"DREAMING OF AMERICA"

 “DREAMING OF AMERICA”

While I’ve been taking care of Caroline in her recovery from back surgery, I’ve had some time to look through my files and papers.  The Presbyterian Historical Society has graciously asked me to archive my papers and files with them, and I give thanks for that.  Rather than send them 6,000 pounds of papers and sermons (or so it seems to me), I am sorting through stuff.  Tedious and time-consuming, but usually fun as I encounter sermons anew;  sometimes painful as I engage places where I was obviously wrong or insensitive.

We started celebrating Martin Luther King’s birthday in 1985 at Oakhurst.  One of our former members, Wanda White, had been on Coretta Scott King’s staff, and she remembered the breakfasts that they had with and for the staff.  So, in 1985, we started having a Sunday MLK Breakfast on his birthday weekend, with speakers and/or youth, followed by a sermon on MLK.  That tradition continues at Oakhurst, so we thank Wanda White, Azzie Preston, Choquita McGriff and others for getting it started!

Looking through my files this weekend, I’ve begun engaging the many sermons that I was privileged to preach on Martin Luther King, Jr.  We covered many of his themes, and over our last decade at Oakhurst, we would pick particular speeches and sermons of his and focus on its context and its content.  In looking at all these again, I was reminded of how much MLK believed in the dream of America.  My favorite speech of Dr. King’s was “Drum Major for Justice,” but the one that influenced me the most was “I Have a Dream,” delivered by King most famously at the March on Washington in August, 1963.  It was the most influential in my life because it helped me to see a different vision of America, of Black people, and of myself.  I first listened to it by myself in my house on the day that King preached it in DC – I was deliberately by myself.  My mother was working, and I did not want any of my white friends to know that I was listening to it.  I had begun to feel some churnings in relation to the racism that I had been taught – and that I believed.  I had heard and had believed that King was just trying to make money off unsuspecting people.  I also believed that all those who agreed with him – Black and white alike – were fools.

Something drew me to him and to that day, and his speech was one of the motivating factors in my beginning to step out of the bounds of the racism which held me captive.  His eloquence, his ideas, and his emphasis on the American dream all touched me deeply.  And, with 250,000+ people there, it was hard to think that all of them were fools.  This speech was given the week before I began my senior year in high school, and although I did not make any real changes in my life in regard to race at that time, I did decide that there was more to the story than I had been told.  And, I did decide that I would make an effort to learn that different story.

Dr. King believed in the American dream when he gave that speech in 1963.  As he engaged the racism that is so deep in the American character, he began to lose hope in that dream, in the capacity of those classified as “white” to hear the truth, to receive the truth, and to begin to change our lives and our minds and our actions in relation to race.   His overall mood about the American dream - especially in regard to the Vietnam war and the racism that undergirded it – began to change.  His belief in the power of the arc of history to move towards justice began to be shaken.  By the time of his assassination by the very people he sought to love, he was deeply depressed and angered about the possibilities of America.  As the fine writer and theologian James Cone (a fellow Arkansan, I might note) put it so well in his book on Malcolm X and MLK,  King began with love and moved towards justice, while Malcolm began with justice and moved towards love.

That American dream – a dream of justice and equity that is also at the heart of American history – looks shaky again.  Though we have made significant progress since King’s speech, the power of racism remains deep and wide in American culture.  With Donald Trump’s rise on the back of white supremacy, we hear the voices of racism returning to a full-throated blast, and many fear that the next elections will be like those of the 1890’s:  a repudiation of past gains on justice and equity and a return to the repressive forces that have dogged us and shaped us in so many twisted ways.  

    In her 2016 book “Living into God’s Dream: Dismantling Racism in America,” my friend and co-author Catherine Meeks suggests that it is possible to recover the American dream that drove Dr. King and many others.  In order to find such recovery, however, we will need to do a lot of work for ourselves and for the world, and as Catherine so aptly puts it, we are all called to be just a little bit braver each day.  We may not be able to take giant steps each day – I sure couldn’t do it on that day in August, 1963 – but we can all take some baby steps each day.  Let us find those steps to take in our lives and seek to live into God’s dream for us.