"Dr. Martin Luther King's Theology"

Liturgical Materials for Sunday the 14^th of January, 2001

Mark Belletini, Minister First Unitarian Universalist Church of Columbus, Ohio

Opening Words [Next] [back to top]

We are here
to worship in many different ways.
For some, remembrance or release.
For others, holy reverie or risk.
Those at the edge come here to find their center";
those at the center, to find challenges at the edge.
For all who come, music and silence and word,
echoes of our companions along the way
those who cut through the tangles of the age
by the sharp strength of great lives, to make a way.

(assembly) And may our reason and passion keep us true to ourselves, true to each other,
and true to those shared visions of what we might together become…

The Great Silence [Next] [back to top]

O Love. I know some things.
I can list the capitals of Europe and Africa and Asia,
thread my way through the Periodic Table,
and list the many biographies and novels I've read .
I studied all my life, but I have so few answers.
Fewer and fewer all the time.
And the questions themselves get more convoluted,
more subtle and cunning, making me wonder
if I even want to know the answers.

Sometimes my footing isn't so sure.
Sometimes my map crumples into powder at my feet.
Sometimes the lights go out, the engine seizes,
the song is cut off, the sadness is tangible.
And on those days, I don't need Paris or Prague,
Nairobi or Delhi.
I don't need answers.
I don't even need the questions.
What I need is a squeeze of my hand,
a shoulder on which to lean,
a voice that says, "We'll do it together";
a smile that does not say "chin up" and "be tough,"
but which simply stands close, silent,
arms draped around my stooping shoulders.
Give me no lectures on clumsiness when I stumble.
Give me no pep talks on vision when I cannot see.
Just be there, o Precious Love,
whenever I am not strong enough
to admit I am not always strong.
Be there. Hold me.
And then walk with me in silence all the way home.

(silence)

Sometimes our shoulders are there just for sharing.
Sometimes our hands are there just for holding.
Sometimes our mouths are there for speaking
what is inside into the common air.
We remember that we are in this together, a circle of individuals who are a vital community, not a club.
Every life story is precious to us,
every loss, every sadness, every joy.
We claim that precious affirmation
by naming those whom we love,
those who love us, those whom we miss,
and those who have been a strength in our lives.
In silence or into the common air, we name them.

(naming)

Blessed are those who love and are loved,
who ache and are comforted.
And blessed are those who, like Rosa Parks,
sit down when they are tired,
and blessed are those who rise up when the work has to be done, the changes made,
obedience questioned, the spirit praised.

The First Reading [Next] [back to top]
is culled from Martin Luther King's most frequently read book, Strength to Love, written in 1963. There is quote from that book at the top of the order of celebration, and, another on the back cover.

I am convinced of the reality of a personal God. It is a living reality that has been vindicated in the experiences of every day life. God is a living God, with feeling, will; responsive to deepest yearnings of the human heart. (God is the one who) is able to make a way out of no way, and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. This is our hope for becoming better human beings. This is our mandate for seeking to make a better world.

The Second Reading [Next] [back to top]
comes from an interview of Camille Cosby, whose husband, Bill, is a tad more famous because of his television show. But these words, dating from an article in the Sunday tabloid, Parade Magazine, shows she is every bit the philosopher her articulate husband is.

Given the odds, we weren't supposed to stop being slaves.
Given the opposition, we weren't supposed to have an education.
Given the history, we weren't supposed to have families.
Given the blues, we weren't supposed to have spirit.
Given the power of the enemy, we weren't supposed to fight back.
Not only have we achieved victories, we have, despite the powers against us, become our own victories.

Sermon: Sexuality and Spirituality [Next] [back to top]

You know, just taking the day off on Monday doesn't strike me as much of a way to celebrate the life and vision of the man we've named the day after.

After all, at Christmas, which at least partially celebrates the teacher Jesus, we at least decorate a bit, give gifts, and sing the vision of the season over, and over in carols "Peace on earth, to all good will."

And, on the Fourth of July, at the very least there are nifty fireworks commemorating the great vision of our founding forebears, even if many modern United States citizens can't even name them anymore.

