Occasional Sermons

Birmingham, Alabama was just like any other city in the Jim Crow South. It was segregated. But perhaps the word “segregated,” as negative as are its connotations, is something of a euphemism in this particular case. Segregation can be taken simply to mean separation. Locker rooms are segregated. Dormitories are segregated. This means that men and women have separate facilities -- separate, but equal, to coin a loaded phrase. But of course, this was not what was going on in the Jim Crow South, nothing of the sort. It wasn’t as if there were separate but equal facilities for African Americans and White Americans. It was that African Americans were not permitted the use of White American facilities. Libraries, stores, parks, schools, restaurants, rest rooms, swimming pools, transportation, hotels, amusement parks, houses, apartments, and of course, churches. African Americans were not permitted the use of these facilities, or if by rare exception they were, that use was severely restricted. Needless to say, African Americans had nothing comparable of their own. And how was this so-called segregation enforced? By signs, mostly - “White” and “Colored.” Now you may say to yourself? Signs? What kind of enforcement is that? Signs can easily be ignored or defied. If someone put a sign saying “No Calvinists” at my health food store, I’d go in anyway and read them the riot act to boot. And after all, African Americans comprised, depending on the count, a third to a half of the population in the Jim Crow South. How could such egregious discrimination be enforced by signs? Well, truth be told, especially when African American discontent in the Jim Crow South began to grow, there was some concern among White Americans that signs were not enough. So in Birmingham for example, to give the signs additional muscle, eighteen unsolved bombings took place in African American neighborhoods. I don’t know about you, but if I were an African American in Birmingham in those days, and there was the threat that my children, or any children, would be blown to pieces, I think I’d read (and heed) the signs. In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. turned his attention to Birmingham. He began to organize peaceful demonstrations there. In short order, a judge ordered King to cease his demonstrations on the grounds that Birmingham had not granted him the required permits. King ignored the order and was thereupon imprisoned. A colleague who came to visit him brought him a local newspaper. In it King saw a full page advertisement taken out by white clergymen declaring that his demonstrations were, and I quote, “untimely.” King, in the margins of that newspaper, began a letter of response to that advertisement. When he ran out of space in the margins, he continued the letter on toilet paper, until he was at last supplied with a notepad. King’s letter, of course, was his immortal manifesto, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” In it, he argued for the “timeliness” of his demonstrations. There were, basically, two fronts to his argument. The first front of his argument was that it is easy enough for those who are not suffering from social injustice to tell those who are to be patient, to wait. And of course, King is irrefutable here. It would be like telling someone who is dying of thirst to be patient, to wait, while you yourself are sitting right beside a well; or like telling someone who is starving to death to be patient, to wait, while you’ve just come from a feast. It’s rather hypocritical, insensitive, and indifferent. It’s rather hardhearted. It’s rather cruel. Allow me to quote King at some length on this point: “For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant 'Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that ‘justice too long delayed is justice denied.’ We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights…Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging dart of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"…, when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at a tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" -- then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.” The second front of his argument was that to ask African Americans to be patient, to wait rested upon the false premise that social justice is evolving by some kind of natural process; that it wasn’t something that must be struggled for. Again, to quote King, this time with much greater brevity: “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God.” And when King was freed from the Birmingham Jail, he continued the struggle for social justice there. That struggle reached its nadir when children aged six to sixteen joined in the demonstrations in place of their parents who could not risk the loss of their livelihoods. The response of the Birmingham police was to throw the children in the Birmingham jail. Before long, the jail was packed past capacity with nearly 1,000 children. When other children continued to demonstrate and there was no room left for them in the jail, the police turned their power hoses upon them. The force of the hoses snapped their bones and washed their small bodies down the streets. And this lost Birmingham its war against African Americans. By this time the press had turned its attention to Birmingham. Photos of the persecuted children spread throughout the country and the world, which together convulsed in moral horror. The process of integration in Birmingham was then haltingly begun. The signs began to come down. Birmingham, Alabama turned out to be the turning point in the Civil Rights Movement. It was where Martin Luther King Jr. taught the Jim Crow South and teaches us here today that the immoral course is to tell those suffering from social injustice to be patient, to wait; and the moral course is to join the struggle to achieve social justice. Martin Luther King Jr., was undeniably, from a secular standpoint a visionary, and from a Christian standpoint a prophet. He gave a face to wisdom and conviction and courage. His leadership changed the course of this nation in a worthy direction. That, of course, is why we honor him each year on his birthday. But there’s one compliment that can’t be bestowed upon him. It can’t be said he was original. He himself again and again decried his own originality. He insisted he was merely following the Bible. And indeed he was. Just consider just our New Testament lesson. Paul had founded a church in Corinth, Greece, and from his letter to that church it appears that the minute he left Corinth, they screwed everything up. It’s little surprise really. The barriers between Jews and Greeks were impenetrable. You can’t overcome a cultural barriers of that magnitude with a little evangelism. What the church in Corinth errantly took from Paul was that if Christians were justified through Jesus Christ, at the end of the age and then alone they would be saved. Between now and then, it was pretty much business as usual. Justification through Jesus Christ functioned basically as a “Get Out Of Hell Free” card. Paul wrote to the church at Corinth that if that’s how they viewed justification through Jesus Christ that they were justified, “in vain.” “Now,” Paul declared, “is the favorable time." What Paul tried to impress upon the church at Corinth is that justification through Jesus Christ was a call to active service in the here and now. It was a call to stand up and be counted. It was a call to accomplish salvation in that place and time. It was a call to timeliness. What King did really was to make the Bible come alive in the Jim Crow South. And on Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday, may he inspire us to make the Bible come alive in our time as well. Amen.