P R O P H E T S
or, Surely you don't mean me
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
January 18, 2004
A sermon by F. Jay Deacon
Preached at the Unitarian Society of Northampton and Florence
January 18, 2004
Forty or so years ago in the American South a minister named King was voted into oblivion by his denominational Conference. They figured they had to do it because the guy was a troublemaker. He'd been in trouble with the law, had been arrested, for his leadership in the civil rights movement. He'd shaken up his church, too. So they voted to discipline him. Shortly thereafter came the plot to assassinate him.
You haven't heard of him. It was 1963, and the minister was a Methodist by the name of Edwin King. The local segregationist newspaper — this was in Jackson, Mississippi — reported that the debate at the Methodist Conference meeting had reduced some of the clergy to tears. But they had to do it. This guy was a troublemaker. He'd visited the Freedom Riders imprisoned at Parchman Penitentiary and smuggled in some books by Gandhi, by concealing them inside dust jackets of books by Billy Graham. He had participated in a ministers' vigil at the County Courthouse, protesting the violent repression of the May 1963 sit-ins, and had gone to jail for it. He had tried to integrate Methodist worship services. What choice did they have but to vote to bar him from holding any office in the Conference?
Because of what he'd done and the stand he had taken, he'd been stalked and one day someone loosened the lug nuts on his tires and then was sideswiped by a marauding car in a head-on collision that nobody thought was an accident. When Allard Lowenstein found him, his face was caved in on the left side.
There are prophets everywhere, wherever and whenever someone is willing to live close to their soul and speak and act authentically.
Rev. Edwin King, the Mississippi Methodist, was finally stripped of his credentials by his denomination. Actually, this happened at just about the time when the entire Board of Trustees of the Unitarian Universalist was marching with Dr. King in Selma — a few days after another UU minister's death in Selma — Jim Reeb.
Edwin King, a white minister, felt himself in good company with the other Rev. King, the one you ever heard of, who had two years before been excommunicated from his denomination, the National Baptist Convention, for trying to propel it into civil rights activism.
Martin Luther King struggled mightily with his National Baptist Church, trying to bring them on board in the work of justice, freedom, and dignity. They wouldn't come with him. They were quite interested in the prophets Amos and Isaiah, but not the prophet King, who stood in their midst.
I think it has to do with something Emerson said in his Divinity School Address — which was certainly another prophetic utterance. He told those young ministerial graduates that "It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was; that He speaketh, not spake."
And he criticized "The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed . . ."
A few years ago there was a somewhat serious attempt to get the more liberal Christian denominations to add Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail to the canon of the New Testament. Of course, they were right, and the Divinity School Address, and an awful lot of other items, ought to be there, too — in fact, an unending flow of contemporary scripture.
Today, many honor King who, while he was alive, would have been his most virulent detractors and foes. But like Amos and Isaiah, dead prophets are way easier to contend with.
Dr. King had not started off looking much like a prophet. He was the son of the very popular minister of a very big Atlanta congregation. He was ambitious and intellectually curious, above all, apparently, passionate about rhetoric and oratory and about becoming a brilliant preacher. He was an excellent student and earned a Ph.D. at Boston University. While he was a student there he and Coretta attended a Unitarian Universalist congregation — he wasn't really into the fundamentalist theology of his father. In 1954 he settled into his first charge, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.
You would not call him a prophet. He set out to restructure the organization and finances of the church. He didn't have much to say about civil rights — not that he had not reflected deeply about these issues under the guidance of two of the greatest American theologians, Reinhold Niehbuhr and Paul Tillich. But that was all academic.
The rest happened very fast. One day a seamstress, Rosa Parks, wouldn't give up her seat on the bus. Now, Rosa Parks was a humble seamstress who had been trained in civil disobedience at the famous Highlander School, which J. Edgar Hoover eventually shut down for subversive activity in 1960 as a hot-bed for communism, anarchy, and race-mixing. And — Rosa Parks — she was serious about this. She was by now secretary of the Executive Committee of the Montgomery NAACP. And now the ambitious new minister got himself appointed to it as well. He was about to be thrust right into the middle of it.
In spite of her rather scary experience at the Montgomery jail, Rosa Parks made the extraordinary commitment to allow her case against Montgomery to be taken to a federal court — a very dangerous thing to do in Montgomery. The black ministers had responded to her arrest by calling the famous boycott of the bus system and for reasons no one really knows — maybe because nobody else wanted to do it — the new minister King was made president of the boycott organization.
All his life, from the safe cocoon of the Atlanta community surrounding his father's church, he had seen the humiliation, and the abuse, and the contempt, and the inequity. Now it all came down upon him. He experienced the hate-calls and the mobs and the bombings and the political doublecrosses and the inside of the Montgomery City Jail. And now it would all come tumbling in together.
