Sermons

'What Would He Say About This:'

"What Would He Say About This"
A Sermon by Charles Blustein Ortman
For Martin Luther King Sunday
January 20, 2002
At the Unitarian Church of Montclair
67 Church Street, Montclair, New Jersey 07042
973-744-6276 WWW.UUMontclair.org  

One of the greatest gifts I've ever received was the gift of learning under the guidance of a wonderful mentor. Who here has had a mentor somewhere in your life? I want you to think about your mentor for a moment. And even if you haven’t had one, maybe you can imagine what a good mentor would be like. What are the characteristics of a good mentor?

The good mentor has a willingness to be there for you; the willingness to share with you openly and caringly from their experience, as they help to guide you through your development. They consider your best interests. They accept your weaknesses, and they push you toward your best potential. The good mentor is willing to see a future influenced by your participation in the creation of that future. The good mentor has the ability to ask questions about what is right, and to teach us how to ask similar questions of ourselves. And perhaps most of all, a good mentor helps us to see that we are capable of doing things far beyond anything we might have ever thought possible.

I was lucky enough to have had such a mentor as I entered the ministry. I have told you about my mentor, Alan Egly, a number of times before. Like Mel Hoover from our reading this morning, Alan believed that we don't necessarily control the future, but that we can indeed shape and enhance its possibilities. I think he felt like he could help to shape the future of Unitarian Universalist ministry by helping me to become the best minister I was capable of becoming. That’s what mentors do. They believe in us and teach us to believe in ourselves.

There is a point I’d like to interject here. It has something to do with the difference between the facts and the truth. With our mentors, as with many other key figures in our lives, there is the actual person who was or is our mentor. This is a matter of fact.

And then there is the ideal person—the ideal mentor—who is the accumulation of all the things we’ve learned and gained, the level of aspiration we feel for our future as it has been enhanced, the gratitude we feel for those gifts, and so many other elements of the ideal. The ideal mentor is all of these combined, and these are more a matter of truth. A word of qualification is that I will wander freely between these two realities this morning because I think they are both the legacy that is handed down to us by our mentors.

So, whether or not you’ve personally been blessed by having had such an opportunity to have had a mentor, I think we've indeed all been greatly blessed to have had as a cultural mentor, Martin Luther King, Jr. He was not just a mentor in matters of racial relations. Martin Luther King was a mentor for our entire society. He saw what our society could become, and he lived in a way that would promote that end. Then he invited us into the vision with him. He wanted to leave a committed life behind him, so that we, too, might learn to lead committed lives. So that like him, if we could spread the message that the master taught—and in case you miss that one, the message was to love your neighbor as yourself—for then, too, our living would not be in vain.

How was Martin Luther King a mentor for our culture? He was there for us, for all of us. He was there in body and in spirit, in determination and in action. He shared his life with us. He gave his life for us. He saw that the mistreatment of African Americans hurt, not only those who were maltreated and denied, not only African Americans, but that racism imprisoned all Americans. He loved this country and he wanted to love what this country was becoming.

He wanted what was best for all of us. For it to be best for us all, it could be no less than what was best for any of us. This is perhaps the most difficult part of King’s legacy for many to understand and to fully appreciate, because it meant that he wanted what was best for White America. He didn’t want it in any exclusive or superior way, though. He wanted what was best for America—white black, yellow and brown.

Did he accept our weaknesses? Certainly not in any way that promoted them as the status quo. Still, he knew that – to move on toward the mountaintop, to move on toward the Promised Land – we all had to accept the reality of our weaknesses. We could not and we cannot stop the ravages of racism by denying that we live in and perpetuate a racist state.

He accepted our weaknesses, accepted us with those weaknesses, and then he pushed us toward being the America he knew we were capable of becoming. And that America of his vision was not even one of his own invention. The America he saw us becoming was the same one our forebears had claimed in the beginning – with liberty and justice for all. It was the same America affirmed by Abraham Lincoln with a government, “….of the people, by the people, and for the people.” (Words he borrowed, by the way, from the abolitionist and Unitarian Minister Theodore Parker)

The dream Martin Luther King had for this nation was the same American dream that this country had always claimed for itself…of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Martin’s vision of America’s potential was merely a fuller version of the dream. Maybe it was a Universalist vision. (Martin often claimed that he was a small u universalist.) His vision was one that held us all.

He saw a future in which that vision was fulfilled, and he knew that it would take all of us to get there. And so, he invited us all to see ourselves as part of, as partners in its creation.

We, here at the Unitarian Church of Montclair, are a good example of Martin’s effectiveness as a cultural mentor. This church saw itself as a part of King’s vision. Led by Dr. Norman Fletcher, this congregation went out into the streets, the movie theaters and the lunch counters of Montclair in order to fulfill the dream.

