Unitarian Universalists of Sterling

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Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael

On April 16, 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a long and passionate letter addressed to his dear fellow clergymen. After years of engaging the struggle for civil rights with a commitment to nonviolent resistance – after months of separation from his family, after weeks of sleepless nights, after long court battles, and numerous stays in jail, after a lifetime of oppression and a life in segregation, his struggle was condemned in bold print in a local paper. This was one among many rejections, but this one he felt he must answer, as it raised in him such righteous indignation that he couldn’t be silent.

Martin Luther King read the advertisement, while sitting in solitary confinement, in the Birmingham jail.  Eight clergymen wrote it from eight major religious faiths.  It denounced his struggle as unlawful, it called him an extremist.

The clergy advocated for a slower process, for legislation before demonstration, and for the faithful to obey the rule of law. 

Of all Martin Luther King’s writings, each eloquent in its own right, I find the Letter from a Birmingham Jail the most stirring.  For one he is speaking directly to a religious community that had forsaken him and the movement.  But what’s more he is speaking from the seat of the struggle for equal rights and freedoms. 

Birmingham was not the first center for civil rights demonstrations – but it was the ground for the most decisive battle.  There, protesters faced a virulent and proud opposition, armed with and comfortable using fire hoses and angry dogs.   When a federal court order banned segregated parks, “Birmingham closed down its parks and gave up its baseball team rather than integrate them.”[1] This was a city where the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People was banned as a ‘foreign corporation;’ a city where city officials campaigned on a segregationist ticket proclaiming their pride in “knowing how to handle the Negro and keep him in his place.” 

Let’s begin to listen to some segments of this letter, a letter thats roots dug into this commanding oppression; a letter that answered a reluctant clergy who saw no good in nonviolent demonstrations.

“My Dear Fellow Clergymen,

…Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly…

I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension, which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood…

Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and voluntarily give up their unjust posture; but, as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups tend to be more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed…”

Looking back the struggle for civil rights seems so clear cut. Our nation’s laws and customs opposed basic morality.  They had to be challenged and overturned. 

I ask myself and I hear others ask themselves, what is our battle today?  What injustice are we neglecting that future generations will recognize as glaringly obvious? 

Or are our times different? Is there less at stake? 

Though I am one who has been guilty of reticence, I cannot answer yes to either of those questions.  Our society is slowly, so very slowly working towards a true democracy, and though we have made awesome strides, we are none so removed from the follies of our past. 

Injustices are perpetuated as a matter of course by the powerful.

Payday lenders prey on low-income people, especially minorities and seniors, exploiting an unconscionable rate of interest from the most vulnerable of our population.  The struggle there is for economic justice.

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender individuals are denied the right to marry and in Virginia they struggle against discrimination in housing, and fight for the right to share health, and life insurance, and to make end of life decisions for their partners.  This is a struggle for equal rights. 

Immigrants who arrived illegally, but have been welcomed with open arms by our corporations are suffering a process of alienation.  Laws in towns, counties and the state have been and are being drafted to prevent anyone who has arrived here illegally from using public libraries and services.  And if the most recent bills pass no state agency or local government will be able to provide any documents, information, or literature in any language other than English.   The struggle for immigrant rights is a struggle for the preservation of human rights and dignity. 

Many of us wonder how to proceed.  To work for equal rights, economic justice, and human dignity, laws must be overturned.  We have to re-evaluate and challenge the comfortable authorities of the past.  How can this be done without disrupting too much – without giving in to the pale of anarchy?

When the clergy challenged King by saying “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” he responded:

“The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "an unjust law is no law at all."

Now, what is the difference between the two? …

Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. Segregation, to use the terminology of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, substitutes an "I- it" relationship for an "I-thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. Hence segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and awful.”

Segregation as a legal and public force was overturned.  Our courts no longer advocate separate but equal.  But our society is not so easily transformed.  In King’s autobiography he repeatedly claims that the injustice of segregation lives in the social system, the way of life.  It is for this reason that he advocated a social movement.  The movement needed the courtrooms, but the gains would have been benign if the whole of the country were not somehow engaged with the transformation.

Separate is unequal – If our courts advocate and our society accepts different policies and privileges for our gay and straight populations – we have advocated and accepted inequality.  If our legislature prescribes and our society accepts laws that prevent our Spanish speaking population from accessing state or local governmental information and aid – we have legislated and accepted inequality.    If our legislature does not prevent payday lenders from charging astounding interest rates, rates that trap our most economically unstable population in impossible debt – we have legislated and accepted inequality.   

In Birmingham, where inequality was a way of life, a Unitarian Universalist congregation was involved in the movement – in fact they were one of the only ‘white’ congregations in Birmingham to offer support.  When James Reeb, a Unitarian Universalist minister and civil rights marcher, was beaten by an angry mob of racists in Selma Alabama, he was taken to Birmingham for treatment, only to die a short while later.  Then when hundreds of Unitarian Universalists including the Associations Board of Trustees traveled to Selma for the memorial service and later for the march, the Birmingham congregation installed extra phone lines, met people at the airport, fed people, put people up overnight, arranged busses … and in the midst of this threw a membership Sunday to welcome 25 new members and a kick-off dinner for their pledge drive. [2]

You might say that the Birmingham congregation integrated – it did the work of social justice while doing the basic work of maintaining itself as an institution.  But more so, it did not shy from tension. 

This is a model of support that the Unitarian Universalists of Sterling have emulated, especially in working with the ADAMS center, a local Muslim organization.  And this is a model of support that enables us to engage in the work of transformation …  And this is the model of support that King was asking for, from the Birmingham jail:

“… I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Councilor or the Ku Klux Klansman, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." …

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people…”

King reminds us that the church has been a defender of the status quo when it could have been an advocate for justice.  I was honored when this community responded with praise to my piece in a local paper on Immigrant rights.  On Martin Luther King Day, Scott, my husband and I will travel with other liberal religious leaders both lay and ordained to our state capitol, Richmond, to visit our legislators and advocate for immigrant and gay rights, as well as economic justice.  And when I do, we will speak with this congregation's convictions in mind – indeed they will give me the courage to speak for justice.

Later this year we will rebuild our social justice committee and with renewed vigor determine how we will engage with tension to enable transformation. Let us be vigilant in our efforts, unafraid of upsetting our way of life – encouraged not by a calm society, but by the promise of a free and democratic nation.

And today, and all days, may we find inspiration in the words and work of Martin Luther King Jr. without whom we may not have ever known the sort of America that now seems so obviously right. 

From Birmingham he concludes with a testament to the heroes of social change.  And it is fitting that today his words close out our sermon.

“…One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face Jeering, and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy-two-year-old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My fleets is tired, but my soul is at rest." They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience' sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judeo-Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

Yours for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood,

Martin Luther King, Jr.”

Amen, and May it be So.