Maybe more than that — he saw the people, in their thousands, maintained the boycott for 382 long days — He saw them volunteering every possible car to transport black workers; he saw the old women walking every day to their menial jobs; he heard them when they spoke at the mass meetings — like Mother Pollard, when she stood to say "my feets is tired by my soul is refreshed." Was she not also a prophet? He heard another prophet, even if a minor prophet, but one nonetheless, who had the guts to stand up at the first mass meeting for the boycott, just after some ministers had proposed that the names of the boycott leaders be kept secret and the boycott be kept as secret as possible — just after that, just as Rev. King was arriving at the mass meeting late — stood up and let his anger speak these words: "Let me tell you gentlemen one thing. You ministers have lived off these wash-women for the last hundred years and ain't never done nothing for them," and then scolded them for trying to hide while the poor workers bore the brunt of the arrests. He heard that and it struck him deeply.
What emerged from all this was Martin Luther King the prophet. It came from his soul and his life, but it was far more than that, a far more expansive vision, an urgency beyond his own life. Of course, he could have ducked the whole bothersome business, taken a pass on the hassle, the way the National Baptist Church did.
But it was going to be a trip through a cauldron. One day he was truly rattled, and scared through and through. He had buried his face in his hands at the kitchen table and faced the fact of his own fear and the fact that he couldn't face all this alone when he had the first transcendent religious experience of his life. He didn't use God-language to describe it but he felt his fears melt away and he knew the Inner Voice that would guide him through the rest of his life and that would repeatedly open up great stores of energy in him, mysteriously, beyond his frailest moments and even his noblest.1
But there were so many more prophets. At King's side were both Bayard Rustin and Allard Lowenstein, two brilliant strategists, one black and one white and both gay, in the 1950s, in J. Edgar Hoover's and Joseph McCarthy's America; both doubly oppressed, Lowenstein eventually assassinated. It was in no small part their own life-experience that led them into the civil rights struggle, even if, tragically, they could not yet apply the same demands for dignity and freedom to their own lives.
But there were more, an uncounted throng, and had there not been, none of this could have happened. They touched, and trusted, and spoke and lived the truth of their lives.
There is an essential truth to every life. Some would say it's an essence, a spiritual entity; whether it's that or not, it's surely this:
It's the witness of an authentic life. It's what your life, the living of your life, reveals about both the limits and the possibilities of life. But the revelation is only the possession of those who are attentive and receptive to the truth about themselves, about their lives, who are unwilling to carry on a pretend-existence, but believe in the truth that is revealed in their own lives.
I am drawn again and again to something Walt Whitman said, and it's this:
We consider bibles and religions divine — I do not say they are not divine; I say they have all grown out of you, and may grow out of you still.
Or as the late Ira Progoff said,
There are new bibles, many new bibles, to be created as a sign of a spiritual unfolding of the human spirit in our time.
And yet — The declaring and living of prophetic truth isn't really about you. It is about something that encompasses far more than your own life and has meaning and urgency for the times in which you live. But this very self and essence of us is the vessel in which we may reach and touch the world of life around us, and touch, also, whatever of Infinity there is to touch in this life.
Here's another prophet you may not have heard of, Thomas Wentworth Higginson. He was part of our own radical religious movement, a friend of Parker and Emerson and the others. He was minister of a congregation in Worcester — it was a sister congregation of our own Free Congregational Society of Florence. Then he commanded a regimen of black soldiers in the Civil War, and plotted with John Brown. Ministerial students used to ask him how best to train themselves for public speaking. His answer applies, I think, to everything we do. Here it is:
Engage in something which you feel for the moment to be so unspeakably more important than yourself as wholly to dwarf you, and the rest will come. . . . There is an essential thing wanting to the eloquence of the men who act a part; but given a profound sincerity, and there is something wonderful in the way it overcomes the obstacles of a hoarse voice, a stammering tongue, or a feeble presence.On the anti-slavery platform, where I was reared, I cannot remember one really poor speaker; . . . How could eloquence not be present there, when we had not time to think of eloquence?
I should add that one of those prophets Higginson most admired was Charles C. Burleigh, of the Florence side of our own congregation's heritage. He's hanging over the coffee in the Parlor.
Acts of creative vision often happen where there is suffering and anguish, when our times, our lives, and those about us cry out for beauty where there is brokenness, for freedom and possibility where there is oppression, where life demands new patterns and better ways: that is where creative vision breaks through.
Prophetic creativity begins with the pain of need. Dissatisfaction, unrest. Are the boundaries of this world too small? Do our lives seem to turn in repetitive patterns of futility?
This is not the safe religion of a sealed revelation, a bible with covers on it, and all the prophets safely in the past. That kind of religion defies change, and the growth of consciousness. That kind of religion needs do little more than believe things. But what if the world is still full of prophets who, out of their own experience of life in this world, living close to the soul, speak, and behold new justice, new truth.
They are not prophets who speak only what their culture, or their community, or their church tells them to say.
A half dozen years ago the Harvard Divinity School professor Bryan Hehir pointed out2 that we get the richness of religious vision in the public arena at a certain risk. When you read Amos or Isaiah or Jesus or Gandhi or Emerson there is a power in them that is different from normal religious or political discourse. There is a fire that can both invigorate the quality and character of public life — and that can burn the house down.
