Sermons

In honor of Martin Luther King Day, I wanted to devote the time we have together to the core of Dr. King’s life work: the pursuit of justice. It is my belief that sanctuaries of belonging like the one we share today are the central contexts in which – much like the flame of the Unitarian Universalist chalice – the flame of justice is kept alive in society. I believe that Dr. King would concur and encourage us in this perspective.

Justice is a fiery thing. We know from both our witness of history and contemporary struggles for justice – marked as they are by cries of outrage from all ends of the political landscape – that anger has always been a key and transformative force in progressing what Dr. King called the long “moral arc of the universe.”

Anger is a powerful emotional signal, one I feel should be respected and handled skillfully like any burning flame. When a truth is repressed or oppressed, anger should and will arise. Dr. King spoke often of a deep anger that arose in him throughout his life; it seems that the fire of anger for him was a motivating force that moved him to act in the name of racial justice despite his many justified fears of violent retribution from a racist society. Anger has a way of throwing off obstacles, whether external and systemic or inner and spiritual.

Dr. King was not a perfect man. Whether accurate or distorted by political agendas, many accounts have arisen in recent years of his own private moral failures. Nevertheless, one particularly admirable quality that Dr. King left us in his legacy as both a fallible human being and a brilliant leader was the skill he demonstrated in communicating his anger in public forums. In his speeches, we hear anger, but it is a vast, expansive anger in which we can feel the space he wished to give to the world: the space for brotherhood across our differences, the space for respect, and the space for shared peace.

This ability to communicate a spacious anger that is at once powerful, inspiring, and, somehow, sheltering, is a rare gift. It contains the burning beacon of truth which is the medium of justice’s progression in the world. Simultaneously, in Dr. King’s speeches, we hear a promise of justice’s fruition: the space in which we can all live together in freedom and equality.

How was such a balance possible? I feel it was so because, in those profound moments which shape our memory of Dr. King’s legacy, his own heart was vast and all-encompassing. His anger had a very specific message – one that sought to balance the scales of racial justice and promote world peace. But, simultaneously, this message was united with and rooted in, in the language of his own tradition, agapic love – all-encompassing love. His message belonged to a heart in which all in the world were seen as worthy of belonging.

In a despiritualized world, where the mysteries of the heart and spiritual growth are rarely discussed in public dialogue, this inner aspect of Dr. King’s legacy is often overlooked and underemphasized. In his own worldview, the work of his life was not an act of individualism in which he was a solitary leader engaging in a struggle for justice by his own bootstraps. His faith defined his work as arising from and sustained by relationship – both to a sacred mystery of love and to a community of belonging that, together, maintained a connection with that larger mystery.

Without his spiritual community and the larger movement-wide community of civil rights activists seeing him as a conduit of their faith and voice of their time, Dr. King would not be able to accomplish all that he did. If it takes a village to raise a child, it takes a community of belonging to sustain the work of heart-based justice. Without communities of truth and belonging mirroring in us the personal potential we all carry to embody and speak from a heart of great love, we run the risk of overlooking or egoically misinterpreting our innate potential as human beings to change the world around us through spiritual growth and action.

Of course, as Unitarian Universalists, or more broadly speaking as members of the highly diversified spiritual landscape of the modern world, we may not share the same belief system of Christianity that Dr. King so cherished and belonged to. We must find our own words, both personal and shared. Still, we must not forget the overall pattern from which his life work arose: our human ability to root our lives in a vast openheartedness and steward that connection together in community. Especially now, in our time, with the work of dismantling racist systems ongoing, and the injustices of the climate crisis becoming more and more visible near and far each year, we must not forget our role as sanctuaries in keeping alive the flame of justice as a collective and nurturing each other’s personal ability to carry forth the work of justice from an open heart of love.

The real beauty of this sanctuary and community-based approach to justice is that each of us has a place. Whether we are a vocal leader or a quiet nurturer, a gentle guide or a tenacious mover-and-shaker, we are all needed. When the belonging of each one of us is strengthened, the overall strength of our communities grows, as does our ability to create change together.

The “moral arc of the universe” may be “long,” but it is always and ever progressed here and now. In this long view that is immanently needed, the love that we have for each other is inseparable from the love we have for those on distant shores. “Injustice anywhere” – the absence of love and respect – “is a threat to justice everywhere.” That all our sanctuaries may grow stronger in this time, let us love and grow together.