[Quoting Rev. Dr. King:]
We who must keep the church going and keep it alive have certain basic guidelines to follow - to preach good news to the poor, to heal the broken-hearted...to set at liberty them that are captive. You see, the church is not an entertainment center. The church has a purpose. The church is dealing with ultimate concern. Sunday after Sunday, week after week, people come to church with broken hearts. They need a word of hope...the church heals the broken-hearted.
Secondly, the role of the church is to free people - people who are slaves to prejudices; slaves to fear. The church is called to set free those that are captive; to set free those that are victims of the slavery of segregation and discrimination; and are caught up in the slavery of fear and prejudice.
The church must preach the acceptable year of the Lord, not some period beyond history; the acceptable year can be this year. The acceptable year can be any year when we decide to do right. When we stop throwing away the precious lives that we have been given. When we keep our theology abreast with our technology. When we keep the ends for which we live abreast with the means by which we live. When we keep our morality abreast with our mentality..."
Martin Luther King is called a prophet, not because he foresaw the future, but because he did what the great prophets have done - to preach the truth as he saw it in and out of season. Furthermore, he did not preach out of hatred of evil, but out of love of good. He spoke with truth about the continuing national cancer of segregation. He inspired and led the fateful march to Selma and in the end gave his very life for what he believed in, but we should remember that he was not a single issue prophet on the subject of segregation - obviously, the most historic injustice and insult to the spirit of the constitution. This dramatic victory was achieved and celebrated. He did good to the soul of America, not by winning a war, but by bringing America back to its stated values. He restored and ennobled the soul of the country. No, not a single issue person, but with a wider lens he allowed us to focus and re-focus on the ongoing, often subliminal, injustices of race, class, and gender discrimination that are still very much with us. These issues must be prophetically addressed because they cripple the potential and the very souls of a significant minority of our population - what's the future of Afro-American and Mexican Ghettoes? What's happening in education where, compared with the children of the middle class, minority schools are dreadfully under funded? We've developed a capacity to stare at these problems rather than solve them. Wittingly or unwittingly, we are allowing the extension of the culture of poverty, the pervasive atmosphere of violence and repression, and depression in our inner cities. When big-easy, black New Orleans floods our homeland, security's response is pathetic. Would the response have been so slow if the city had been Cincinnati or Seattle?
These aren't intended as cheap observations. I lived in New Orleans for six years - my first years in the UU Ministry. It was "big-easy" indeed! I was often a bit uneasy because the place was over-sentimentalized both by poor black folks, the majority, and by the affluent middle and upper middle classes who lived in the Garden District, the uptown, and in the old French middle-class neighborhoods on the other side of the town. Along with the French Quarter, they were all built on high ground. Most of the black folks lived in old wetlands which suffered most. I often thought what happens if the levy breaks. Well, New Orleans always survives, but not this time. The catastrophe, man-made or inevitable, and the response to it, revealed the fissures of classism and racism.
I'm sure Dr. King would have literally wept over the fate of New Orleans - an architectural jewel, a marvelous international city - certainly a city of international appeal rivaled only, I believe, by New York and San Francisco. Enough of the travelogue! We shall see who profits and who loses in the rebuilding and restoration of the city. I suspect that money- interests rather than social justice will triumph.
I obviously can't even attempt an extended analysis of where we stand on the issues of race, class, and gender, but it is part of Dr. King's legacy that we continue to be concerned. Race, class, and gender are useful criteria of the spiritual health of the nation. I think at this present time it's useful to take deep account of our own feelings about the real state of the nation, noting progress where we can, and developing a greater capacity for national self-criticism and intelligent action.
With regard to Race, much has changed, but much remains to be done in the inner cities to address issues of education, health- care, and crime where the cultural deficit and suffering of minorities is profound. With regard to Class, there are new, emerging injustices, or social deficits. I wouldn't want to be a blue-collar worker in rust-belt America. Vanishing, but until recently, well-paying jobs. Not just the loss of jobs, but the decimation of pensions, the growing inability to meet the costs of health-care. There is a pervasive anxiety that leaves few people untouched in one way or another. I fear at worst a kind of emotional breakdown on the part of too many of our citizens - a "depression" not just in an economic, but a psychological sense. I'm not playing prophet of doom, but pointing out some dangerous symptoms continuing the nation's sense of social justice and unity.
With regard to Gender, I do have the feeling that the recent success and upward mobility of women has softened at least the harsher edges of sex-discrimination, though we need a true heightening of consciousness and awareness of surviving glass ceilings. However, there is a gender issue still to be fully absorbed, much less dealt with, concerning anti-gay discrimination - hostility to gay rights and gay marriage. Here the country has to repent and have a true conversation of the heart. This kind of anti-gay prejudice, verges on the pathological. And one more gender issue - the opposition of the religious right and too many fellow-travelers to a woman's right to privacy and to abortion. We shall see indeed where the new Supreme Court goes! Meanwhile, we seem to have a Congress in moral meltdown. Perhaps, after all, we are being ruled by the rich, the vain, and the violent. Perhaps this is the elephant in the room!