criticized his work. King expressed his disappointment in them, white church leaders throughout the South. "I once hoped," he wrote, "that white ministers, priests, and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents. All too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows."2
Courage came, yet again, from the ranks of children and young people. When the protests began to falter in Birmingham, King encouraged the leadership to go the schools and universities and invited the youth to march. March they did, in numbers defying expectation, against the caution of their parents and teachers. It would be called the "Children's Miracle" as some as young as eight walked, allowing themselves to be beaten by policemen and their dogs. "Don't worry about your children," King told a group of concerned parents. "Don't hold them back if they want to go to jail. For they are doing a job not only for themselves but for all America and all mankind. They are carving a tunnel of hope through the great mountain of despair...."3
I bought a poster from the Civil Rights Museum titled, "Courage," with a black and white photograph of three young people being pushed into a brick wall by a fire hose. Below the photo is the definition: "Courage -- the mental and moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand fear and difficulty."
The years 1963-1965 represent the high point of the Civil Rights Movement in terms of momentum and accomplishment. In August 1963, King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to share the power of his dream. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed, the Mississippi Freedom Summer brought civil rights activists from around the country to help register black people to vote, and King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1965, there was an extraordinary 4,000-person march from Selma to Montgomery, a distance of 54 miles, to protest voting rights violations in Selma, and President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. Yet, for every moment of glory, came another round of violence. Just two weeks after the march on Washington, four little girls died in a church bombing in Birmingham, and King preached at their funeral. Others, too, were murdered. King's life was threatened so many times that he lost count. Hundreds were arrested in Selma and subjected to intense brutality. Several civil rights leaders were killed, including James Reeb, a white minister and Viola Liuzzo, a white mother from Detroit, who was overtaken by the Ku Klux Klan as she was driving in her car.
King wrote of the march from Selma to Montgomery as the highlight of his life. Thousands of people from around the nation had come to participate. King had issued a call to the religious leaders of America, and this time the churches responded, gloriously, courageously, as hundreds of ministers, priests, and rabbis climbed into their pulpits, declared that they themselves were going south and invited others to join them. The people that you and I know who said, "Yes," some of whom are sitting in these pews, still speak of those events as among the most significant of their lives. The Dutch priest, Henri Nouwen, was a graduate student in Topeka, Kansas, at the time. He climbed into his Volkswagen and headed south. He stopped outside Vicksburg, Tennessee, to pick up a black hitchhiker, a twenty-year-old man named Charles. Charles exclaimed, "God has heard my prayer. He sent you as an angel from heaven. I've been standing here for hours and no one would pick me up. The white men have all tried to run me off the road. But I made a cross in the road and prayed to God that he would allow me to go to Selma to help my people. He heard my prayer."4
King's life was threatened as he prepared to lead the march. The Justice Department warned King that a sniper was planning to shoot him and that King should drop out of the march. King said that he would march out in front. Andrew Young came up with a creative solution. Figuring that all black people look the same to whites, he invited all the black ministers wearing dark suits to join King in front. About forty did, and they led the march into Montgomery without incident.5
The museum's last exhibits are filled with the confusion and controversies of King's last years, as the tide of public opinion, both white and black, began to turn against him. The decisions he made in those years remain the subject of much debate. His decision to move to Chicago and highlight the perniciousness of racism in the North and his decision to focus on issues of poverty and the economic discrimination against all poor people are still debated. His decision to speak out, at long last, against the Vietnam War and in so doing incur the wrath of his once great ally, President Johnson and the decision to go to Memphis to support the Negro sanitation workers in their poorly organized and doomed-to-fail strike for decent working conditions are still debated.
Many whites felt he had overstepped his bounds. Many blacks believed his nonviolent views were woefully inadequate in the face of escalating violence against them. But King pressed on. He said, "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience, but where he stands in moments of challenge, crisis and controversy. The cross is something you bear and ultimately you die on."
The night before King died, he spoke at a church in Memphis. His close friend and colleague, Andrew Young, said that the reality of his death was all around him that night. Young said that when he spoke, King preached the fear of death right out of him.
The last part of his sermon is well known. In it he tells the congregation that God has allowed him to go the mountaintop, look over, and see the promised land. "I may not get there with you," he said, "but I am here to tell that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."
The first part of the sermon is equally compelling. He begins with a statement of heart-breaking candor: "I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable. We are commanded to do that. And so we find ourselves in so many instances having to face the fact that our dreams are not fulfilled. Life is a continual story of shattered dreams.
