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This sermon was given at Prairie Circle Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Grayslake, IL, on January 17, 2010.

Our Unitarian Universalist faith has a strong connection to the work and life of Martin Luther King, Junior.

In the past, the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly, a weeklong conference held every year, boycotted the state of Arizona in 1988, which was the last state not to recognize a holiday for Martin Luther King.

Each year at General Assembly, the delegates vote to approve resolutions that guide the work of our association. Dr. King has inspired four different resolutions. Our sources of inspiration state that we learn from the words and actions of prophetic women and men, and of course, we count Dr. King as one of the many.

It is only appropriate that we spend some time talking and thinking about his legacy this morning. Our president and his wife, each year, have invited the nation to a day of service, and this year is no different: they invited us all to a weekend of service.

Children of children of children who did not immigrate freely, the president and his family offers us their understanding of service, and ways for us to make it our own. Our readings, service and devotion, speak to us of the qualities necessary for developing justice in the world. These qualities are how we become justice makers.

Martin Luther King’s work focused on the questions of race and relationships —the challenges in the Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King also was interested in questions of class and poverty—what we would term economic justice. And that is our focus for today, economic justice.

In 1968, Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference organized the Poor People’s Campaign to address these issues of economic justice. The campaign culminated in a march on Washington DC, demanding that the poorest communities of the United States receive economic aid.

King traveled the country to create a “multi-racial army of the poor” that would march on Washington and engage in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol until Congress created a bill of rights for poor Americans.

King received a lot of backlash for this movement. Some people refused to get involved with the march, saying that the goals were too broad and unrealizable.
King called upon our government to invest in rebuilding our cities. He made these requests during the Vietnam War, feeling that our government spent too much money on the war, thus showing “hostility to the poor.”

In his one of his sermons, A Knock at Midnight, he challenges not just the government, but also the church, saying, “and those who have gone to the church to seek the broad economic justice have been left in the frustrating midnight of economic privation.” (72, King)

King saw the church as an instrument separate from the state that needed to be prophetic in standing up for the causes that it sees as most important. And in his case, the church happened to be any church, not just the black church. His concept of church includes you and me, in our movement. Immigrants we are, coming to a new faith, some of us. And some of us, returning to a faith for all.

King understood that the potential for the church lay in the values that the church embodies, and that when churches stand up for the values they believe in, then a great fellowship of love is born, and people develop a stronger relationship with the church as an institution, because they know the church will speak with integrity about what its values are.  And with this work, the people dismantle the systems that hold them captive: the systems of class, race, homophobic behavior, and ageism.

He saw economic justice as a part of the reconstruction of society that needed to happen, citing systematic flaws of “racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism.”
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King’s vision was based on his knowledge of the United States Constitution and the Declaration of the Independence. The American Dream is not a dream that is just based on life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

He interprets this American dream correctly: King understands these words to apply to all men—and I think if he was living today he would say all people—all men are created equal (King, 88). He says it another way: we are challenged another way, to respect the dignity and worth of the human personality (King, 87).

King took that understanding one step further, and this is where the connection to Unitarian Universalism is most clear: He understands the words that “all men are created equal” because these are God-given rights to mean that all men have equal intrinsic worth, that is, that the worth comes from inside the individual.

Sound familiar? The first principle. We covenant—that means we agree—to honor and promote the inherent worth of every person.

This principle means we are bound by our agreement to do work in the world that promotes justice of many kinds.

Often, now, we look at the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and we interpret these words another way. Social critics might argue that the men who wrote the Constitution, being men of property, wrote those words to mean that the pursuit of happiness means, on some level, the pursuit of property.

The sense of financial stability was something those men knew a little about, having been men of business, men who worked to build a nation and its free market system from the ground up. These men were immigrants, people who came from another land for values that we believe in today—freedom, tolerance, and the use of reason. Some of these men even used the name we go by: Unitarian and Universalist.

King correctly infers that we live a schizophrenic life in the United States, proudly professing the principles of democracy, talking the talk but not actually walking the walk.

