Sermon

INTRODUCTION: I still remember reading in an anthology of American Literature during my sophomore year in college, about an experiment of Benjamin Franklin’s. This was not about a kite, key or electricity; rather, it concerned the most famous preacher of the day, both in England and America – a Methodist evangelist known as the Rev. George Whitefield. He made 17 oceanic voyages – and his fame in America rivaled that even of George Washington.

One of the things which distinguished the Rev. Whitefield, and which Benjamin Franklin’s experiment focused on, was Whitefield’s ability to project his voice in open air meetings. As you know, sound waves bounce off of walls, some more or less than others. But in the open air, there is no wall off which to bounce, which means that the speaker must be able to project his voice to be heard. And what Benjamin Franklin was interested in disproving was the oft repeated reports in newspapers of the day that George Whitefield preached effectively to thousands in the open air. Franklin didn’t think it could be done.

So while both Franklin and Whitefield were still in England, Franklin decided to attend one of the Rev. Whitefield’s open air sermons. Franklin started calculating from close up. He took deliberate, paced steps away from Whitefield, so as to measure how far he could go and still hear clearly.

He was amazed. He counted his steps, allowed two square feet per person, and computed that indeed, the Rev. George Whitfield could speak to a crowd of more than 10,000 and everyone still could hear him perfectly well.

Whether in Jesus’ day or Whitfield’s, until after the first quarter of the 20^th Century, to preach meant the ability to project one’s voice and be heard. Though microphones, speakers and audio systems were first patented in the early 1920s, it was many years before speaker systems came to be requisite for every church, and most certainly, for any outside gathering. So the first thing I want to say in comparison of Jesus and Dr. King is that:

a. with powerful voices: Jesus was a preacher of Judaism. He was a disciple of John the Baptist, and drew large audiences to open spaces, riversides and valleys. He was not “sharing” or “engaging” in conversation. He was preaching.

Unfortunately, one of our most lasting images of Jesus is of Warner Sallman’s “Head of Christ,” which is reputed to have been reproduced more than 500 million times. However, it more appropriately should be entitled “Woman with Whiskers,” because of the distortion in which it engages. Jesus is portrayed as soft and feminine. It goes along with the poetic doggerel, of “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.”

But there was nothing meek and nothing mild about the preaching of Jesus. He was able to project his voice so that large crowds could hear him. According to the scriptural record, the numbers in his audiences reached as many as 5,000. I promise you thousands would not have come out to hear him, had he not had a big and commanding voice.

In fact, Jesus must have been a large and physical presence. The Gospel of John says that when he came to the Temple to worship, he found that there were those selling animals for sacrifices and exchanging money for various currencies inside the Temple. There were so many and they were making so much noise that they had turned the temple into a merchandising outlet instead of a house of prayer. In outrage, Jesus made a whip out of small pieces of rope, drives out the animal dealers and their animals, turned over the money tables, and drove out the money changers. This was no quiet, gentle, meek and mild Jesus.

It was not always what his listeners wanted to hear. What he offered were not “tidbits for tiptoeing through the tulips.” No, they were in-your-face-challenges to conventional wisdom that would ultimately result in his death.

At the time of Jesus’ ministry, the nation of Israel was occupied by Rome, the most powerful nation in the Western world. The rulers of the theocratic state of Israel had no military chance against Rome, so they had worked out terms of occupation. That meant it was in the interests of the rulers of the nation for things to go smoothly, for taxes to be paid, and for no rabble rousers to make unauthorized noises.

But when Jesus began to speak out against the moral compromises that occupation had brought, he was in immediate trouble with the leadership. That was true as well for Dr. King. He too was a great preacher. He too spoke truth to power.

In the early 1960s, John F. Kennedy had increased America’s military presence in the Southeastern nation of Vietnam from 500 to 16,000. He also told Walter Cronkite on television in 1963, that we were not in Vietnam to see a war lost and that it would be a mistake to pull troops out.

Then when Lyndon Johnson succeeded JFK after his assassination in late 1963, Johnson made a calculated decision to elevate the conflict, due to bad advice from his Secretary of State. He said, “If we quit Vietnam tomorrow, we’ll soon be fighting in Hawaii and the next week we’ll have to be fighting in San Francisco.”

Does that ever sound familiar as America bombs, kills and maims in a useless war in Iraq – “to avoid fighting in the streets of New York,” as we were told.

In early 1965, President Johnson authorized “Operation Rolling Thunder,” which started the wholesale bombing of North Vietnam and the area controlled by the Viet Cong. Initially, the bombing was meant to last for eight weeks – instead it lasted for three years. Polls showed in 1965 that 80% of Americans supported the war.