Each one of you in some way is building some kind of temple. The struggle is always there. It gets discouraging sometimes. Some of us are trying to build a temple of peace. We speak out against war, we protest, but it seems to mean nothing. And so often as you set out to build the temple of peace you are left lonesome, discouraged and bewildered. Well, that is the story of life. And the thing that makes me happy is that I can hear a voice crying through the vista of time, saying, "It may not come today or it may not come tomorrow but it's good that it is within your heart. It's good that you are trying. You may not see it. The dream may not be fulfilled, but it's just good that you have a desire to bring it into reality."6
He also gave an interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan that epitomizes how King lived his life, from those early days in Montgomery right to the end. He began by contrasting the actions of the priest and the Levite who passed the wounded man on the roadside with that of the Samaritan who stopped and offered help.
I think those men were afraid. And so the first question the priest and Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But the Good Samaritan reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?" That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job, or my normal duties as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help people in need, what will happen to me?" The question is "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.7
For those of us called to follow Jesus, in our moment of this country's history, it's our question, too.
King was shot as he left his hotel room and headed down the balcony stairs to go to dinner. His last question to Andrew Young was if the singer, Mahalia Jackson, was going to be there, and if so, if he would ask her to sing his favorite hymn: "Precious Lord." Mahalia Jackson didn't sing anything that night, but she sang it for King's funeral five days later.
____________
1. Clayborne Carson, editor, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998), p. 77.
2. Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," from A Testament Of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., James M. Washington, editor (New York: HarperOne, 1990), p. 199.
3. Op cit, Carson, "Statement at a Birmingham Mass Meeting," p. 211.
4. Richard Deats, Martin Luther King: Spirit-Led Prophet (New York: New City Press, 2003), p. 101.
5. Ibid, p. 103.
6. Op cit, Martin Luther King Jr., "I See The Promised Land," p. 284.
7. Ibid, p. 285.
-- Isaiah 49:3-7
The National Civil Rights Museum is built inside the old Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Hanging from the balcony where King died is an enormous fresh flower wreath and alongside it, a plaque inscribed with a passage from the biblical story in Genesis of Joseph's brothers plotting to get rid of him: "Here comes the dreamer. Come now, let us kill him ... and we shall see what will become of his dreams" (Genesis 37:19-20).
The museum is laid out as a walking tour, starting from the ground level, going in an upward spiral until you stand outside the room where King slept the last night of his life. The first floor is dedicated to the historical antecedents of the Civil Rights Movement: slavery in the South, the Civil War, reconstruction, and white backlash against blacks throughout the latter nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It highlights the importance of the black churches and of changes in mid-twentieth-century American society that laid the foundation of future struggles.
The first exhibit is devoted to the long legal effort to desegregate public schools, culminating in the historic 1954 Supreme Court decision, "Brown vs. the Board of Education in Topeka," that declared school segregation unconstitutional and subsequent showdowns between black students and the resisting white minority in places like Little Rock, Arkansas.
The next exhibit describes the movement to desegregate city buses in Montgomery, Alabama, which began when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat when a white man demanded it. The exhibit has an actual bus you can get on, with a white section in the front, a Negro section in the back, and a statue of a black woman sitting down in the front. Rosa Parks is typically remembered as a woman too tired to stand up. She was, in fact, a quiet and determined young woman, the secretary of the local NAACP, strategically chosen to challenge bus segregation. The movement that followed was equally strategic in its planning.
Martin Luther King Jr., a newcomer in town, the 26-year-old pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, was elected leader of the Montgomery Improvement Association. He was more than ready for the challenge, having moved back to the South after his doctoral studies in Boston in order to be an agent of change. He devoted himself to the boycott, holding mass meetings, conducting training in nonviolence, and coordinating the million details associated with a protest that lasted over a year. What inspired him were the thousands of people who walked or carpooled everywhere they needed to go for 381 days. They walked and walked and walked. "My feet are tired," said one elderly woman on her way to clean houses on the white side of town, "but my soul is at rest."
The resistance, as you know, was fierce. King's home was bombed, and threats were made against his life and that of his wife and baby daughter. Others were harassed and beaten. Taxis were forbidden to pick up protesters and local companies cancelled the insurance of Negro car owners. King and his colleagues were arrested for violating hastily enacted anti-boycott laws. Indeed, King was due to be sentenced for his "crimes" on the day the US Supreme Court upheld a lower court's decision that Montgomery's bus segregation was unconstitutional.
