THE STRENGTH TO LOVE

a sermon preached by the Rev. Dr. Tim W. Jensen
at the First Religious Society in Carlisle, Massachusetts
Sunday January 18th, 2004


I once saw an interview with the actor Ben Kingsley, who casually observed that the secret to his successful characterization of Mohandas Gandhi in the renown Richard Attenbourgh film of the same name, was his realization that Gandhi was not so much a saint who "stooped" to participate in politics as he was a politician struggling to become a saint. I've thought about that apparently offhand remark a great deal since first hearing it. Why is it that professional politicians are so universally held in such low esteem in our society, so much so that even honest-to-God “saintly” individuals (like, say, Jimmy Carter) inevitably appear "compromised" in the public eye when they attempt to participate in the political process? It reminds me of a story I once heard about the syndicated advice columnist Ann Landers, who was approached one evening by a member of the Senate at an Embassy Reception in Washington D.C.

"So you're Ann Landers," the Senator remarked. "Say something funny."

To which Ms Landers immediately responded "So you're a politician. Tell me a lie."

Political activity is the lifeblood of a free society; it is the means by which the will of the people becomes the law of the land. We lift up American Democracy as a model for all the world, yet for some reason we find it all too easy to believe that those who choose to practice politics as a vocation must be doing so from base motives, avariciously, deceitfully, with only their own advancement rather than the best interests of the country or even their own constituents at heart. It’s almost as though we believe that true saints must somehow be "above politics" -- unsullied by the strange bedfellows encountered in smoke-filled cloakrooms. Fools rush in where Angels fear to tread; and Saints, of course, are expected to behave like angels. Politicians on the other hand, remain free to behave like fools.

Of course, it’s not as if the politicians themselves don’t do plenty to bring on this sort of criticism. It’s almost enough to convert even a naive, wide-eyed optimistic Idealist like myself into a confirmed cynic. The events of this past week have been particularly egregious in this regard. While the Democrats were out west in Iowa engaging in their usual round-robin of mutual recrimination, insinuation, and name-calling known as a “Caucus,” the President flew to Atlanta to lay a wreath on the memorial of Martin Luther King Jr. (thus allowing him to bill the taxpayers for his travel), then rode across town to a $2000/plate fundraising dinner (where he raised more money in a single evening than the most credible African-American candidate, Carol Mosely Braun, raised during her entire campaign), after which he returned to Washington DC to announce a trillion-dollar program to send a man to Mars (most of which, if it is actually ever appropriated, will be spent in Texas and Florida: two states critical to the President’s re-election, and notorious for their efforts to circumvent the Voting Rights Act), and that incidentally, since Congress is now in recess, he is going to exercise his “emergency powers” under the Constitution to appoint Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, despite the fact that the controversial Judge had already failed twice to win Senate confirmation, and was opposed (because of his judicial record) by essentially every important Civil Rights organization in the country, including Dr. King’s own Southern Christian Leadership Conference. But Pickering is popular with the Religious Right because of his views on abortion, among other things, thus making his recess appointment a perfect opportunity for both parties to pander sanctimoniously to “the Faithful,” portraying themselves as the last bold defenders of all that is Good, and Moral, and True in our society, while characterizing their opponents as Evil Incarnate. Just to be fair, guess where Howard Dean is attending church this morning? That’s right, in Plains Georgia with Jimmy Carter. And don’t even get me started on all the self-righteous double-talk about civil unions, and the so-called “Healthy Marriage Initiative.”