But on this weekend, most of us just get a day off. A few stragglers attend a small parade downtown. And less than one tenth of one percent of the city of Columbus attend a special breakfast. You might hear the famous "I have a dream" speech on National Public Radio if you're lucky. But even that's not much. Besides there is lot more to Dr. King than fine speeches and stirring metaphors. And that's some of what I want to explore this morning.

First, let me review a bit of what many of us know about the man. Then, I want to lift up a bit of what most of us do not know, and which I did not know until the last couple of years, namely, King's theology. And then I want to explore what it might have to do with us.

We know that King and many others with him, including former ministers of this church, John Evans and Jay Chidsey, marched to change the unfair laws in the South. We know King himself was a minister, a progressive Baptist, the son of a very well-educated Baptist preacher in Georgia. We know King was educated at Boston University, as well as at Morehouse and Crozer Seminary. We call him Dr. King, remembering that his doctorate was not honorary, like mine, but earned through a hard course of study. We know that King studied Mahatma Gandhi's practice of non-violence. We know that King had a family he loved, that he sometimes smoked when he was nervous, and that his favorite hymn was "Precious Lord, Take My Hand." And we know that King's life was cut very short.

Remember what we read earlier? "It is always easier to pay homage to the prophets than to heed the direction of their vision. Great leaders are honored, not by adulation, but by sharing their insights and values."

These are bold words. But I happen to agree with them completely. So before I can claim to heed or even praise Dr. King's vision, I have to know what I am praising. And King's theology is a central part of that vision.

The first thing I note is that King studied all the most liberal theologians of the day, Paul Tillich, Bordon Bowne, and Edgar Brightman. He even wrote his PhD dissertation comparing the Unitarian theologian Henry Nelson Wieman with the theology of Tillich. King was introduced to Gandhi's influential non-Western theology by the transforming speech of a great non-religious pacifist, A. J. Muste, (whose son, I've just been told recently, was in our Sunday school program here.)

Of course, Dr. King was not only a brilliant academic theologian who wrote many books and articles. He was a man of conviction and action as well. He did not turn from the world, but rather he turned to face the world, see it as it was, and work to transform it.

Most modern religious liberals have no problem with any of this. We can appreciate a good scholar. We can appreciate a deft activist. But many of us may grow uncomfortable when I make clear what Dr. King himself asserts so strongly in his book Strength To Love, quoted in the first reading. Namely, that the true foundation supporting his thought remains a strong faith in a personal God.

I want to talk about that today, just a little. I want to talk about Dr. King's God, and the discomfort that many of us, but by no means all of us, share when a personal God is mentioned at all.

King, of course, had been raised with a strong faith in a personal God, his father being a Baptist preacher and all. But you must not think that King Sr. sat Martin down and made him recite catechisms of right belief. No, the elder King simply confronted the overt racism of his own era with a courage, skill and confidence which King claimed taught him a great deal about God. All of his life, King believed that human integrity and courage are not far from what he meant by divinity.

So please don't confuse what you may have once been taught about God with what King preached. God, for Martin Luther King, was not some giant man-like Goliath up in the clouds. That would be literalism, something he agreed that any real grown up thinker would have fought off long ago. Instead of a literalist God, King posited a God whom he described as the conscious heart of the universe, a limited God, not all-knowing, not all-powerful, but a struggling God, a growing God. This is exactly the sort of heretical God, I need to say, which our ancestors in Poland, Lithuania, Holland and England, lifted up regularly for over three hundred years.

This means that God, for Dr. King, was not an impersonal force, or in Thomas Jefferson's phrase "Nature's God." That would be deism, not theism, to use the fancy theological words. Instead, Dr. King's God was a personal and always partisan being, partisan toward all the disenfranchised, a being who always willed and worked for freedom through the willing agency of disciplined, hopeful and loving human beings. Those of you who like to use more precise philosophical language may want to know that King called his view of God "Theistic Monism." This means that his God is not outside or over the Universe, but entirely within it.

God, for Martin Luther King Jr. was not found in foot-noted texts, or in creeds, or in well-argued theologies. For that God, he was clear, would be a dead God. Instead, he insisted that the concrete actions of ethical human persons alone revealed the personhood of a living God.

