Tomorrow communities and organizations across the land will be observing Martin Luther King Day.
In many places schools will be closed, there will be no mail delivery, and many governmental offices will be closed.
Fortunately as a nation we have resisted turning the observance of this great man into just another excuse for our shopping malls to offer super sale prices on their merchandise and wares.
In 1994 Congress passed the King Holiday and Service Act, designating the King Holiday as a national day of volunteer service.
Instead of a day off from work or school, Congress asked Americans of all backgrounds and ages to celebrate Dr. King's legacy by turning community concerns into citizen action. One slogan says, "Martin Luther King Day: Not a day off but a day on!"
Participation in the King Day of Service has grown steadily over the past decade, with hundreds of thousands of Americans each year engaging in projects such as tutoring and mentoring children, painting schools and senior centers, delivering meals, building homes, and reflecting on Dr. King's life and teachings.
Tomorrow in Winchester the United Way of Northern Shenandoah Valley will hold a special youth volunteer service day on Jan. 15 in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
As part of their day of service area students will distribute light bulbs and other items to homes in Winchester's North End neighborhood.
During his lifetime, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. worked tirelessly toward a dream of equality.
He believed in a nation of freedom and justice for all, and encouraged all citizens to live up to the purpose and potential of America by uniting and taking action to make this country a better place to live.
Back in November, 2002, the Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt published an article in the UUA World Magazine titled, "To Pray Without Apology: Why Martin Luther King, Jr. Wasn't a Unitarian Universalist." :
In this article she relates how she had once been considered as a co-author for an autobiography of Coretta Scott King. As a part of the screening process McNatt was invited to meet with Mrs. King. This is how she summarized their conversation:
"During an hour of wide-ranging conversation, I mentioned to her that I was in seminary to become a Unitarian Universalist minister. What frankly surprised me was the look she gave me, one of respect and delight.
"Oh, I went to Unitarian churches for years, even before I met Martin," she told me, explaining that she had been, since college, a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, which was popular among Unitarians and Universalists. "And Martin and I went to Unitarian churches when we were in Boston."
"What surprised and saddened me most," McNatt continues, "was what she said next. Though I am paraphrasing, the gist of it was this: "We gave a lot of thought to becoming Unitarian at one time, but Martin and I realized we could never build a mass movement of black people if we were Unitarian."
But this was not Dr. King's only experience with our liberal religion and the crises of life.
On March 7, 1965--a date known ever since as "Bloody Sunday"--state troopers used billy clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas to break up a peaceful protest march from Selma to the capital in Birmingham.
When the brutal scene was broadcast on national television, people all over the country were horrified by what they saw.
The next day the Rev. Martin Luther King appealed to clergy from around the nation to join him for a ministers' march.
In Boston a young Unitarian Minister by the names of James Reeb was working for the American Friends Service Organization in Roxbury, Massachusetts where he worked as an organizer for housing for the urban poor.
Although Reeb recognized the risk--he had four young children--he, felt compelled to answer King's call.
Along with other Unitarian Universalist ministers from around the nation, Reeb had flown to Selma, Alabama, to join a peaceful march to demand voting rights for the city's black people.
Reeb arrived in Alabama early on Tuesday, March 9th and spent the day at a relatively peaceful protest.
He was returning from dinner with two other white ministers when three white men shouting racial epithets suddenly assaulted them. Jim Reeb was clubbed in the head and critically injured.
The next day the front page of The Boston Globe carried a banner headline: "2 Hub Ministers Beaten--1 Badly-- in Selma Street." Five hundred people gathered at the Federal Building to protest the "savagery" of the Alabama police.
The savagery was nothing new. Two weeks earlier, a police officer had shot to death a young black hospital worker as he tried to protect his mother from being beaten; but it was Jim Reeb's beating that caught the world's attention.
As he lay unconscious in an Alabama hospital, the story spread across the nation and the world.
When he died on March 11th, people around the nation mourned James Reeb as a martyr for the cause of civil rights.
The next day, Congress resounded with speeches denouncing the brutality and calling for government intervention.
Deeply moved by the death of "that good man," President Lyndon Johnson instructed his aides to draft a voting rights bill.
Four days after Reeb's death King was scheduled to speak at the memorial service.
He began his eulogy with these words:
"The world is aroused over the murder of James Reeb. For he symbolizes the forces of good will in our nation. He demonstrated the conscience of the nation.
He was an attorney for the defense of the innocent in the court of world opinion. He was a witness to the truth that men of different races and classes might live, eat, and work together as brothers."
Quickly, the many ministers and religious leaders present that day were brought to attention when King asked:
"Who killed James Reeb? The answer is simple and rather limited, when we think of the who. He was murdered by a few sick, demented, and misguided men who have the strange notion that you express dissent through murder.
There is another haunting, poignant, desperate question we are forced to ask this afternoon, that I asked a few days ago as we funeralized James Jackson.
It is the question, What killed James Reeb? When we move from the who to the what, the blame is wide and the responsibility grows.
James Reeb was murdered by the indifference of every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained glass windows.
He was murdered by the irrelevancy of a church that will stand amid social evil and serve as a taillight rather than a headlight, an echo rather than a voice. He was murdered by the irresponsibility of every politician who has moved down the path of demagoguery, who has fed his constituents the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism."
"He was murdered by the brutality of every sheriff and law enforcement agent who practices lawlessness in the name of law.