But confronted with things like this, what are we then to think about that rare politician, like a Mohandas Gandhi, who truly does struggle to become a saint -- who seeks to express through his or her political convictions the high ethical and humanitarian principles of a profound religious faith? Actually, despite my own evolving cynicism, I suspect that this sort of politician is far more common than we generally assume, and that our appreciation of their efforts depends to a great extent upon the degree to which our own political opinions are in agreement with theirs. The road to sainthood is long and arduous, and the dividing line between “saint” and “fanatic” typically razor-thin; many are called but few are chosen; ultimately only history will decide whether or not the struggle was fruitful. Sainthood and the aspiration to sainthood are hardly one and the same. Indeed, so rarefied is our view of the former that often merely the ambition to attain it is enough to taint its purity in our eyes. Yet it would be equally misleading to assume that only those who do not seek it, who have their greatness thrust upon them, are somehow deserving of the mantle of our respect. The inner quality of sainthood is a peculiar combination of humility and arrogance: the arrogance to believe that one's deeply held principles and convictions are important enough to make a difference, and the humility to recognize that this challenge cannot be met by aspiration and strength of will alone.

Martin Luther King Jr. was only 26 years old when he was elected president of the Montgomery Improvement Association, an ad hoc black community group which had been organized to oversee the now famous Montgomery Bus Boycott. As best I can tell, judging from everything I have read, he probably didn't even want the job. At the time, King had been pastor of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church for less than two years, and had only completed the final requirements for his Ph.D. at Boston University that previous spring. Furthermore, his selection as President of the M.I.A. was an overtly political choice. As a relative newcomer to the city of Montgomery, King had yet to become too strongly identified with any particular element within the black community, and thus it was felt that perhaps he could provide precisely the kind of neutral leadership which would allow all of the rival factions within that community to come together in this one common purpose. There was a downside consideration to his nomination as well. Should the boycott fail, as many of the more experienced black community leaders believed it might, this young preacher could easily be sacrificed without endangering these more established leaders' hard earned credibility with both the white establishment, and their own constituencies.

Knowing this aspect of the story, one might easily say that Martin Luther King Jr. did indeed have his greatness thrust upon him, and with the unanimous consent of older, wiser, and more politically savvy colleagues at that. But clearly, this would be only part of the tale. More importantly, there was an inner quality to this aspiring but untested religious leader, an intrinsic quality of saintliness if you will, which, once exposed, blossomed forth into a strength which enabled him to endure receiving dozens of threatening letters and telephone calls each day; to survive slander and harassment by police and other government authorities; to have the front of his parsonage blown off by dynamite while his wife and few-month-old child huddled in the kitchen...to experience all of the doubts and fears and pressures to which the human soul is vulnerable, and still not lose sight of the larger aspiration: a goal which in its very rightness and importance dwarfed both his abilities, and his frailties, as a human being.

To be sure, in many ways Martin Luther King Jr. did have his greatness thrust upon him: he happened to be in the right place, at the right time. But the reason we honor him with a national holiday on his birthday is because he also happened to be the right person to be there in Montgomery, Alabama in 1955, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a bus. Yes, there was an inner quality of greatness to him. But more importantly, he did not shy from his responsibilities when the need to express that greatness presented itself before him.

From Montgomery, as we all know, King went on to face new challenges and achieve new triumphs: in Birmingham and Selma, in Washington D.C. and Oslo, Norway, where he became the youngest man ever to receive a Nobel Peace prize. Yet I've often wondered whether or not King's greatest challenge and achievement might not have been related to the conflicts which he faced within his own soul, such as the temptation to "retire" as it were from the Civil Rights movement, and accept a lucrative post somewhere in academia, or to spend more time with his wife and his children, away from the death threats and the FBI wiretaps; to grow old in the bosom of the liberal white establishment, lecturing to wide-eyed freshmen about Socrates and Jesus, Gandhi and Thoreau, while writing bestselling books for Harper and Row.

These options were certainly made available to him many times. And yet he chose instead to continue to fill that role which destiny had thrust upon him there in Montgomery in 1955; and this, to me, seems a far more telling mark of King's true "saintly greatness" than any of his other achievements or laurels. It is not merely because King achieved great things that we celebrate his birth as a National holiday. It is also the price he was willing to pay in order to achieve these things -- not for his own personal benefit, but for the benefit of an entire society.