And, Dr.King insisted that his idea of God was "validated by his own experience." What experience? A voice? A burning bush? No, of course not. God was validated for him in his own experience of watching his father face constant racial harassment with grace. It was validated for him in his own struggle to dismantle unjust laws. God, King wrote quite plainly in the first reading, is that personal Strength which is able to make "a way out of no way."

For Dr. King, God is exactly that Strength, that unexpected passion which rose up in the slight and small teenager David when confronting the obnoxious and omnipotent giant, Goliath, in the famous biblical story. You know the story, don't you, the one where a small kid single-handedly defeats a huge, loud and well-franchised Philistine warrior backed up by a whole platoon of warriors?

Dr. King also pointed out that, in the story, King Saul put his own battle armor on the young shepherd David. But David found it too cumbersome and threw it off. He faced the giant without armor, or the tough training of boot camp, and without conventional weapons. The Strength called God is like that, says King, willing to face terrible malicious giants at every turn, but unwilling to engage in self-protection or to use ordinary, vengeful means.  But Dr. King's God is not the God many of us were raised with, is it?

As I have suggested many times before, many of us were raised with a God not much different from the legendary Goliath, a Big Bully claiming allegiance by threats of hellfire.

Others among us were raised with a God the Rule-Maker or God-Big-Tantrum-Baby in the sky who makes tornadoes and earthquakes for no good reason.

Still others among us were raised without any conventional religion at all. The only God some of us ever heard about was the silly one in jokes or the superstitious ones found in ordinary English curses. Worse, of course, while in High School,we all studied those historical brutes who called for the Crusades and stoked the fires of the Inquisition, all the while crying out "Deus Vult!" or God So Wills! And what am I to make of the well-meaning cruelties I've heard offered as sops of comfort given to grieving parents :"God must have needed your boy more than you did"? I can only weep when I hear such expressions of "theology."

You see, no matter how we were raised, I am convinced that the religious education of modern grown ups have been pretty meager and thin. Confronted with all these banal, cruel or superstitious images of Ultimacy floating around, why, I used to ask myself when I was in my 20's, would any decent person affirm the reality of such a being? Aren't folks who use such language, I asked myself, more to be pitied than praised?

These questions tormented me for many years. I was impatient with almost any usage of the word "God."

I flinched when anyone said it. Oh, if Gandhi, or Nikos Kazantzakis, or a poet used the word, I would make allowances; after all, visionaries and artists are notoriously unconventional and thus deliciously heretical. But for the most part I ran from the word.

But then I encountered Martin Luther King.

I found that King's passion for God, made visible in his life choices, challenged me to re-question the absoluteness of my non-theism. After all, I asked myself, what possible good could come if I fought to maintain my arrogant stance that Dr. King would have been better off had he but given up this "God-business"? On what possible evidence could I possibly base such a swaggering, superior opinion? Could there really be any virtue in secretly looking down at people like Dr. King as embarrassing in some way, as pathetic, as not being able to free himself from the "primitive" language of his beloved father? Was my discomfort with his passion for God only one more way for an educated white man to feel superior to an educated black man and not admit it? Did I really believe that it would be better for all people, including King, to take up a "manly" Humanism (and that word "manly" is straight from the Humanist Manifesto) as a better philosophy for confronting the powers of racism in our nation?

Thus, as I read more and more of King's actual life, I began to wonder if some of my cherished skepticism at least wasn't partly mere self-congratulation. After all, however much I identify with my Emilian-Italian heritage, it remains that I look out onto the world through hazel eyes and pale skin, and that King looked out onto the world through dark brown eyes and dark brown skin.

I have never had to live with white folks glancing at me, scowling at me, checking me out, clutching at their purses, hiding their wallets from me while I walk by. I have rarely had to put up with daily condescension or fragile politeness.

King, however, despite his rather middle-class upbringing, had to put up with this nonsense daily. He spent his childhood watching his father routinely deal with abuse that would have crumpled me, and I dare say most people in this room, just like that. And I don't have to take King's word for this, either. I have lived in entirely African American neighborhoods most of my adult life. And despite my glasses, my eyes work very well, thank you. I used to witness example after example of this kind of treatment in my Oakland neighborhood daily.

