“The Midnight Call”
by Reverend Charles Blustein Ortman
January 14, 2007
READINGS
Our first reading is from the Book of Micah:
"With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the LORD be pleased with thousands of rams, with ten thousands of rivers of oil? Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?" He has showed you, O man, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?
Our second reading is from, “Beyond Vietnam,” a sermon delivered by Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. at Riverside Church, New York City on April 4, 1967:
“Something should remind us once more that the great things in this universe are things that we never see. You walk out at night and look up at the beautiful stars as they bedeck the heavens like swinging lanterns of eternity, and you think you can see all. Oh, no. You can never see the law of gravitation that holds them there.
“When I speak of love, I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality.”
SERMON
In 1967 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached his sermon, “A Knock at Midnight,” using for it a biblical text from the book of Luke, Chapter 11:
“And he said to them, "Which of you who has a friend will go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves; for a friend of mine has arrived on a journey, and I have nothing to set before him,’ and he will answer from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door is now shut, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything’?
“I tell you, though he will not get up and give him anything because he is his friend, yet because of his importunity [urgency] he will rise and give him whatever he needs. And I tell you, Ask, and it will be given you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For every one who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks it will be opened.”
In his sermon, Dr, King talked about the depth of need that sometimes arises in the middle of the night. He related the story of the midnight caller to his listeners’ personal experience, as well as to the events and dynamics of the 1960’s. Personal needs and the events and dynamics of this time – the first decade of the new millennium – are not so very different. See how his words might speak to you, to us, now. Dr. King wrote:
“It is midnight within the social order. On the international horizon nations are engaged in a colossal and bitter contest for supremacy… When confronted by midnight in the social order we have in the past turned to science for help. And little wonder! On so many occasions science has saved us. When we were in the midnight of physical limitation and material inconvenience, science lifted us to the bright morning of physical and material comfort. When we were in the midnight of crippling ignorance and superstition, science brought us to the daybreak of the free and open mind. When we were in the midnight of dread plagues and diseases, science, through surgery, sanitation, and the wonder drugs, ushered in the bright day of physical health, thereby prolonging our lives and making for greater security and physical well-being. How naturally we turn to science in a day when the problems of the world are so ghastly and ominous.
“But alas! Science cannot now rescue us, for even the scientist is lost in the terrible midnight of our age. Indeed, science gave us the very instruments that threaten to bring universal suicide. So modern man faces a dreary and frightening midnight in the social order.
“This midnight in man’s external collective is paralleled by midnight in his internal individual life. It is midnight within the psychological order. Everywhere paralyzing fears harrow people by day and haunt them by night. Deep clouds of anxiety and depression are suspended in our mental skies. More people are emotionally disturbed today than at any other time of human history. The psychopathic wards of our hospitals are crowded, and the most popular psychologists today are the psychoanalysts… The popular clergyman [on the other hand] preaches soothing sermons on "How to Be Happy" and "How to Relax." Some have been tempted to revise Jesus’ command to read, "Go ye into all the world, keep your blood pressure down, and, lo, I will make you a well-adjusted personality." All of this is indicative that it is midnight within the inner lives of men and women.”
Midnight inside and out… We have reached some new kind of midnight in the nearly forty years since Dr. King’s death. The segregation he fought so hard to end has gone underground, as African Americans are no longer excluded, at least legally, from physical participation in the American dream. Today segregation has given way to a more pernicious kind of racism that excludes many Blacks – and poor Whites – from access to the institutions that should be the vehicles for the fulfillment of the American Dream.
The impending depletion of the environment, which Dr. King alluded to, has moved nearly 40 years nearer to completion. Responsible scientists inform us that we likely have less than ten years to mend our ecological ways before we have bankrupted the environment so completely as to have rendered it incapable of continuing to sustain human existence. While we may take down a number of plant and animal species with us, the planet may well survive quite beyond our presence on it.
We were a nation at war, in 1967, with a people whom we did not culturally understand nor appreciate. Today we are in a similar war, again against people whose story we do not know well enough. Since our warring efforts seem to have little clear ambition beyond hegemony and oil revenues, once again we have little claim to any moral high ground. Current attempts to escalate our war efforts, quite similar to what was going on in 1967, are doomed to the same fate, failure. It is as though we learned nothing from the earlier conflict, and rudderless, we seem destined to repeat our folly.
This same rudderlessness was what Dr. King referred to as the individual, the psychological, condition of members of our society – complacent within racism and other oppressions; complicit in imperial expansion; corrupt in personal character. And while it all seems so grim when summarized this way, when personal and collective denial, so prevalent today, can not save us but only encumber our misguided path, Dr. King knew that hope could not be denied – but that it had to be discovered. He found that the discovery of hope was closely linked to the experience of faith. I trust that we too, are here to find and strengthen our faith.
For Dr. King, that discovery came about as the result of feeling his personal sense of fear and vulnerability and his own lack of rootedness. The midnight call – his midnight call – had arrived. The urgency of the Civil Rights Movement left him feeling quite bereft of any loaves of bread to share, let alone enough to eat for himself. He was desperately hungry and in need of good sustenance.
Jesuit Scholar, John Dear, in his essay, “Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Kitchen Table,” says that Dr. King originally thought the boycott would only last a few days. As those days turned into weeks and then months, and as white Montgomery realized that the bus boycott posed a more serious threat than first imagined, Dr. King began to receive death threats telling him that if the boycott was not ended, he would be killed. Two months into the boycott, he was arrested and jailed on the charge of speeding; he thought for sure he’d be lynched. By now, Martin was receiving up to forty telephone calls per day threatening his life. Suddenly, he felt overwhelmed with fear.