Our call, then in our congregations and within our daily lives, is to live out the words of King and the principles we said this morning—to find ways to make all forms of justice alive in this world.

King was not shy about showing our nation its warts. In fact, the theology he ascribed to—and it’s a theology we can ascribe to as well—is a theology of love. This kind of love requires honesty. My father said that when he got married to my mother, the advice they received was to “tell the truth, and tell it with love.” (“be honest, but be kind”)

King argues that how we act towards each other is how we model breaking down those class systems, how we model learning to integrate the concept of difference while celebrating each other’s quirks and uniqueness, it is how we find room for our broken-ness in a world that seeks perfection.

Agape, the Greek word for love is understanding, creative, redemptive goodwill for all men. A love that seeks nothing in return. It is the love of God, or spirit, or energy, working in us all, men and women, black and white and red and yellow.

This spirit of life is what calls us to be justice makers in our daily lives, in our lives at church and in our experiences, moment by moment that add up to decade by decade.

This spirit of agape, this spirit of life and love, is what keeps us going for the long haul in the campaign on poverty that King began.  And it will keep us going in the campaign for all sorts of justice.

The spirit of life and love is what keeps us going when we hear of the injustice and challenges faced on ground in Haiti right now.
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As many of you know, the people in Haiti are suffering. The capital, Port-au-Prince, experienced a major earthquake around 4 PM central time on January 12. Most people spent the night outdoors, without shelter, or joined those frantically searching for people under the rubble.

Those countries that have sent aid had trouble getting in to help.  The U.N estimates 2.2 million people are affected, with destruction and loss of life being widespread.  Given that this nation struggles with racial inequality, with a system where eighty percent of its nation is in poverty, it seems fitting to respond to this need right before Martin Luther King Junior Day.

Our response was swift. The Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, an independent organization within our Unitarian Universalist Association, has created a relief fund for the people of Haiti. Information for donating is in your order of service. I hope you will join the work of love and justice by helping the people in need.
Our fund is specifically focused on the people who are less likely to have aid, such as child domestic workers, women-headed households, and people living with AIDS/HIV. Because of our association’s focus on creating partnerships and working with grassroots movements, this focus is ideal for our purposes.

Haiti, as many of you may know, is a nation full of paradoxes, just like our own nation. An independent nation of ex-slaves, many of them immigrants, Haiti’s president authorized a constitution in 1804.

Upon assuming power, General Dessalines authorized the Constitution of 1804. This constitution, in terms of social freedoms, called for freedom of religion and for all citizens, regardless of skin color, to be known as “Black”. This was an attempt to eliminate the multi-tiered racial hierarchy, which had developed in Haiti, with full-blooded Europeans at the top, various levels of light to brown skin in the middle, and dark skinned “Kongo” from Africa at the bottom.

And finally, most interestingly for us, in 1804, in Haiti, white men were forbidden from possessing property or domain on Haitian soil.

Should the French return to re-impose slavery, Article 5 of the constitution declared: “At the first shot of the warning gun, the towns shall be destroyed and the nation will rise in arms.”[12][1]

Even as its constitution called for creating freedom of religion and a level playing field in terms of color, the history of this country has been long and checkered, much like our own in terms of race and class.

The paradox of freedom is not one lost on us, either.
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Emma Lazarus, the writer of the poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, was part of a paradox in the creation of the Statue that for so many of us stands as a beacon of liberty in a country that values its freedom. As we said before, we say it’s an unconditional freedom, but in practice it is not.

Georgina Schulyer, a patron of the New York arts scene, found Emma Lazarus’s words. Schulyer arranged to have these words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty. Lazarus had the famous Unitarian minister Ralph Waldo Emerson as a pen pal and mentor. She was a member of the New York social elite, writing in such a way as to contrast the Colossus of Rhodes with a new American Colossus.

The creator of the Statue did not intend for the Statue to become a symbol of welcome for thousands of immigrants. It was supposed to be a model of the path of enlightenment for the countries in Europe who themselves were still battling tyranny and oppression.