Through it all, King kept an outward persona of calm and moral confidence, but the internal pressure was staggering. By the time the boycott was a month old, the Kings were receiving thirty to forty threatening phone calls and letters each day. One night, after he received a particularly vicious call, he paced the floors of his house wondering what to do. He went downstairs, made a cup of coffee, sat at the kitchen table, and prayed: "Lord, I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But Lord, I must confess that I'm weak now, I'm faltering. I'm losing my courage. Now, I am afraid. And I can't let the people see me like this. They are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I've come to the point where I can't face it alone." In that lonely hour, King had the first transcendent experience of his life. He heard the quiet assurance of God's voice telling him to stand up for righteousness and truth. God would be at his side. With that, his uncertainty disappeared. He was ready to face anything.1
The next exhibit is dedicated to the student movement that organized sit-ins at lunch counters throughout the South. This was a spontaneous movement, born of the idealism and frustration of young people determined to change their lives. King, now the leader of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and living in Atlanta, saw the power of their efforts and supported them however he could. He encouraged the young people to hold fast to non-violence, no matter the violence that met them. In one year, the student movement successfully abolished lunch counter segregation in 27 cities.
The next exhibit highlights the Freedom Rides, again a student-led effort to desegregate interstate bus travel. This exhibit also has a bus, but you can't get on it. It's a burned-out shell, like several of the buses destroyed by angry mobs determined to do whatever was necessary to put black people in their place. Several people died in the Freedom Rides, hundreds were beaten and arrested. By 1961, the Interstate Commerce Commission posted signs on all buses and bus stations that banned segregation.
A large exhibit is dedicated to the 1963 campaign to challenge a full range of segregation laws in Birmingham, Alabama, a place with more unsolved bombings of black homes and churches than anywhere in the country and where police brutality reigned. The Birmingham campaign, like the one in Montgomery, was carefully organized, beginning small and working up to larger and larger nonviolent protests. King was again jailed. This was where he wrote his now famous "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" in response to local religious leaders who openly criticized his work. King expressed his disappointment in them, white church leaders throughout the South. "I once hoped," he wrote, "that white ministers, priests, and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents. All too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows."2
Courage came, yet again, from the ranks of children and young people. When the protests began to falter in Birmingham, King encouraged the leadership to go the schools and universities and invited the youth to march. March they did, in numbers defying expectation, against the caution of their parents and teachers. It would be called the "Children's Miracle" as some as young as eight walked, allowing themselves to be beaten by policemen and their dogs. "Don't worry about your children," King told a group of concerned parents. "Don't hold them back if they want to go to jail. For they are doing a job not only for themselves but for all America and all mankind. They are carving a tunnel of hope through the great mountain of despair...."3
I bought a poster from the Civil Rights Museum titled, "Courage," with a black and white photograph of three young people being pushed into a brick wall by a fire hose. Below the photo is the definition: "Courage -- the mental and moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand fear and difficulty."
The years 1963-1965 represent the high point of the Civil Rights Movement in terms of momentum and accomplishment. In August 1963, King stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to share the power of his dream. In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed, the Mississippi Freedom Summer brought civil rights activists from around the country to help register black people to vote, and King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In 1965, there was an extraordinary 4,000-person march from Selma to Montgomery, a distance of 54 miles, to protest voting rights violations in Selma, and President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law. Yet, for every moment of glory, came another round of violence. Just two weeks after the march on Washington, four little girls died in a church bombing in Birmingham, and King preached at their funeral. Others, too, were murdered. King's life was threatened so many times that he lost count. Hundreds were arrested in Selma and subjected to intense brutality. Several civil rights leaders were killed, including James Reeb, a white minister and Viola Liuzzo, a white mother from Detroit, who was overtaken by the Ku Klux Klan as she was driving in her car.