It is difficult for those of us who lack this inner quality of saintliness, this peculiar combination of humility and arrogance,to fully understand what was at stake in Martin Luther King Jr's decision to continue along the path that had been chosen for him, a path which eventually led him to his death on a motel balcony in Memphis. There have been those who have claimed that King was, in fact, a megalomaniac, or that he suffered from a "martyr complex," that his ego was such that he simply could not step out of the national limelight once he had tasted the sweetness of being Time magazine's "Man of the Year."

Nothing, I think, could be further from the truth.

King himself knew better than anyone what was at stake in the drama that was being played out in his frail, mortal human existence. And he spoke of it simply in terms of "The Strength to Love:" the power of God's own overflowing, passionate, creative love for human kind manifesting itself in a single human life. Perhaps it was a form of megalomania, a delusion of grandeur of the most grandiose proportions. But it was also an ultimate act of personal surrender, a martyrdom of the self in the truest sense of that word, as a witness to a creative power for justice far greater than one's own power or creativity.

In the final analysis we must recognize that it was not delusion, but vision, which animated King's career as a civil rights reformer. Commentator Gary Wills has noted that the changes which Martin Luther King Jr. brought to American society were "so large as to be almost invisible." In a few short years, King and those who worked with him swept away an entire system of American apartheid which had existed in the South for nearly a century. Men and women of my generation have had no experience of "whites only" lunch counters, restrooms, and drinking fountains; we have been educated in integrated schools, voted for and elected black politicians, patronized black-owned businesses; and, for the most part, we have done so without giving it second thought.

This is not to say that racial prejudice and discrimination no longer exist in this country. White Sheets and cross-burnings may seem like things of the past, but we still have hate crimes in this country; the Ku Klux Klan is still alive and kicking, and has spawned numerous imitators; access to jobs, housing, justice, health care, educational opportunity is still not completely color blind, nor anywhere near equally available to all. In many ways racism has become much more subtle, even sophisticated; it has replaced its white sheets with pinstriped suits, and is fueled as much by the ignorance and the naivete of the well-intentioned (who would just as soon not think about it, and who wish that the problem would simply "go away"), as it is by the malice of those few (albeit increasingly vocal) kooks who would just as soon trot segregation (or its functional equivalent) back out of the closet, if they thought they could get away with it.

Yet King's vision of a truly pluralistic, inclusive, and democratic society, in which individuals are judged by the quality of their characters and not the color of their skins, remains a vivid beacon of our future, untarnished in the nearly half-century which has now elapsed since the bus boycott in Montgomery, which first brought this man to our national attention.

It’s a little-known fact, but my ex-wife Margaret and I were married in Atlanta: at midnight on the Summer Solstice at the Peachtree Plaza hotel during the UUA General Assembly in 1985. It was the first time either of us had ever been in that city; and while we were there we had the opportunity to visit the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change, which is located just up the street from the Ebenezer Baptist Church, "Daddy" King's church, in the neighborhood where young M.L. King spent his childhood. It was the only "touristy" thing we did while we were in Atlanta (we were much too busy being newlyweds to bother with such foolishness as art museums), but we made the most of it; we even bought each other T-shirts. And I spent an hour or so in the small museum there, which is filled with memorabilia of the Civil Rights Movement, and Dr. King's ministry. The one exhibit I found most fascinating was that of Dr. King's preaching robe, a robe not so different from the one I'm wearing now. It surprised me to discover that he was actually a rather short man; I had always envisioned him as some sort of giant, yet I doubt the man whom I imagined could have ever squeezed into the tiny robe I saw hanging there in that glass case. Nor would he have had to. For I realized in that moment, standing there in awe before that tiny robe, that stature is not always a function of physical size. Nor is the significance of a life extinguished by death, when all which that life stood for still burns within the hearts of others. And there is a vitality to all that Martin Luther King Jr. stood for, an immortality if you will, which still lives today beyond the grave. It is a vitality which grows from the capacity for self-sacrifice, from the willingness to stand faithfully in the presence of evil, and surrender one’s ego to the truth of a higher principle. It is an immortality born of our Strength to Love.