Bring that dream to life…Lord I pray…
Won’t you bring that dream to life
I have a dream today…(that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character).”
I have a dream.
Lord, I pray, won’t you bring that dream to life…
We come here on this day, the Sunday before the nation honors the memory of Dr. King…
We come…into this religious space…when our task is not analysis…because the analysis has long been clear…the analysis was done by W.E.B.DuBois and Ida B. Wells, by Thurgood Marshall and Lani Guinier, by James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin and Hannah Nicole-Jones…
Our task today does not need to be analysis.
And, on this Sunday, our task is not to celebrate the progress for which Dr. King gave his life…progress that was real…laws were changed…progress that activated the moral conscience of America…
Progress that we watch being turned back day by day by day…
Our task is not pretend that that progress is secure…not to pretend that progress is inevitable…
Even Dr. King’s family has asked that this not be a time of celebration this year…there will be time for celebration when the voting rights that he fought for are secure again…
So our task today is also not to celebrate.
Nor is our task, on this Sunday, to search for a place in our spirits that can believe, again…be moved again by the dream he voiced…
That dream of innocent children called forth the demand for justice in many American hearts…that dream helped change our laws…
But we have been waiting for that dream to change not our laws but our lives… for decades now…
Our task today…is to search together for hope…in these times when hope is hard to find.
That is our spiritual task this morning…
To search for hope when so much of the evidence of the world tells us to despair…
To find a ground of hope firm enough to face the resistance that has risen to the surface now…
A ground of hope firm enough that we can overcome.
Tomorrow we will hear his “I have a Dream” speech over and over, that vision…for a world in which Black and white children, no longer schooled to hate or to fear…might see each other for the God-given blessings that they are…that we all are…
All children of God…the pure Universalism of King’s message still stirs the heart…
It was a vision not of some post-racial paradise. That was not the miracle Dr. King worked for. The miracle he called for was more than an ending of the violence and oppression…more than a truce in the culture wars…
But the dream was not for a color-blind society…it was for a society that valued the varied and beautiful colors of humanity. The dream was for a world that saw power and possibility in our diversity, saw richness and abundance in our differences.
Difference seen not as a threat to be feared but as a source of creativity and a ground of hope.
Dr. King knew how far we had to go to bring that dream to life…
He knew…and before he was murdered, he came to know more and more deeply…just how much resistance there would be…
And, knowing the resistance and the difficulty, he called us to remain awake…
Because our task was not just to have an inspiring dream…but to hew…out of the mountain of despair…a stone of hope.
To look toward the place of brokenness…the place of despair… to discover our strength.
Out of the mountain of despair…a stone of hope.
I am one who is glad that there is now a monument to Dr. King on the mall in Washington, DC. Have any of you been there? His image seems to emerge from the granite…emerge to offer us all a stone of hope.
I can critique the message of that monument. How it focuses attention too much on Dr. King, as the individual hero of the story, when the struggle for liberation was and always will be a collective struggle.
I can critique that monument for not pointing to the places where Dr. King was still growing in his own understanding…he had things to learn about the role patriarchy plays in the system of oppressions. He would have had to beg forgiveness for the way the movement forced gay civil rights leaders into the background and learn about the impact when our identities intersect. We have liberated ourselves in ways he had not, at least I hope we have in more than 50 years.
And I can critique that monument for celebrating success when it is so clear that we have really only just begun…
All of that makes me doubly thankful for the Museum of AA History and Culture on the mall…which honors the work done in King’s day, but puts it in the context of an arc of history that has not yet bent far enough toward justice.
On this Sunday, it is important to say that the work continues. That progress, despite the reverses which are real…progress is, in fact, still being made.
I could point to the way the 8th Principle has been adopted here and in now hundreds of UU congregations. I could point to the new histories told from the AA, the Latine, the Asian American and Native American point of view. Point to the 1619 Project. To the diversity of voices delivering the news…on most networks. To the arts and new films. To how the culture is shifting…even big business has gotten the message…
Even parts of the world of politics.
Just this month, the Governor of Louisiana issued a pardon to Homer Plessy, the named plaintiff in the Supreme Court case that enshrined “separate but equal” and ushered Jim Crow into American history. In 1892, Plessy, a man of mixed race, was arrested for sitting in a “white’s only” railroad car in New Orleans. After the Court heard his case, he pled guilty and was fined.
In 1954, the Brown v Board decision overturned Plessey v Ferguson, ending 5 decades of apartheid in this country.
Legal segregation was ended but Homer Plessy’s record was not cleared.
Until last November, when the Louisiana Board of Pardons granted that pardon, posthumously.
Keith Plessy, a distant cousin, offered this sentiment at the ceremony: “This is truly a blessed day for ancestors and elders. For children and children yet to be born.” Holding back tears, he went on: “I feel like my feet are not touching the ground today, because the ancestors are carrying me.”