Years later, as we came to understand that the fight for justice could not be won merely through integration, we formed our Undoing Racism Committee; we spent two years in self-examination through our Journey Toward Wholeness program and we claimed the work of antiracism as part of our community’s covenant. Dr. King saw the future influenced by our participation in it. And we have become a part of fulfilling that dream. Our challenge now is to stay true in our efforts and to find new ways of inviting and including others into that partnership.

Another characteristic of a good mentor is the ability to not only to ask questions about what is right, but also to teach us to ask similar questions of ourselves. Martin asked us to continually reexamine the American dream and the way we’ve applied it to our civic life. He asked us to reexamine our sense of what is right and to realign the structures of our society based on what we’ve learned in those examinations.

Many of us have learned to ask these questions of ourselves. But until the demographics regarding the criminal justice system, the failures in public education, the murder rate, life expectancy and financial income expectancy, until these demographics cease to define typical life styles of Americans by race, we will need to continue to ask these questions of ourselves. And we will need to find new ways to ask them, ways that might better help us to uncover the realities that keep us from fulfilling Martin’s American dream. Until the wrongs have all been righted, we will have to keep asking ourselves these questions. And we will have to strive to answer them honestly.

The final test of Martin's mentorship is—can he continue, even in death, to help us see that we are capable of doing things beyond what we thought were possible? And that part of the equation is up to each of us to answer. How dearly do we hold his dream? How much have we allowed ourselves to make it our own? How invested are we in keeping alive? How determined are we to continue asking ourselves if all the children of this great nation are truly born with equitable possibilities of fulfilling the potentials of their lives? How committed are we toward making that equity a reality? How resolved are we to making the impossible possible?

He did his part. Can we do ours?

Martin Luther King was indeed a fine mentor for us all. That means that we do carry him inside of us as a part of our national psyche. That means his vision is a part of the way we look at things to determine whether or not justice is being served. And so, maybe on this Martin Luther King national holiday in this post September 11th world in which we find ourselves, maybe it would be fitting to invoke Martin's spirit to ask, what would he think of all this? And what would he want us to do? Here's how his voice plays out in my thoughts.

I can't help but to think that he'd be somewhat disappointed in the limited gains we've made in addressing black and white racial matters. And I don't think his disappointment would be limited to that single issue. Toward the end of his life, Martin began to see, through the experience of the Vietnam War, how the oppression of people around the world was linked together in a common set of issues. I can't help but to think he would look at our current situation, not as an isolated experience of American victimization, but as an international occurrence, related to oppression.

Martin Luther King, above all else, was a man who preached and lived the love that was the lesson that his master taught. He would not condone the acts of violence from the terrorists, but he would also want to know what his America could do better – not by force and violence, but through justice and compassion – to erode the provocations of terrorism.

I can't help but to think he would want us to accept our own responsibilities for this chapter in world history, as well as holding others accountable for their responsibilities. Denial, he would say, does not help us to accept who we are. It keeps us from becoming who we are capable of being.

I can't help but think he would encourage us to be very aware of our responsibilities to our Arab American neighbors. A time of crisis, he would assure us, is a time of crisis for everyone. It is not the time to disavow any of us, nor to renege on any part of the American dream...for anyone, no matter their heritage, their skin color, there religion or their culture.

And I can't help but to think that, despite any disappointments he might have in our unfulfilled promises, he would still see in us a great cause for hope. He would see that we mean well for our fellow citizens and for all the citizens of the world. He would see our efforts to make this a better world. And he would see that, even though we still haven't fully learned to redeem our intentions with our actions, he would still see in us the possibility of that redemption.

What would he think of all of this? What would he want us to do? I can't help but to think that he would look at the world through his compassionate eyes, and that he would say, stop being so concerned with being right and be more concerned about doing right. Do right by one another.

That’s how I hear the mentor’s voice in my head. How do you hear him in yours?

Mel Hoover wrote:

“We can’t discern in the present the fullness of our actions and their impact, but we can be pioneers in our time, exploring fully the crevices and cracks where knowledge and new insights might be found.

We can explore our spectrum of relationships and confront our complacency and certainty about the way things are.

We can dare to face ourselves in our entirety, to understand our pain, to feel the tears, to listen to our frustration and confusion, and to discover new capacities and capabilities that will empower and transform us.”

Martin Luther King said:

“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice; say that I was a drum major for peace; I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter. I won’t have any money to leave behind. I won’t have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind.”

Let us say amen which means, so be it. And let us be the ones who make it so.
Let us say, thanks be for the mentors who shine the light of their lives so that we might find our way along the path that leads to becoming.