Last preached January 17th, 2007
I have a dream…..
What a powerful concept is contained in those four small words. It could be argued that those words contain within them what it means to be human.
I have a dream…..
“I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
These words were uttered by a dreamer, nay a visionary, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28th, 1963. They were uttered by a man, flawed as we all are, but possessed of a vision of the future that is undeniable. It is a future we have moved closer to, and yet still not achieved.
Many today and tomorrow will discuss the life and death of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King jr., and well they should. He was that rare man able to rise above his own imperfections to inspire others to be more than they were before. People of all ethnic backgrounds have felt and continue to feel this inspiration. He was a man willing, even eager, to face conflict in defense of his ideals. In another time, he might have been called a Prophet. In our time, he was both a Dreamer and a Visionary. This morning, however, I will instead focus not on the man, but on the Dream, the Vision that held him.
What is this Dream that Martin Luther King spoke of on that August day, and why has that one speech among hundreds of speeches and talks he gave come to hold sway in our public mind? Why is it that, among the thousands of activists of all races who have worked for and continue to work for Racial Equality, he is remembered above all others?
Perhaps it is because he has become the symbol of what we know to be the next major change in the development of humankind. The acceptance that all of humanity should not only enjoy equal protection before the law, but also carries equal potential, equal spirit, and equal value when they come into this world. We are all created equal.
Martin Luther King described that dream in regards to the battlefront of his day, racial equality… but we Unitarian Universalists take it one step further in the first principle of our foundational covenant, “the inherent worth and dignity of every person.” Thomas Jefferson immortalized it in that covenant of defiance, the Declaration of Independence when he said “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men, or people, are created equal.
No nation, no society, and no culture in the history of the Human Race has ever set this standard as their ideal. In over 5,000 years of recorded human history, and probably even further back than that, all societies have been founded on the belief that all people are not created equal. In societies that have consisted of mostly one ethnicity, birth into social classes or economic standing has been commonly used to say who was of greater value and who was of lesser. In multi-cultural and multi-ethnic societies, such cultural and ethnic differences have almost always been used as the primary set of barriers between our inherent equality.
Often, I think in today’s world we forget what a radical concept it is which we have, both as a religious movement and as a nation, set for ourselves as our ideal. Dr. King certainly realized it. The inherent worth and dignity of all has never been tried before. And yet, it is the foundation of who we claim to be as a people. I put forth the proposition that those who deny the inherent worth and dignity of all, in truth then deny what it means to be an American.
Martin Luther King jr. came before his nation to call upon it to live up to its own ideals. The nation had stated its beliefs in the Declaration of Independence, and then again in the Emancipation Proclamation, and then failed to put those beliefs fully into practice.
And yet, though we are still not living up to the ideal we set for ourselves when our founding fathers signed a document that, had they failed, would certainly have cost them their lives, that failure to complete the dream in full does not mean we give up hope! Later in his life, after the bombings of African American Churches, Dr. King himself feared that what he had warned of in a letter written from the Birmingham jail might come true, his dream might indeed become a nightmare.
And yet, the world has changed, even if slowly.
There are times in history where change can happen, changes in the basic fabric of human nature. When, some five thousand years ago not far from the current chaos and war in and around Baghdad, some individuals decided that it was easier to stay in one place and plant seeds and fence in animals than it was to follow where the animals went… they began the path to change human nature. The settlement they founded on these principles became known as Ur, and it is believed to have become one of the first human cities… the cradle of civilization.
This change did not spread everywhere at once. No, it began in one place, with one people. It was probably a radical change there at the beginning, and doubtless many argued and fought against it. “This is the way things have always been” they must have said. “We should stay with what we know, with the way our fathers lived.”
Does that sound familiar? Change is scary. Especially changes that affect our basic perception of what it means to be human.
But, as people saw that those in Ur were doing well, had food, and even by working together in community were able to devote time to other things, such as blacksmithing, weaving, and other such arts, those not in this “urban revolution” began to see the advantages of it.
Some moved to Ur. Others began founding their own settled communities, and what we now know as modern civilization was born.