The words turned the original meaning of the statue on its head. The Statue of Liberty became a beacon of welcome for immigrants leaving their countries, instead of working towards enlightment in their own.

Paradox after paradox abounds in our struggle towards economic justice.
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The nation of immigrants —both those who chose the process of immigration, of coming to a new country, of finding a new home, both socially, economically and spiritually—and those who came here under slavery and different forms of servitude— are stories that challenge us time and time again to find a new kind of economic justice for ourselves, a turning and turning until we find just the right place, until in the words of the hymn, “we turn round right.”

Immigrants today find themselves turning and turning in bureaucracy. In the words of one woman from Chicago, Lenor Magana. She says:

My husband and I went to his interview in CD Juarez in late June of 09. My husband (Agustin) has been in the USA since he was 13 yrs old. I am an American Citizen and we have three children who are all citizens as well. Adriana 14, Gabriel 9 and Miguel 5. During his interview everything was going well. The Counsel that attended him stated his case did not look bad and he may have to apply for the waiver. Turns out, he rec’d a 10 yr ban. Our immigration system is wrong in so many ways. It was such a terrible feeling to have to leave my husband in Mexico and come back home to Chicago on my own. It has only been two months but it feels like two yrs. When will our voice be heard? When will our children’s’ voices be heard? Why don’t we have the right to have and keep our families united? Her words are the cry of a people who look for that integrity.  A people who look for connection. A people who look for a sense of home, of stability, who seek that flawed American dream.  Immigrants who want a home.

Part of our work as religious and spiritual people is examining how our principles stand up to current issues. Pondering them and making arguments and decisions about how to respond to different issues according to what we believe.

For example, if we take Martin Luther King’s words to heart, words that connect with our own principle, promoting the inherent worth and dignity of all people, this work allows us to broaden our definition of who we are and what we believe.

We believe that no one person is illegal. That no one person should be in a life of poverty. That there are certain inalienable rights for us all.

The idea of a person being “illegal” is antithetical to our first principle of inherent worth and dignity of every person. The theological basis in support of immigrant rights is rooted in every faith tradition.

Rev. Kim Crawford Harvie, the Unitarian Universalist minister of the Arlington St Church, developed a network within in her congregation that responds to people like Lenor Magana, people who are like you and me, immigrants to a nation where we work to lead lives of integrity.

The current challenges to our understanding of religious integrity are going on all around us as we speak. These are battles of whether or not we will choose to help others have the same rights as we do.

Whether or not our lesbian, bisexual, transgender and gay brothers and sisters will have the rights to marry. Whether or not our most recent immigrants will be welcomed into our country.  We have to try and look at these arguments with the agape love King claimed we have inside us—the agape love we all have to give others.  The challenge to our religious integrity, too, is finding those opportunities where we can practice that agape love of King’s.
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In looking at all these challenges, we must not forget to look at home, at our congregation. Are we a justice-making church?

Are we a church that believes in economic justice for its people? For the members, for the staff, for all of us, together?  Have we considered the connections we have to the district, and what it says about how we treat each other from an economic standpoint?

As we move forward in our process of growth, one of the questions we need to ask ourselves is how we will focus on issues of economic justice. How will we be willing and open to transform into people who know agape first hand? How will our fundraiser, our pledge drive, challenge and encourage us to dig deep into our pockets so that we can lead lives of integrity, of economic justice?

Are our by-laws up to speed in terms of helping us explore our beliefs in healthy ways that allow us to live into that desired integrity? Will each committee review its policies and procedures with an eye towards justice making?

The questions Martin Luther King started with in the 1950s and the 1960s are questions that remain unanswered. Some have been answered, partially, but there is not yet justice for all.

We have been given the task of making a new nation, equal, together, with justice of many kinds for all.

We have been given the freedom with our beliefs to do this kind of exploring, to find answers that help us shape the arc of the universe towards justice.

The arc of the universe is long, says our forebear Rev. Theodore Parker. But I believe, he says, that it bends toward justice.

May it be so, and may we be a part of that arc, with agape in our hearts and minds and hands.