King wrote of the march from Selma to Montgomery as the highlight of his life. Thousands of people from around the nation had come to participate. King had issued a call to the religious leaders of America, and this time the churches responded, gloriously, courageously, as hundreds of ministers, priests, and rabbis climbed into their pulpits, declared that they themselves were going south and invited others to join them. The people that you and I know who said, "Yes," some of whom are sitting in these pews, still speak of those events as among the most significant of their lives. The Dutch priest, Henri Nouwen, was a graduate student in Topeka, Kansas, at the time. He climbed into his Volkswagen and headed south. He stopped outside Vicksburg, Tennessee, to pick up a black hitchhiker, a twenty-year-old man named Charles. Charles exclaimed, "God has heard my prayer. He sent you as an angel from heaven. I've been standing here for hours and no one would pick me up. The white men have all tried to run me off the road. But I made a cross in the road and prayed to God that he would allow me to go to Selma to help my people. He heard my prayer."4
King's life was threatened as he prepared to lead the march. The Justice Department warned King that a sniper was planning to shoot him and that King should drop out of the march. King said that he would march out in front. Andrew Young came up with a creative solution. Figuring that all black people look the same to whites, he invited all the black ministers wearing dark suits to join King in front. About forty did, and they led the march into Montgomery without incident.5
The museum's last exhibits are filled with the confusion and controversies of King's last years, as the tide of public opinion, both white and black, began to turn against him. The decisions he made in those years remain the subject of much debate. His decision to move to Chicago and highlight the perniciousness of racism in the North and his decision to focus on issues of poverty and the economic discrimination against all poor people are still debated. His decision to speak out, at long last, against the Vietnam War and in so doing incur the wrath of his once great ally, President Johnson and the decision to go to Memphis to support the Negro sanitation workers in their poorly organized and doomed-to-fail strike for decent working conditions are still debated.
Many whites felt he had overstepped his bounds. Many blacks believed his nonviolent views were woefully inadequate in the face of escalating violence against them. But King pressed on. He said, "The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of convenience, but where he stands in moments of challenge, crisis and controversy. The cross is something you bear and ultimately you die on."
The night before King died, he spoke at a church in Memphis. His close friend and colleague, Andrew Young, said that the reality of his death was all around him that night. Young said that when he spoke, King preached the fear of death right out of him.
The last part of his sermon is well known. In it he tells the congregation that God has allowed him to go the mountaintop, look over, and see the promised land. "I may not get there with you," he said, "but I am here to tell that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."
The first part of the sermon is equally compelling. He begins with a statement of heart-breaking candor: "I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable. We are commanded to do that. And so we find ourselves in so many instances having to face the fact that our dreams are not fulfilled. Life is a continual story of shattered dreams.
Each one of you in some way is building some kind of temple. The struggle is always there. It gets discouraging sometimes. Some of us are trying to build a temple of peace. We speak out against war, we protest, but it seems to mean nothing. And so often as you set out to build the temple of peace you are left lonesome, discouraged and bewildered. Well, that is the story of life. And the thing that makes me happy is that I can hear a voice crying through the vista of time, saying, "It may not come today or it may not come tomorrow but it's good that it is within your heart. It's good that you are trying. You may not see it. The dream may not be fulfilled, but it's just good that you have a desire to bring it into reality."6
He also gave an interpretation of the parable of the Good Samaritan that epitomizes how King lived his life, from those early days in Montgomery right to the end. He began by contrasting the actions of the priest and the Levite who passed the wounded man on the roadside with that of the Samaritan who stopped and offered help.
I think those men were afraid. And so the first question the priest and Levite asked was, "If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?" But the Good Samaritan reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?" That's the question before you tonight. Not, "If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to my job, or my normal duties as a pastor?" The question is not, "If I stop to help people in need, what will happen to me?" The question is "If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?" That's the question.7
For those of us called to follow Jesus, in our moment of this country's history, it's our question, too.
King was shot as he left his hotel room and headed down the balcony stairs to go to dinner. His last question to Andrew Young was if the singer, Mahalia Jackson, was going to be there, and if so, if he would ask her to sing his favorite hymn: "Precious Lord." Mahalia Jackson didn't sing anything that night, but she sang it for King's funeral five days later.
____________
1. Clayborne Carson, editor, The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Warner Books, 1998), p. 77.
2. Martin Luther King Jr., "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," from A Testament Of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., James M. Washington, editor (New York: HarperOne, 1990), p. 199.
3. Op cit, Carson, "Statement at a Birmingham Mass Meeting," p. 211.
4. Richard Deats, Martin Luther King: Spirit-Led Prophet (New York: New City Press, 2003), p. 101.
5. Ibid, p. 103.
6. Op cit, Martin Luther King Jr., "I See The Promised Land," p. 284.
7. Ibid, p. 285.