He was murdered by the timidity of a federal government that can spend millions of dollars a day to keep troops in South Vietnam, yet cannot protect the lives of its own citizens seeking constitutional rights.
Yes, he was even murdered by the cowardice of every Negro who tacitly accepts the evil system of segregation, who stands on the sidelines in the midst of a mighty struggle for justice."
"So in his death, James Reeb says something to each of us, black and white alike-says that we must substitute courage for caution, says to us that we must be concerned not merely about who murdered him, but about the system, the way of life, the philosophy which produced the murder.
His death says to us that we must work passionately, unrelentingly, to make the American dream a reality, so he did not die in vain."
And in his conclusion King exclaimed that:
"We must work..., till men everywhere will respect the dignity and worth of human personalities...We must work with determination for that great day (when) 'Justice will roll down like water, and righteousness like a mighty stream.'....
We must work to make the Declaration of Independence real in our everyday lives.
If we will do this...We will be able to speed up the day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands in unity and brotherhood to bring about the bright day of the brotherhood of man under the guidance of the fatherhood of God.
So we thank God for the life of James Reeb. We thank God for his goodness. We thank God that he was willing to lay down his life in order to redeem the soul of our nation."
I always get chills whenever I read Rev. King's exquisite words.
And I always feel that somehow I fall short of what is expected of me as a minister of the liberal gospel, as one who thinks of himself as an advocate for peace and understanding in our troubled nation, and as a true believer in our liberal faith tradition that covenants to affirm and to promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person and a world community characterized by peace, liberty and justice for all.
King told us "James Reeb was murdered by the indifference of every minister of the gospel who has remained silent behind the safe security of stained glass windows.
He was murdered by the irrelevancy of a church that will stand amid social evil and serve as a taillight rather than a headlight, an echo rather than a voice." and I can't help but think that these words apply to our Unitarian Universalist churches as much today as they did over forty years ago.
How often have I shown my indifference to a hurting world? How often have I turned away from social and economic issues that I find unpleasant to deal with?
How often have I felt that others will come forward to do the work that I find unpleasant and that takes me out of my comfort zone?
How often have I taken the easy way by just sending my check to some good cause rather than getting out in the streets and doing the hard work that must be done?
How often have my actions demonstrated indifference in place of commitment?
And the question must be asked of our churches as well. What has our church done to be a beacon of liberal religion in our neighborhoods, cities and towns?
When do we take our conversations about the wrongs in the world and actually take action to bring justice, equity and compassion to all of humanity?
When has this congregation been the voice for freedom and democracy and not just the echo?
What does our faith expect of us? What actions are we called to perform in the ongoing efforts to combat racism and walk the journey toward wholeness? What is our theology of equality?
James Cone, writing in God of the Oppressed notes that, "Although the historical events of the twentieth century have virtually destroyed the nineteenth-century confidence in the goodness of humanity and the inevitable progress of history, twentieth century white theologians are still secure in their assumption that important theological issues emerge out of the white experience."
Cone continues to make the point that often white Christianity took as its message a freedom from the bondage of sin and Satan, while black preachers were taking their text from the book of Exodus and its account of Moses leading the Israelites from bondage.
These black preachers made use of Biblical accounts that stressed God's will to make freedom a reality in the land of the oppressed.
On what beliefs do Unitarian Universalists base their efforts on behalf of justice and equality?
Is it enough to profess a belief in the principles and purposes of our chosen faith?
Is it enough to profess a faith in humankind's ability to make our world materially better for all who dwell therein?
What does our faith tradition require of us in the face of oppression?
I think King comes close to answering this question when he told the mourners at Reeb's memorial service:
"The history of this great period of social change will be written in all of its completeness. On that bright day our nation will recognize its real heroes.
They will be thousands of dedicated men and women with a noble sense of purpose that enables them to face fury and hostile mobs with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneers.
They will be faceless, anonymous, relentless young people, black and white, who have temporarily left behind the towers of learning to storm the barricades of violence."
" They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a 72-year-old Negro woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity, and with the people decided not to ride the segregated buses; who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness, "My feets is tired, but my soul is rested."
"They will be ministers of the gospel, priests, rabbis, and nuns, who are willing to march for freedom, to go to jail for conscience' sake."
"One day the South will know from these dedicated children of God courageously protesting segregation, they were in reality standing up for the best in the American dream, standing up with the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby carrying our whole nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the Founding Fathers in the formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
When this glorious story is written, the name of James Reeb will stand as a shining example of (humanity) manhood at its best."
So who among us will be recalled as one of those in our nation, our city, or our towns who strove to bring equality and fairness to all?
Who among us will put our lives on the line for the cause we believe in as deeply as we believe in life itself?
Let each of us, according to our desires and our abilities participate in the work of racial justice so that it will never be said that we responded with indifference and may our congregations never be seen as irrelevant.
Accordingly, my challenge this morning that between now and next Martin Luther King Day that the members of this congregation will either join with an existing organization or form one of our own to bring food and clothing to those most in need in our community so that it may be said of the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Shenandoah Valley:
They did their part to ensure the day when all of God's children blacks and whites, women and men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands in unity.
And let us remind ourselves this year and every year of those words spoken by the Prophet Micah in the Hebrew Bible, "He hath shown thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Lord require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"
Amen and blessed be.