So, what began with a radical revolution in one area, slowly began to take hold in others. As new generations were born, and taught in this new culture, they began to look upon those who still followed the herds as backwards, behind the times, and even uncivilized.
It took hundreds, if not thousands of years, until living in one place became the norm, and doing otherwise became the extreme.
I see the adoption of a belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person to be no less grandiose a vision. It is indeed a basic change in a human nature that has, for millennia always looked for reasons why one person should be naturally less or more than another.
As with any such change, there are times of great upheaval and turmoil, and even times of rapid “growth spurts of change”. Sometimes such change happens like an earthquake, pressure between two fault lines building up until something has to give way, causing a radical change. I’m sure when the first people in that area south of modern day Baghdad said “ok, lets quit following the herds and stay here for awhile” the earthquake that idea caused was amazing. It shook the world, and its effects can be found in society today.
Dr. King saw that the pressures had built to the point in his time that such a time of radical change was possible and necessary. By his steady application of non-violent pressure, he did indeed shake the world.
But is this the only way such change can happen? Once again, I will turn to the model of our landmasses and their motions. While in some places the plates move against each other with sudden force, in other areas the movement is both gradual and constant. In the mid ocean ridges new seafloor is being built with almost mathematical precision, every minute of every day.
In relation to changes in human nature, I refer to this as “generational change”. This is the thoughts, ideas, ideals, values, and cultural norms that each generation passes on to their children. This is the second great battle in our vision of the inherent worth and dignity of every person… and it may just be the more fundamental one.
We can, and indeed should use marches and protests to raise public awareness. We should continue to fight for the rights of all people under the law. And I do not mean simply on the issue of racial equality. Our dream, our vision of the inherent worth and dignity of all people spans race, religious creed, sexual orientation, economic standing, and gender. But such actions are indeed only half the fight.
What is just as important, and maybe even more important, is what we teach our children. The settlement at Ur would have failed if the founders had not taught their new cultural norm to their children. And their children taught the same to the next generation, and the next. And the next. And, through the generations, living in the settlement became the new normal. Human nature changed.
My great grandfather, though a hero of WWI, was in fact a very racist man. His son, my grandfather, learned that racism at his knees, and from the cultural norms of his time. My grandfather spent his life building first the railroads, then the highways, and then the natural gas pipelines of this nation, and in that work he discovered that most people worked about the same, and this was an attitude he passed along to his son, my father
My father learned through his life that, at least in the military, there really was only one color… green. Though raised with a set of beliefs that by today’s standards would still be considered racist, he chose to teach his son, me, that each and every person has the potential to be just like each and every other person. I watched everyday as the ideas bred into him in childhood conflicted with what he had intellectually come to accept as an adult.
I grew up in the military, where it was much more important to our social standing as children what rank your father (or mother) held than what color your skin was. In fact, growing up in Hawaii, I was in the minority… the weird looking kid with blond hair, blue eyes, and pale skin. If you have ever been to Hawaii, you might have run into the term “haole”… directly translated it means “without spirit”. It is a derogatory term that signifies a belief that white people have no soul. I took many a black eye because I had no soul.
And so, I came to believe that all people share the same inherent worth and dignity, from both sides of the equation. And I will teach my children that not only do all people share that inherent worth and dignity, but to think otherwise is a sign of backward thinking, a sign of being uncivilized. And I would hope that what my children teach my grandchildren would take the lesson one step further. And as such, we help to create a new cultural norm, believing in the inherent worth and dignity of every person
This is the second front in this battle of spiritual warriorship… generational change. And while the changes brought on in the political and social arena often gather more attention, occur faster, and play a role in changing our perceptions and misconceptions, it is what we teach our children, and what they teach their children, that will change human nature. It is in our duties as parents and as adult role models that we have the best chance to make a reality of Dr. Martin Luther King’s Dream.
In his words: “I am convinced that love is the most durable power in the whole world. It is not an expression of impractical idealism, but of practical realism. Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, love is an absolute necessity for the survival or our civilization. To return hate for hate does nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. Someone must have sense enough and religion enough to cut off the chain of hate and evil, and this can only be done through love.”