As David Garrow explains in the biography, Bearing the Cross, King's struggle of faith reached a crescendo on Friday night, January 27th, 1956. That night, Dr. King returned home near midnight after a long strategy session with his colleagues. His wife Coretta was asleep, but King was too preoccupied to fall asleep. The phone rang and a sneering voice told him that if he wanted to remain alive, he had to leave Montgomery in the next few days. Martin hung up and felt devastated. He felt he couldn’t take it any more. Restless and fearful, he went to the kitchen, made some coffee and sat down at the kitchen table.
For the rest of his life, he would look back on the moment that followed as one of the most profound spiritual experiences of his life. He spoke of that event over and over again. His book, Stride Toward Freedom, tells the story:
“I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me, I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud.
“The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. ‘I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I've come to the point where I can't face it alone.’
“At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced God before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: ‘Stand up for justice, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.”
Three days after the experience, the Kings’ home was bombed and the family nearly killed. "Strangely enough, I accepted the word of the bombing calmly," Dr. King later wrote. "My religious experience a few nights before had given me the strength to face it."
When angry crowds gathered in front of his house an hour after the bombing, Dr. King spoke as never before of the need to love one's enemies and become a people of nonviolence. "We must meet hate with love," he declared from his broken front porch. "Remember, if I am stopped, this movement will not stop because God is with the movement. Go home with this glorious faith and this radiant assurance." As he later reflected, "A night that seemed destined to end in unleashed chaos came to a close in a majestic group demonstration of nonviolence."
Throughout this just past holiday season, my theme and my prayers for all of you (myself included), recognizing what Ralph Waldo Emerson said – that we all will indeed have our own gods – my prayers were that your God would be large enough for your gratitude, and large enough to meet your needs. I wasn’t talking about your selfish needs; we all have those and they provide much grist for the mill for working our way through our life issues. I was talking about your self-centering needs, the needs you have that allow you to be centered in your spiritual path, the path that leads you deep within your being and then through that being, allowing you to be more deeply connected to the world around you and those who are in it.
Like ourselves, I don’t think Martin Luther King had any grandiose ideas of a God who was some kind of superhuman manipulator of the cosmos. He often talked about God as a force, a moral force. “The moral arm of the universe is long,” he would said. “And it bends towards justice.” Even still, he had a personal relationship with this force. He could communicate with it and it with him. When he found himself hungry at midnight, it was to this force that he reached out. And it was in the embrace of this force, this long-armed force that he found his deeper yearnings satisfied.
Indeed, we live in times no less clouded than those stormy days of the 1960’s. The major difference perhaps is that our denial of what’s going on around us is even stronger than it was then. I truly believe that we can not think our way out of the predicaments into which we have so deeply ensconced ourselves. Slip sliding away…It seems that for many of us, the nearer our destination comes, the more we’re slip sliding away.
Every step forward that we make towards ending racism, sexism, homophobia or any other oppression, we seem to take at least one step back. Every step forward we take towards the use of alternative energy sources, or cleaning up the water or the air or the rest of the environment, we seem to take at least one step back. In November we elected a new Congress in order to end the war in Iraq, and in January the President says that we are going to escalate that war by increasing our troops, sending over 21,000 more – into that hell-hole made so much worse by our presence in it.
I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that we cannot think our way out of these predicaments. That does not mean that I am coming to the conclusion that there is no hope. To the contrary, I believe I’m finding greater grounds for new hope.
Don’t get me wrong – I haven’t given up on thought, not at all. What ever solutions we find for our personal problems or our collective ones, thought will surely lead the way. But thought is not enough, because it can never get us there. Only belief, only faith can do that. Our belief and our faith are what can lead us to the mountain top, beyond our personal and collective failings to that which is larger than ourselves, to that which serves the common good, to that which serves the largest good.
Our midnight call is at hand. The world is really not going to put up with us much longer. We need to figure out how to feed ourselves and each other. And it will be our faith that can stem that hunger. I know that many of us here are uncomfortable with the idea of prayer, but I pray we can get over that. Prayer is nothing more than projecting our greatest joys and dismays out beyond ourselves, so that we might be in earnest relationship with the universal Spirit of Life that holds us in being. Prayer leads to faith. And faith leads to the transformation of our hearts, our homes, our community and our world.
As my late colleague Lon Ray Call, would say, “Prayer doesn’t change things. Prayer changes people and people change things.” The changing of things is the result of action and we are called to act in this world. We are called to action.
We have learned so much from Martin Luther King, Jr. about what it means to serve our country and the world. We’ve learned so much about what it means to serve the causes of justice with strength and with courage. Let us learn from him as well how to serve these lofty causes with faith – that our faith might lead to service with hope and even with joy.
Martin prayed:
"I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I've come to the point where I can't face it alone."
So let our prayer be no less: that we might have the strength and courage to do what each of us can, what collectively we can to serve the causes of righteousness and justice and love, knowing that we can not do it alone.
And may we have the humility to wait, the audacity to listen, so that we too might be answered and directed, from within and without, to act, to stand up for justice and for truth. And may the answer let us know too, that God – that Love – will ever be at our side.
For every one who asks, receives; the one who seeks, finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
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