April 26, 27 2008  6 Easter, Year A
The Rev. Barbara Schlachter

Last week Fr. Bill challenged us all to live like Christ so that anyone observing us would know what it means to be a Christian.  That same farewell discourse in last Sunday’s Gospel continues today.  This is Jesus’ last sermon, his final words to his disciples before the Ascension, which falls on May 1 this year.  He is preparing them for a life where they will no longer see him.  But they will not just have to relay on memories, for God will send another Advocate, the Spirit of truth, which will abide with the community and reside in each of them.  We know this, of course, as the Holy Spirit, which we receive at baptism and which enables us each, in our own humble and halting way, to live a life as individuals and as a community in which Christ is made manifest.

The life for me that has made Christ most manifest in my lifetime is a man who bore the same fate as Jesus.  He was killed for being a prophet, for speaking uncomfortable words, words of truth, forty years ago this month.  I am speaking, of course, of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Do you remember the song, “Where Have all the Flowers Gone?” popular in the 60’s?

Maybe, maybe not.  It goes through the cycle of the life of a flower.  The flowers have gone to young girls, who have given them to men, who have become soldiers, who have gone to war, who have died and been put in the graveyards, where they once again start to produce flowers.  And the refrain of each verse is “When will they ever learn?  When will they ever learn?”

I was playing the guitar and singing this song and no doubt thinking about the Vietnam War when news reached Union Seminary on April 4 that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been killed.  That was forty years ago, and I wonder what we have learned in those forty years about the message of peace and love and justice that MLK took straight from the Bible to set before America.

One thing about being a dead martyr is that people can say anything they want to about you and you can’t set the record straight.  We remember our brother Martin for only part of his message.  We remember him for his work against racism and for justice for the person of color, which was his work from 1955 to 1965.  He had that job laid on him because he was in the place where history was about to happen.  He was a 28 year old pastor of a church in Montgomery, Alabama when a woman twice his age decided not to move to the back of the bus.  Rosa Parks started something that Martin Luther King would add to, but it was never finished in his lifetime and still is not in ours.

On a very windy and rainy day a couple of weeks ago, with the rain coming in sideways from the East, Mel and I made our way to Mount Vernon to the Chapel at Cornell College where we had the privilege of hearing Raphael Warnuck, the man who is the pastor of the Ebeneezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin was pastor when he died. Afterward I told Pastor Warnuck, who is also a graduate of Union Seminary, that I was there when Martin was killed and how we walked the streets around the seminary, which were also the streets of the edge of Harlem.  He told me he was in preschool at the time.  Way to make a lady feel old!

The day we journeyed to Cornell, I thought it was just exceptionally foul Iowa weather, but now I wonder if the Holy Spirit as a driving wind wasn’t operative.  For what Warnuck said challenged my heart.  He talked about how he is the pastor of a middle class black church and how hard it is for middle class blacks who have made it to feel responsibility and want to help those who are still under the grinding heel of poverty.

He shared the story of how on the Saturday before Easter he had arranged for a whole bunch of barbers to come to the church and advertised around town that there would be free haircuts offered.  He also arranged for members of the congregation  who were in positions of public responsibility and trust—politicians, lawyers, judges, bankers, business people—to come and mingle and listen to the concerns of the people who came.  It was a great day of sharing and connection. 

This is what Martin Luther King discovered.  It wasn’t just the sin of racism, America’s oldest and most original sin, but it was a sister sin, that of poverty, that began to stir Martin’s concern.  He began to see that in this country the two are almost inextricably related.  I won’t give you a lot of statistics about how being black makes you a more likely target of poverty as well as racism.  I will just say you can look at the prisons to see the correlation.  Half the population of our prisons is black, and one third of all black men in their 30’s have a prison record. 

But it’s not just black people that are struggling these days.  In a country where 1% of the population owns about half of its wealth, there are a lot of white folks and other people of color who are having a hard time. 

From 1965 until he was killed in 1968 brother Martin worked on the relationship of racism and poverty and one more ism.  That is militarism.  He could see that a disproportionate number of the men fighting in Vietnam were black.  But he could also see that America was placing its trust not in God, as it claimed to on its money, but on its military strength.  Warnuck calls this “our fundamental sickness.” We put more money on our military than the next 20 countries combined.  “What are we so afraid of”, he asked?

Martin Luther King called for a Revolution of Values.  He was killed.  But his work wasn’t finished, and if anyone is going to finish his work, it is going to have to be the Church.  We are the ones who are called to follow the way of Jesus who showed that justice is central to salvation.  We are the ones who are told, as in the Epistle for today, “Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated….”  We have been shown another way, the way of peace, love, and justice, and we need to live as if we really believe that Christ’s spirit is present in us and among us. 

Ascension Day is the least honored of all the Christian Holy Days, because it falls on a Thursday and we all have better things to do than to go to church and be reminded that Jesus has ascended into heaven and is at the right hand of God, with “angels, authorities, and powers made subject to him.”  But we do need to be reminded of this.  We need to live like this.

I think if we did, we would be asking a lot more questions:  We would start with Warnuck’s “What are we so afraid of?”  And we would go on to, “Why do we think that the good life consists in having more and more stuff?”  “Why do we think that the busier we are the more we are showing our worth?”  “Why do we think spending more money on military might than on our citizens’ health, education and welfare is a good use of our tax money?”  “Why does most of our food come from so far away, traveling an average of over a thousand miles?”  “Why do a few chemical companies own the rights to the seeds we can buy, which we need to, because seeds have been hybridized so the plants can’t produce viable seeds?”  “Why does business and economic growth seem to be the operative force in a world that can’t continue to produce the resources for growth?” 

This list could go on and on but the one that we may need to start with is what are we afraid of.  This week spend some time on this question, asking what are we afraid of as a nation, and what am I afraid of personally.   Do I not really trust God?  Do I not know that my life is safe with God, hidden with Christ in God?

Perhaps one of our problems is that we have lost the distinction between ego and soul or perhaps have lost an understanding of soul altogether.  Ego is our conscious mind; it is the part of us that feels fear.  But soul knows another truth altogether.  It knows it is safe.

Richard Rohr, the Franciscan/Jungian theologian writes “When we live out of ego, we impose our demands on reality.  But when we live in God’s presence, we await reality’s demands on us.  The great spiritual teachers are not concerned about domination and power in the sense our culture uses it. Their power is in descent, not ascent.  I find my deepest power is what Jesus visualizes on the cross as powerlessness.  We Christians believe that the crucifixion of Christ—seemingly a moment of utter powerlessness—is actually his moment of greatest power.  This recognition is at the core of all spiritual teaching.  It is a recognition that dramatically turns one’s reality upside down.  But with contemplation, this paradox eventually moves from being a dilemma to becoming a choice.”

The key word in that quote may be contemplation.  Taking time to slow down and contemplate, reflect on beauty, on the sheer gift of life, on the love that we have received so generously from so many.  Contemplate that it is all a gift.

The Advocate, the Spirit of Truth has come, my friends.  She is deep inside each of us, and if we take time to listen, the questions I raised above and your own version of them, of how you fit into them, will come to you.  And when enough of us decide that we no longer want to live from society’s values of greed and fear, then we will find abundance and trust and generosity.  And  maybe we will be ready to finish the great Unfinished Symphony of Martin Luther King’s life, which will take us a long way on the road to living the life Jesus envisions for us.  Amen.