Any bookie who had read even one page of American history could tell you that the odds were clearly against King's success from the beginning. And yet, despite all this, King clearly initiated a remarkable change in our nation. And he did this without armor, and without the conventional weapons of revenge. He did so well, in fact, he has almost disappeared as a human being and become a legend, like David the Shepherd Boy.

Echoing this idea, Camille Cosby wrote, "Given the odds, we weren't supposed to stop being slaves, we weren't supposed to have an education. We weren't supposed to have spirit, to have families."

What a remarkable passage! And how astutely correct. In the whole history of the world, I can think of no other group of human beings who has fought such great odds, and accomplished so much in a short time, considering all that was set against them. It's just under 140 years since the legalized terrorism called slavery was officially dismantled. Yet despite the real problems that remain in the present age, including a lot of economic exclusion, I want to offer you a litany of greatness, which, especially considering the odds, moves my soul deeply:

George Washington Carver, Frederick Douglas, W.E.B DuBois, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, Paul Robeson, Audre Lord, Marian Wright Edelman, Spike Lee, Thurgood Marshall, Fannie Lou Hamer, Rosa Parks, Cornell West, Nikki Giovanni, James Baldwin, Shirley Chisholm, Barbara Jordan, Leontyne Price, Mahalia Jackson, Louis Armstrong, Phyllis Wheatley, Duke Ellington, Jackie Robinson, Muhammed Ali, Marian Anderson, Malcolm X, Jesse Owens, Ralph Ellison, Tony Morrison, Ishmael Reed, Lena Horne, Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Anita Baker, Odetta, Diana Ross, Langston Hughes, Ridgely Torrence, Mary McLeod Bethune, Sugar Ray Leonard, Amiri Baraka, Max Roach, Dizzy Gillespie, Denzel Washington, Satchel Paige, Mother Waddles, Beah Richards, Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Davis, Colin Powell, June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, Oprah Winfrey, Alex Haley, Magic Johnson, Bill Cosby, Sammy Davis Junior…It's an incomplete litany, but I assure you, the legend of David and Goliath is hardly a fairy tale to most of these folks, or to millions I did not name. These all have, in Cosby's lovely phrase, "not just achieved victories, but become victories."

For Martin Luther King, Jr., God is a name given to the Strength that beats the odds. Not luck, said King. Not fate. Not randomness, although these surely effect things too. But God. A personal God. A partisan God. God is sheer worthiness, and thus, God is that which bends toward all those whose worth is denied and assures them they, too, are worthy.

A Unitarian Universalist might say, or a Humanist might say, that every human being is intrinsically valuable. But I think this is not really different from what Dr. King is saying, except that King calls the reality of deep worthiness "God," whereas the others tend to use the word "intrinsic."

Now, perhaps there are those among you who fear that I am being dishonest, merely playing with words. You may tell me that you are hearing me say that Humanism, Unitarian Universalism and Dr. King's "monistic theism" are, in fact, identical. They are not.

Hear me. Reality itself is silent. It exists without words. Reality exists without inherent interpretation.

Humanism is not the bald truth any more than theism is. It's an interpretation… the sounds and symbols uttered by human beings to preserve and remember their own experience… which is initially wordless.

As soon as human beings announce their experience with words they have left reality and set their feet on the slippery slope of interpretation. This is why many profound religious groups, from the Trappists to the Quakers to many Buddhists, cultivate silence as their spiritual worship. They are trying, against all dis-couragement, to remain faithful to experience itself.

Hear me again. I am not also hereby saying that all philosophies and theologies are the same or equal. I hope you know that. Gandhi's and King's philosophies are demonstrably better than Mr. Hitler's. Why? Because Gandhi and King, and yes, you and me, use our whole lives to create our philosophy. We use our experience, our education, our struggle with truthfulness, and our compassion to meditate on what is right. Mr. Hitler never struggled with truthfulness, education or compassion, as far as I understand. He simply focused on raw power alone. Absolute, obsessive power and control. And as King knew, and as I hope we all know, it is power that maintains unequal access among us, not prejudice by itself.