The New Orleans District Attorney who had pressed for the pardon, said: “I did not submit this pardon asking for Homer Plessy to be forgiven. I submitted it asking for us, the institution, to be forgiven.”
There is progress. And confession, begging for forgiveness…as religious people we value that impulse and the change it can make possible. We do.
But Plessy was convicted in 1892…pardoned in 2022…130 years later…almost 100 years after his death in 1925…
130 years.
How long must we wait for change to come?
How long, O Lord, how long?
After Bloody Sunday, when Dr. King led the marchers from Selma to Montgomery, to demand the right to vote, Dr. King stood on the Alabama statehouse steps…with the Confederate flag flying prominently behind him…and he preached…
How long will we have to wait? How long?
“How long will prejudice blind [their] vision?…
How long will justice be crucified and truth buried?
I come to say to you, he preached, “however difficult the moment…however frustrating the hour…it will not be long…
Because truth crushed to earth will rise again.
How Long…not long
Because no lie can live forever.
How long…not long.
Because you shall reap what you sow.
How long…not long
Because the arc of the moral universe is long…but it bends toward justice.”
Not long, Dr. King preached that…more than 5 decades ago…
Was Dr. King just wrong?
Not long?
It is the same question we ask today? How long must we wait? How long must we work?
Could the change come quickly?
Could it already be emerging…could that be the reason the resistance seems so desperate?
Because they know their day is past?
Is there reason to believe that the arc just might be bending our way?
Because of all the work..all of the protests, all of the beloved and the loving conversations, shared leadership models…the language of accountability…justice, equity and inclusion now watchwords in virtually every corporation in the country…
The new creation is already in progress…in the real lives we are living in our workplaces and our schools and here in our church.
That does not mean the victory is inevitable …but the resistance is fighting a rearguard action and they know it…because our lives are changing…
Here is the shift. Words of queer, black, feminist prophet bell hooks:
“Beloved Community is formed not by the eradication of difference but by its affirmation, by each of us claiming the identities and cultural legacies that shape who we are and how we live in the world.”
Not the eradication of difference but its affirmation.
A dream that Dr. King could not give voice…he had more growing to do…
We need an image more complex than a black and white world…an image of a truly multi-cultural community.
And, as much as I value both the black church tradition and the Unitarian Universalist tradition, we need an image of a multi-religious world as well.
A world in which varying abilities are welcomed. A world where gender identity and gender expression are varied and all valued.
A world in which the question is whether we love…not who.
We need a dream in which more of us, and more of all that we bring, is seen, and known, and valued as a blessing.
That old melting pot image has been replaced. People talk today about a mosaic or a salad bowl…have you heard that one…a salad bowl?
Its better than the melting pot.
But for me those images do not capture the power that is possible. Because, in this broader dream…though we are grounded in the particularities of our lives…and speak from our own commitments…the process of living into Beloved Community is centered on encounter…
Centered on engagement that crosses the boundaries of identity…listening not only for those places of difference but also those places of connection…
Comfort is not the goal. Tension and even conflict are part of this broader dream …we will grow into the tension that difference brings AND the possibility that difference opens for transformation. We will need to get comfortable with our discomfort.
I think what Dr. King may have meant when he answered “Not Long.”…at least what I choose to believe he might have been pointing to…was that we can begin living into this new dream today…we are living into this new dream already…in halting and imperfect ways…here in this community…
How long? Not long. We don’t have to wait.
There is one more thing. Because that mountain of despair and the resistance to change are very real…
There may be one other dynamic today…that can point us toward hope.
The resistance is no longer hidden, pretending to be just the preservation of heritage or treasured practices to protect democracy…
The resistance has been outed…they have had to out themselves…to make plain what they stand for…that they value their white privilege and their greed far more than they value democracy or this nation.
At least the choice is clear. Our vision and our dream of an abundant, pluralistic, multi-cultural, multi-religious future in which we all can see ourselves…
Or being asked to settle for scarcity and the inequality and the violence of the world the resistance fights to maintain.
Perhaps the clarity of that choice is one of the blessings of these days. Not everyone will choose the hopeful future we see…at least not now.
Progress toward the Beloved Community has never been made by unanimous vote. But progress has been made…and…we speak for the majority and we should not forget that…
“…there is a need for a radical restructuring of the architecture of American society,” Dr. King wrote. “A new set of values must be born.”
We do not need to wait.
Tomorrow is Today, as Dr. King preached. The future is now and there is a fierce urgency that comes with it.
We do not need to wait. We can move forward together…grounded in our vision…grounded in our dream but also held up…our spirits lifted off the ground by the example of our ancestors who made a way out of no way…
Called forward by our ancestors, like Dr. King and so many more…those ancestors whose lives pointed the way toward hope.
Amen
Topics: Accountability