“The Creative Use of Winter”
January 14, 2017
Jeremiah 8:4-12
So, where are we this winter morning?
Last Wednesday some residents of Iowa City woke to find that a flyer from a white supremacist group had been delivered to their homes.
Last Thursday this nation and the world were treated to our President’s vulgar and racist words on immigration.
Tomorrow is the day that we as a nation recognize the birthday of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As I said during the announcements, there are several ways in which you and your family and friends can mark this occasion that seems even more important this year. Some are printed in the bulletin. You can check the University of Iowa website for information about tomorrow’s Day of Service and about events during this week’s Celebration of Human Rights.
I’ll be participating in the reading of King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech at the Coralville Library at 5:00 tomorrow afternoon.
That speech has fallen out of favor among some. They worry that it has been “tamed,” that the words are now expected and comfortable in mid-January. But listen to that speech in Coralville tomorrow or read it again at home, I think you’ll feel the power that is still in those words.
Words have power.
The President now defends his words from last week by claiming that he was only saying what other people think—which, of course, is what they’d already been saying on Fox News.
After meeting with the President at a White House event honoring King on Friday, Isaac Newton Farris, Jr., King’s nephew and the president and CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, said. “I think that President Trump is racially uninformed or racially ignorant,” adding that he didn’t think the President is a racist “in the traditional sense.”
I don’t know. The President’s words sound pretty traditionally racist to me.
Reflecting on King’s speech during the 1963 March on Washington, Cornel West reminds us that “King had a dream, but it was not the American dream.” It was a dream that would find fulfillment only when all poor and working people would be able to live lives of decency and dignity in a more free and democratic America.[i]
Decency and dignity seem to be in short supply in these days.
It was the proclamation and the pursuit of the dream that was not the American dream, which included growing opposition to the war in Vietnam and growing denunciation on the endemic poverty in our nation, that led to the anger of an increasing number of people. A year before his death in 1968, a Harris poll showed that 72 percent of whites and 55 percent of blacks disapproved of his opposition to the war and his efforts to eradicate poverty in America.[ii]
The University turns our attention to the radical King this year. The graphic on the cover of our bulletin this morning and the quote at the top of the order of worship come from a speech King gave in New York City less than a month before his assassination. As is often the case with any good quote, it’s important to go back and read it in its original, larger context. So we heard more of that speech in worship today.
And it isn’t an easy speech to hear.
Can we hear King talk about “the gulfs between inordinate superfluous wealth and abject deadening poverty” and not think of the ever increasing income inequality of our time and recent legislation that will most likely only exacerbate it?
Can we hear King talk about our government’s concern with winning an unjust war and not think about the moral costs of our continuous and seemingly endless war over the past 15 years?
Can we hear King prophesy that “as long as justice is postponed…we’re going to find ourselves sinking into darker nights of social disruption,” and not worry about the mass incarceration of African Americans in what has been called “The New Jim Crow”—the title of the book members of our congregation will soon start reading together?
When King says “It is still true that these things are being ignored” it sounds as though he was speaking 50 minutes ago, not 50 years ago.
The prophet Jeremiah speaks in astonished anguish about our basic human tendency to keep doing the same destructive things over and over:
When people fall, do they not get up again?
If they go astray, do they not turn back?
When they has this people turned away in perpetual backsliding?
They have held fast to deceit,
they have refused to return.
…no one repents of wickedness,
saying “What have I done!”
Daily we witness the leaders of our country holding fast to deceit. Daily we watch as they take the wounds of this nation carelessly as, greedy for unjust gain, our own leaders cry “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. Events of the past year have only made painfully obvious the militarism, racism, and economic injustice that has continued afoot in our nation over the last fifty years.
War, racism, and economic injustice place all of us and all of our arguments under the judgment of God. King told us that violence begets only violence, dragging us further into a brutal and vicious spiral of death and destruction. Hatred only begets hatred. Inequality only fuels further inequality.
But King would not give into despair.
Nor should we.
When God seems remote, when our souls are troubled by blatant violence, hatred, and injustice, when our hearts are weary we remember King’s affirmation that: “God is able to conquer the evils of history. If at times we despair because of the relatively slow progress being made . . . let us gain new heart in the fact that God is able. . . . With this faith we can transform bleak and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of joy.”
Out of that hope we can continue to act in the world. We must treat the wounds of the people with care and work for the healing not only of our own souls but the soul of this nation.
The long hot summer, King told us, has always been preceded by a long cold winter. And the tragedy, King said, is that the nation has failed to use its winters creatively.
So this morning, I urge you to do just that. To make some creative use of the winter days of cold and snow and ice.
Maybe you will do this by joining with others to read and discuss The New Jim Crow—a look at the way in which our criminal justice system functions as . contemporary system of racial control, relegating millions of black men to a permanent second-class status—a book that Forbes called “devastating.” And maybe what you discover will spur you to action.
Maybe you will join with others at the Center for Worker Justice—as we as a congregation do—and advocate for economic justice in this state that banned local governments from establishing a living minimum wage in their communities. Maybe you’ll support those businesses and restaurants that continue to pay a $10.10 minimum wage even though our legislature thinks that’s unnecessary.
Maybe you will support efforts to welcome the refugees and immigrants in this city. We’ve begun some of that work as a congregation—providing home goods for refugees, helping immigrants learn to read. Next Sunday at 9:15 our Mission Board begins a four-week series on refugees and immigrants. Get up a little earlier—come and be a part of this.
How else might you—might we—make creative use of winter so that the summer might break forth with a new light and new warmth for all?
Words have power.
Hateful words have hateful, destructive power.
Words of love have a power of their own, as well—bringing the strength of compassion and mercy and hope.
Word have power. And our creative actions have an even greater power.
Let us, then, in these winter days, find the courageous faith to set aside our concern for tranquility and the status quo and work to create justice, humanity, and equality for all.
[i] Cornel West, Introduction to The Radical King, pg. xi.
[ii] ibid., pg. ix.