I find myself wondering these days about how class and cultural upbringing might affect theology. Might not people like Dr. King, who experienced disenfranchisement, automatically relate better to a God partial to the disenfranchised, than would any comfortable, well-franchised person? I certainly think so. When I hear Unitarian Universalist folks discussing God as if God was merely a subject for cool philosophy, instead talking about God as a deep passion for justice on earth as Dr. King did, I, for one begin to wonder at the social and economic basis for these differences. I wonder what I have might have missed in my life by focusing so much more on my self-sufficiency than on my own very real need for greater strength than I have on my own.

I'll close by underlining what I just said with a story.

Some decades before Dr. King graduated from Morehouse, another man did. This man's father was also a Baptist divine, but, unlike King, he did not seek ordination. Instead, he turned toward music.

He proved to be a musician of no mean skill, a man who played the smoky clubs with Ma Rainey herself. After a long stretch of somewhat unfocused living, this man, Thomas Dorsey, began to put his musical genius clearly in the service of his church. People were soon referring to him as "the father of gospel music," even calling such songs "dorseys."

In 1932, Dorsey arrived in St. Louis for a church meeting only to find a telegram that said,"Return home to Chicago right away." His beloved wife, nine months pregnant, had suddenly taken ill. Dorsey tore back to Chicago, only to find his wife had died in childbirth. His infant son survived two days, then also died. Dorsey was destroyed. He locked himself in his music room without food or contact, for three full days. But when he came out, he brought out with him the composition "Precious Lord," which Sydney Munn sang so perfectly before this sermon.

When we spoke in public of putting Dorsey's hymn in the hymnbook, many Unitarian Universalists protested. Can't have any "Lord" language in the new book. And the text is depressing: "I am tired, I am weak, I am worn." Who wants to hear that or sing that? Well, maybe someone who feels that way.

So we put the hymn in the book anyway, just the way Dorsey wrote it. It's a good hymn. After all, he's not praying to some capricious God to restore his wife and child. He's simply a man who lost everything crying out for Strength to keep on going. This is the very God Dr. King would preach decades later. No wonder this was Dr. King's favorite hymn. The desire to be held and comforted, after all, is not childish, or theologically inferior to more stoic or self-sufficient philosophies. In fact, the opposite may often be true.

You see, I think a case can be made that some of our more self-sufficient theologies too often rise out of extraordinary blessing and not ordinary human need. They rise from security, not want. Like King after him, Dorsey relied on the Strength of a partisan God to bring "a way out of no way," a new life out of utter desolation. Both Dorsey and King lived their lives in the faith that any Goliath, social or personal, could, and indeed should, be brought down by ordinary and creative human efforts. Is this faith really much different from a Unitarian Universalist defending the intrinsic worth of every person, and the imperative to make sure that this is true for everyone? I for one don't think it is.

Oh sure, I still maintain that many God images ought to perish. The Santa Claus in the sky has to go, the Bully God, the God of Flags and Armies…all of these gods must die. But King said as much all of his life. And he was a theist, not an atheist.

I conclude by proclaiming my deepest belief: King's limited and personal God, and the Stubborn Hope that uplifts non-theistic Humanists and many Unitarian Universalists, are not enemies. They can actually be friends. They are both born of similar, if distinct experiences. [They are both culturally rooted interpretations. And if both of them can offer a dream on "a mountain top" and issue a call to action, humility and self-examination, might they not both be "right and true" at the same time? And if that is not true, how can any of us ever speak honestly again of diversity, inclusiveness or even love?]

Prayer [back to top]

(sung) Sometimes you have to sit down,
because you are tired and worn.
Sometimes you have to rise up,
because the Strength that moves in you,
and moves you deep, will not let you go.
Sometimes you have to risk jail or journeys,
for there might not be any other road.
Sometimes you might have to risk love,
love's tears & love's song,
to know the spirit is alive in you
and in all who strive for justice.
Don't sit down now, servants,
its not the time. Rise up and sing.

[back to top]

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