First Unitarian Society of Minneapolis

The Power of One

You can always count on the internet to take you interesting places. Last week, for instance, while in the process of looking for the text of a half-remembered quote from the writing of Martin Luther King, Jr., I came across an article on a fundamentalist web site exploring the question, was Martin Luther King really a Christian? Citing, among other evidence, his comparison of Jesus with Gandhi and Socrates, the author concluded that Dr. King was not in fact a truly born-again Christian, and is therefore currently in hell. At first glance, this merely served to confirm my opinion that if the fundamentalists are remotely correct in their ideas of the hereafter, hell is definitely going to be the more interesting spot. I for one would much rather spend eternity with Abraham, Martin and John than with the likes of Billy Graham and James Dobson.

But the whole question, absurd as it was on the face of it, set me to thinking again about the nature of religious conviction, and sent me to read again Dr. King’s powerful indictment of his ministerial colleagues and the unsupportive southern churches in his now classic "Letter from a Birmingham Jail." No thinking person can read three sentences of this or any other of King’s writings or speeches without realizing how deeply imbued he was with the heritage of the Christian tradition, how earnest was his conviction that both the liberation stories of the Old Testament and the sacrifice of Jesus had an important message for his own black community, and indeed for American society and for the world as a whole. In fact, to me one of the most admirable things about Christianity has always been the way in which has served to sustain and inspire oppressed communities, in the southern United States, in South Africa, as we heard last Sunday, or in Central and South America. A religious heritage that can offer both the endurance that carries people with impenetrable dignity through all manner of suffering, as well as the conviction that freedom is their birthright and worth any struggle to achieve, has something to teach us all. Dr. King was one of its greatest professors.

It was this sense of unshakeable purpose that enabled King to not only to lead the movement that had been gathering and simmering well before his emergence as a young educated black pastor, but to give it the distinctive shape that would make him its historical icon. On the one hand, as we discussed a moment ago with the children, Martin Luther King was able to exert the power to call attention to the issue of civil rights because many people, young and old, black and white, responded to his message, took up his dream, and put their bodies on the line in non-violent protest time after time. His word became a force to reckon with because it was backed up with community solidarity – boycotts when he called for them, marches when he called for them, strikes when he called for them. By himself, King would have been merely a bright young preacher with a Southern Baptist cadence and a Boston University vocabulary. On the other hand, without his unique vision and compelling voice, the movement might have remained for another generation or more fragmented and philosophically divided among the cautious and patient, who wanted to keep the moral high ground and work quietly for gradual change, and the restless radicals, who wanted action, and to take their rights by force if necessary. It was King’s ability to give voice to both of these groups, and to draw upon the strengths of each of them, that made him unique. Martin Luther King Jr. was one person, and he did change the world – but he didn’t do it alone.

He didn’t do it alone, and he didn’t do it outside of an institutional context. The heritage of American Protestant Christianity, as it had been annealed in the crucible of slavery, gave the young preacher a narrative context shared – at least supposedly – not only by the overwhelming majority of the black community, but by many white Americans as well. He could talk about images like the walls of Jericho falling down, or crossing the River Jordan, or the promised land, and these pictures would carry deep resonance for most of his hearers. There was no possibility for Martin Luther King to have awakened the conscience of the nation and forced open the door of freedom as he did, apart from the history, vocabulary, music, and institutional structures of the black Christian churches. At the same time, one of the most important concepts that he taught those who worked with him, and that gave his leadership and the movement its distinctive character was borrowed, by way of his seminary and graduate studies, from Hinduism. Through his study of Gandhi, King came to understand Satayagraha – truth force – as a potent theological idea. To Gandhi it meant that bearing witness to the truth was an action of power, whether it had any immediate effect or not, whether it appeared to be winning at a given moment or not. It also meant non-violence as a strategy of principled resistance to wrong, and this implied a highly conscious spiritual discipline of resisting the natural human inclination to retaliate against injury and injustice. King was able to translate this concept into the vocabulary of Christianity – it is, after all, not without some precedent in the Reformation Anabaptist pacifist movements that nurtured the Amish, Mennonite, and Quaker traditions of nonviolence. He was not the first leader within the civil rights or workers movements to discover Gandhi’s ideas and find them suggestive, but he was able to make them resonate with the American Christian conscience in a way that seemed to have both integrity and power.

It is 37 years now since the black American prophet of non-violence was gunned down on a hotel balcony – almost 42 years since he articulated the essential component of racial justice in the American dream with his speech to the March on Washington. Today Martin Luther King’s legacy to us is paradoxical – does it show that one person can indeed, change the world? or just the opposite, that no individual, however prominent, ever really makes anything happen alone? This is a question of more than academic interest to those of us who are invested in the vision of America that Dr. King lifted up before us. When the deepest values that we hold for our country are challenged, how are we called upon to respond?