In the midst of this tragedy, Dr. King chose to speak out. He had first come to national attention in 1955, as a young 26 year old Black preacher, still writing his dissertation at Boston University. He had been called to pastor at the Black elite congregation of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Immediately his peers in Montgomery recognized something special in him.

So much so, that when Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her bus seat to a White man, the Black community turned to Dr. King to lead their fight for the right to ride the bus and sit anywhere seats were available.

For 13 years, from that momentous December in 1955, until his assassination in Memphis in April 1968, Dr. King gave eloquent voice to the hopes and dreams of an oppressed minority, as well as forcing a nation to come to terms with its racist past.

While his actions in civil rights had resulted in not only the Nobel Peace Prize, but also provided impetus for two major pieces of Civil Rights legislation, Dr. King had remained mostly silent about the Vietnam War.

As you know, America has a history of virulent nationalism, not patriotism. Nationalism proclaims, “My country, right or wrong;” patriotism declares, “My Country! When right keep it right; when wrong, set it right!”

In our hyper nationalist society, in 1965 and in 2003, anyone who speaks out against America’s going to war, regardless of the conflict, is always going to be charged with lack of patriotism.

So it was with trepidation on April 4, 1967, that Dr. King told an anti-war clergy meeting at Riverside Church in New York, of a decision he had made. Even though 500,000 American troops were deployed to Vietnam, and Congress had voted 416 to 0 to go to war, Dr. King said he had become convinced that America was the most violent nation in the world, and that a racist military was sending disproportionate numbers of African Americans to fight:

“We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia, which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.…We have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white young men on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit City.”

He went on to say that, “I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor….A time comes when silence is betrayal…. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for victims of our nation and for those it calls enemy.”

Life Magazine called the speech "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi”; The Washington Post declared that King had "diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

But by the time the war was ended – please listen to this – by the time the Vietnam War had ended, 3 to 4 million Vietnamese from both North and South Vietnam had been killed; 1.5 to 2 million Laotians and Cambodians had died; and 58,159 U.S. soldiers returned home in coffins. Their names are enshrined in a memorial in Washington, D.C. According to Dr. King, they were lost in a trumped up war, at the wrong time, in the wrong place.

So not only were Jesus and Dr. King preachers, and preachers who eloquently spoke out against the conventional wisdom of the day, but they also died because of what they did and said.

We don’t know how old Jesus was when he was killed by the state, but the best guess is that he was in his early 30s. We know that Dr. King was 39, when he was assassinated. We do know that both died far too young. But their lives have impacted people in enormously significant ways.

But what strikes me about this comparison between them, is what if you were to imagine for a moment being able to bring them back to this time and place, what would they say about how their lives and memories have been treated?

Imagine Jesus and Dr. King here today in America: What would they think about what we say about them?

There’s no doubt whatsoever that Jesus would be horrified at the notion that he had been made into a god, and even had creeds created that people had to confess to believing or be killed. And that Jews were killed because they didn’t believe Jesus was the Son of God.

The truth is Jesus was a Jew. He was born a Jew, he practiced Judaism, and he preached as a prophet of Judaism.

Remember, it was Paul and the later followers of Jesus who turned him from a dynamic young prophet of Judaism, into a convoluted three-gods-in-one god. But as Moses and Muhammad taught so clearly, the god of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob was one, not three in one.

As for Dr. King, I’m sure he would be equally stunned to know that there is an African American in the White House, that the Attorney General is a Black man, a Black woman is Ambassador to the United Nations, and a Black woman sits on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court. He would rejoice in the progress we have made in many areas of education and employment. But he would have to hurt within to know that one-fourth to one-third of all African Americans, ages 18 to 25, will go through some phase of the criminal justice system…that Black Americans are still on the bottom of the socio-economic ladder…and that the color of one’s skin still has much to do with both the opportunity and the success that one has in America.

But were he to walk down the streets of any Southern city, he would be the first to realize how much has changed and how much his work and the civil rights movement he led had made the critical difference.

He would be pleased to know that the military draft has been done away with, and blacks are no longer disproportionately drafted to fight White men’s wars.

But I’m sure he would be incredulous to learn that America is currently involved in two wars, and he would wonder, as many of us do, how did that ever happen?

In Dick Nogaj’s just published book, Don’t Retire, Get Inspired, he has a brief segment on his interaction with Dr. King. I called and asked him if he would be willing to share it as the closing statement of this sermon (pp. 30f.)

[1] A sermon preached January 17, 2010, “Martin Luther King Sunday,” at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation of Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister, meeting temporarily at the Crestwell School, 1901 Park Meadows, Ft. Myers, FL.