You got the same fire in Martin Luther King and Charles Burleigh and Sojourner Truth, and it scared people.
This is the prophetism of the people. It's is a hugely important distinction from religion-as-usual.
But it's work, and it's risky. It means listening to the voices of people who have experienced the world differently from you — and those who have felt the pain of oppression that results from the structures of the world as it now is, who have come to dream of how it might be.
It is in the midst of the needs and requirements of a particular time and place that new truth emerges, and there are opened in many people deep reservoirs of wisdom. The world needs those voices now. Sometimes the witness of many people's truth comes together at once in a great movement. Something is in the air. And as Emerson put it, when
The truth is in the air, . . . the most [sensitive] brain will announce it first, . . . because he yields to a current so feeble as can be felt only by a needle delicately poised.3
We cannot rely simply on the prophets of the past. The ancient biblical prophet Ezekiel had dream. He responded to his situation of captivity and despair — with dimensions for a great temple. Sometimes in elaborate detail, it came together, in cubits and concretions. From Ezekiel after 25 years of captivity, there came these dimensions, and they gave birth to a guiding vision for his times, firing hope and releasing human energy.
It was a powerful vision but it was not a perfect vision
there is in this universe no perfect vision.
There cannot be any perfect vision or any perfect anything in a context of change, in the riverflow of unfolding humanity still not completed in a universe in process. So there is something wrong with Ezekiel's vision. It can only be an interim vision but it is the next step until there is more truth, more vision. Human consciousness has travelled a long journey since Ezekiel. He dreamed of a temple where no foreigners or outsiders were allowed in. He dreamed of a reconstruction and restoration of something that once was, not modified at all by new necessities or new possibilities. He wanted to rebuild an ancient glory with its ancient narrowness of soul still intact. It was no final or perfect vision and ours won't be either. But it was a dream that could be built and could make real and concrete the dreams of many.
It remains for us to dream dreams in our time, and to create conditions where the radiance of the divine within us and within the world is seen and felt and experienced.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, said this:
We are faithless to our [forebears] if we do not begin where they left off instead of stopping there. We are faithless to ourselves if we do not look with our own eyes, speak our own thoughts and act our own life.4
The nobler, wiser, and braver human the world now requires is one who is attentive to the truth of their life and who dares to face it and and trust it;
who listens to the truth,the prophecy of other lives, —
—truth that is in the air —
who dares — in that place where life has put them — to live it and speak it.
©2004 by F. Jay Deacon. All rights reserved.
From a sermon by Jenkin Lloyd Jones at All Souls Church in Chicago, 1905:
There is a foresight that is born of insight; there is a light of heaven blazing up from within in every soul . . .
Prophecy calls for sweat and self denial; it summons us to uphill tasks, bids us to die trying.
Prophecy is the unconscious witness of uninvested energy; it is the expression of that potency of the universe back of all our plannings, behind all our arguments, greater than all our schemes.
Prophecy witnesses to a divine potency in the universe, the coiled spring at the core of things. . . . There is an element of divine audacity in prophecy. They are the children of God who, fearless of consequences, plunge forward, who take up hard tasks, who break with convention and grapple with the ideal; who dare launch forth in the interest of untried verities, forming new runlets in the tissues of brain for the currents of life to run in. . . .
Martin Luther King. From the Birmingham Jail,
to the clergy of Birmingham, 1963.
My dear fellow clergy:
While confined here in the Birmingham city jail, I came across your recent statement calling my present activities "unwise and untimely." . . .
Such an attitude stems from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through . . . tireless efforts . .
Is organized religion too inextricably bound to the status quo to save our nation and the world? But again I am thankful to God that some noble souls from the ranks of organized religion have broken loose from the paralyzing chains of conformity and joined us as active partners in the struggle for freedom. They have left their secure congregations and walked the streets of Albany, Georgia, with us. They have acted in the faith that right defeated is stronger than evil triumphant.
You warmly commended the Birmingham police force for keeping "order" and 'preventing violence." I cannot join you in your praise of the Birmingham police department. I wish you had commended the Negro sit-inners and demonstrators of Birmingham for their sublime courage, their willingness to suffer and their amazing discipline in the midst of great provocation. One day the south will recognize its real heroes. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest." They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience' sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founders in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
Thomas Wentworth Higginson:
We are faithless to our fathers if we do not begin where they left off instead of stopping there. We are faithless to ourselves if we do not look with our own eyes, speak our own thoughts and act our own life.
Here
where many lives converge
Let this be an open space
for the unfolding of every one
where nothing is cherished more
than authentic lives
flowing fresh from the soul and essence of us
But often our lives run in tracks
safe and habitual
driven by what has been
what we have been
what once was real and live, fresh and free
O let our lives be free
from fearful repetition
playing a part
holding tightly shut what would unfold
in freedom
Let us learn to trust
the light that lights us from within
the newness that would spring from the heart of us
in beauty
in gorgeous harmony
That here where lives touch
All shall receive gifts of courage
Gifts of faith and freedom
and joyful, hopeful affirmation
Now, in this silence.