It is easy to lose heart when the political process and popular opinion appear to be swayed by our basest collective fears rather than our most noble convictions. In fact, nobility, honor, and courage seem to be qualities of character that have currency only upon the sacrificial altar of the battlefield these days. Personally, I wonder whether if we required them to be displayed more by our public leadership, we might make it less necessary to discover them in our teenage soldiers?

What the example of the civil rights movement and Dr. King’s work has to teach us is that we can’t afford to sulk about not enjoying the political consensus, and we can’t just sit back and wait for it to become spontaneously enlightened. If we have a case to make, and I believe that there is one, then we must be about the business of making it, as persuasively as we can. The poet Marge Piercy explores this same paradox in her poem "The Low Road":

What can they do

to you? Whatever they want,

they can set you up, they can

bust you, they can break

your fingers, they can

burn your brain with electricity

blur you with drugs till you

can't walk, can't remember, they can

take your child, wall up

your lover. They can do anything

you can't stop them

from doing. How can you stop

them? Alone, you can fight, You can refuse, you can

take what revenge you can

they roll over you.

but two people fighting

back to back can cut through

a mob, a snake-dancing file

can break a cordon, an army

can meet an army

two people can keep each other

sane, can give support, conviction,

love, massage, hope, sex.

three people are a delegation,

a committee, a wedge. With four

you can play bridge and start

an organization. With six, you can rent a whole house,

eat pie for dinner with no seconds and hold a fundraising party.

A dozen makes a demonstration, a hundred fill a hall.

A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter,

ten thousand, power and your own paper,

a hundred thousand, your own media, ten million, your own country.

It goes on one at a time,

it starts when you care

to act, it starts when you do

it again after they said no.

it starts when you say WE

and you know who you mean, and each

day you mean one more.

It starts, she says, when you care; when you act. This is the point of Joe Trippi’s new years story about his friend Marc Cobb. I particularly enjoy the role reversal in this relationship – that it is the black kid from Watts who steers his white teammate through the college application labyrinth. This is not a tale of heroism or great sacrifice; it only illustrates that in the interdependent web of all existence and all relationships, we often do not know the impact of what we do for others, and we often do not recognize the most significant gifts of our lives until long after they are given, and the giver a long way off. In the end, of course, it took a village – or more specifically, a whole university faculty and community – to provide Joe Trippi with a college education and the foundation for a prosperous and fulfilling life. No project that complex happens in isolation. But it took just one person to get the ball rolling, to open up a door to possibilities that Joe never knew were there, and to push him through it. The things we do matter, sometimes they matter immensely, and we don’t always know. When he was asked about the path to greatness, Martin Luther King said this:

"Everyone can be great because anyone can serve.

You don't have to have a college degree to serve.

You don't even have to make your subject and your verb agree, to serve…

You don't have to know the second theory of thermo-dynamics in physics to serve.

You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love."

Sometimes you do get to see it happen. Sometimes you find the partner who watches your back, the delegation, the fourth for bridge, the newsletter, the demonstration, the movement. Sometimes you can say We, and know who you mean. Other times, you change the trajectory of a life and never even know. The thing is, it doesn’t matter; we are called to be faithful to our values either way. They don’t have to be popular values, they don’t have to be in the cultural ascendancy. It’s nice when you can get your own values elected; it feels great. I know, because once in a while in my life, I have been there. But it’s not a requirement. Recently, the political action group Not In Our Name issued a statement which said, in part:

Not alone, but one by faithful one, we give life and substance to the things we care about; justice, equality, freedom, truth, honor, compassion, peace. When the pundits and the spinmeisters say that 9/11 changed everything, they are wrong. 9/11 may have changed America’s complacency, and the priorities of public opinion, but it did not change the meaning of human decency, or the value of human life, or the responsibilities of leadership. It did not change the principle of satayagraha, the power of the spirit of truth, to stand against the forces of bigotry, hatred, and greed; to face down violence not with more violence, but with commitment, compassion, and personal integrity. These things do not change; not for tragedy, not for expediency, not for popularity. It begins with the power of one, but it doesn’t end there; whether we know it or not, our actions ripple outward, our example leaves its mark; we change lives, we change the world. More than a century ago, the abolitionist clergyman Edward Everett Hale put it this way:

Today we might acknowledge our dependence upon a larger community and historical context in different language, but the affirmation remains. The more aware we are of the challenges around the globe, the more apparent it is that we cannot do everything. Yet be assured, there is something you can do, and if you will do it with integrity, with compassion and the power of truth, it will change the world.