A sermon by
Rev. Chris Jorgensen
Preached
January 15, 2016
At Urban
Abbey UMC
Deuteronomy
34:1-4 (excerpted)
Then Moses
went up from the plains of Moab to Mount Nebo...and the Lord showed him the
whole land…The Lord said to him, “This is the land of which I swore to Abraham,
to Isaac, and to Jacob, saying, ‘I will give it to your descendants’; I have
let you see it with your eyes, but you shall not cross over there.”
The Reverend
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his final speech at Mason Temple in Memphis,
Tennessee on April 3, 1968. It is known as his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop”
speech, and it is so named because it ends with him leaning heavily on the
story referenced in our scripture today. In it, God gives Moses a vision, in
the sense that God allows Moses to see. Quite literally, he is looking from a
mountaintop at the promised land. This is the land that Moses and his people
had escaped Pharaoh to get to, that they had wandered in the desert hungry and
thirsty for 40 years to get to, that God had promised would be a fruitful land
for them to raise their children for generations.
And God
takes Moses to the mountaintop and says, “There it is. But you won’t be going
there in this life.” You will die here before you can cross over.
This was a
poignant story for King to choose to preach the day before he was assassinated.
He told it in the midst of the Memphis Sanitation Workers’ strike. The strike
was about getting fair wages and employment practices for the black sanitation
workers in Memphis, but it was also about something bigger. Its catalyst had
been the deaths of two men: Echol Cole who was 36, and Robert Walker who was
just 29 years old. It happened on a rainy day in Memphis, a torrentially rainy
day. And as the skies opened up, Cole and Walker jumped in the back of a
garbage truck, the kind that compacts garbage so it can hold more.
In the heavy
downpour, this was the best bad option for what they could do about it. They weren’t
allowed to stop working because of bad weather, and they weren’t even allowed
to stop and wait out the worst of the rain in the neighborhood they were
working in. Historian Taylor Branch explains why. He writes “They faced a hard
choice in bad weather because city rules barred shelter stops in residential
neighborhoods – after citizen complaints about unsightly “picnics” by Negro
sanitation workers.”[1]
White people didn’t want to have to be uncomfortable seeing black men stop in
their neighborhood, and so these sanitation workers only had the back of the
garbage truck for shelter. The front cab was already full of the more senior
members of the team. So as they had doubtless done before, Cole and Walker were
in the back of the truck with the garbage. And when a freak short in some wires
possibly set off by a falling shovel caused the compactor to start crushing the
garbage, Branch writes that when the driver “heard screams, he could not slam
on the brakes, jump out, and disengage the pushbutton compressor fast enough.”[2]
It was the
death of Cole and Walker that highlighted the systemic racism at work: the root
of which was white folks’ inability to see black people as fully human. It was
reflected in the signs of the striking sanitation workers that insisted “I am a
Man!” I am not garbage.
So King went
to Memphis. All of King’s work was based in this very simple, very profound,
very theological premise. For King, all people deserve freedom and justice
because they are children of God – they are fully human and of sacred worth.
And like Jesus before him, King aligned himself with those who suffered most,
those who were treated as inhuman, and those who were held down in poverty
despite the great wealth of our country.
And when I
say aligned himself with, I mean he was willing to die for the cause of
bringing dignity and freedom and abundance to those who were denied it. In his
mountaintop speech, King is quite aware that he is the target of assassins. He
knows his time is short, but he does not despair. His hope lies in God, in the arc of the moral
universe toward justice, but his hope also lies in God moving people to do the
work. He says, “When people get caught up with that which is right and they are
willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping point short of victory.”[3]
“When people get caught up with that
which is right and they are willing to sacrifice for it, there is no stopping
point short of victory.”
King invites
us to get caught up in this vision of what is right. In his most famous speech,
he invites us to get caught up in his dream of racial equality coming not in
some abstract perfect union years in the future but in right there in the red
hills of Georgia where white people in the not-so-distant past enslaved black
people, and then when slavery was abolished, those same white folks set laws in
place to keep them destitute and powerless, and who continue to this day to
gerrymander and attack voting rights in order to hold onto power.
And in the
years following King’s speech, his view widened, he looked at the North and the
perhaps more subtle but equally systemic racism that keeps cities segregated
even today, that keeps prisons disproportionately populated by black men whom
studies have shown receive harsher sentences than white men for the same
crimes,[4]
that keeps black infant mortality rates significantly higher than rates for
white infants, and that keeps black males having the shortest life expectancy
of all ethnic groups to this day.[5]
We are still
so far from his dream of equality, still so far from the promised land. But can
you see it? Can you see what the world would be like if our cities were
actually integrated? Can you see what the world would be like if our nation
committed more resources to education and anti-poverty measures than to
expanding our prison system? Can you imagine what our society would be like
when black people – and poor people – and all minorities – were just as likely
to receive high-quality health care as upper middle class white folks? Can you
get caught up in that hope?
Congressman
and civil rights leader John Lewis once wrote (and this quote was in this
sermon before Trump even starting tweeting this weekend). Lewis once wrote… “The
most important lesson I have learned in the 50 years I have spent working
toward the building of a better world is that the true work of social
transformation starts within…to truly revolutionize our society, we must first
revolutionize ourselves. We must be the change we seek if we are to effectively
demand transformation from others.”[6]
I believe we
can only get to the promised land as a people if we start by truly recognizing
others’ humanity, if we start truly being heartbroken and outraged by the
injustice of poverty and racism and sexism and every broken structure that
allows some people to suffer and die so that a few other people can be
comfortable in their privilege.
For my part,
I did not get this until I went to seminary. I truly did not get it until I was
a member of a racially and and socio-economically diverse church community. I
didn’t get it until I had the privilege to be in community with people who helped
me see, helped open my eyes, to their full humanity. So much so that things
like the Trayvon Martin shooting actually, viscerally mattered to me. Not in
some abstract – it’s-ethically-wrong-to-shoot-unarmed-young-men kind of way –
but in a Ruby’s-best-friend-at-Church-of-the-Village-is-a-large-for-his-age 11-year-old-black-boy-and-we-live-in-a-world-where-nervous-white-people-have-created
stand-your-ground-laws-where-young-black-men-get-shot-for-wearing-hoodies-in-the-wrong-neighborhood
kind-of-way.
It broke my
heart. It made me feel guilty because I knew that as a white person, those unjust
systems had been created to protect me and my family. And then it made me angry.
And it made me resolve to always question whether I am placing my own comfort
and privilege over someone else’s ability to simply live.
In the face
of our current political and societal mess, I wish I could stand up here and
tell you just how we are going to fix it all. I may not be able to do that, but
with John Lewis’s words about personal transformation in my mind, I just
encourage you to do this:
Be
uncomfortable.
Put yourself
in places and situations where you can learn more about vulnerable people. Do
it even if you are afraid or nervous. Do it even if you feel guilty. Don’t let
your fear feed the systems that create other peoples’ poverty, other peoples’
suffering, other peoples’ deaths.
I am asking
you to sacrifice your comfort to get caught up in God’s dream. Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr. was willing to sacrifice everything for it because he believed
in God, he believed in the collective power of his people, and because he
believed in us – that we too would be swept up in this dream - until we all
reach the promised land together.
May it be
so.
Amen.
