On 3 April 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke to a group of striking sanitation workers in Memphis, TN. He discussed in which era of human history he would most like to live. After considering the time of the exodus from Egypt, the height of Greek civilization, the glories of Rome, the exuberance of the Renaissance, the period of the Reformation, and the great moment at which the slaves were emancipated, he decided that he would rather live in the second half of the twentieth century, because it was a time of so much change. He talked about the problems faced by people of color in the U.S. and about the fact that many of them were joining together to face their captors. And that's exactly what it takes to be free, he said. Just as in Pharaoh's day, when the slaves finally got together, Pharaoh couldn't keep them bound any more. The Memphis sanitation workers, and others like them, had decided to take a stand, and they were making a positive statement. "We are saying that we are determined to be men. We are determined to be people. We are saying that we are God's children. And that we don't have to live like we are forced to live." King ended his speech with a note about mortality. Recalling an attack several years earlier that had nearly killed him, he commented on rumors of threats against his life that regularly circulated. He closed his speech with these comments.
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land. And I'm happy tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!The next day, as King stood outside his motel room on the balcony, he was gunned down by an assassin. As Moses stood on Mount Nebo surveying the promised land that he would never enter, what was he thinking? Surely he had regrets. "Just a little more time, God, just give me a little more time," he might have said. "If you must take my life soon, wait until we cross the River Jordan. I'm still strong and healthy. There's so much more I can do!" But it wasn't in God's plan for Moses to enter Canaan. When I was little, I thought it was really unfair that God wouldn't let Moses enter the promised land. After all, Moses had had to put up with a lot in the wilderness. On more than one occasion God had threatened to wipe out the Israelites and start over with Moses, but Moses had convinced God not to do so. It wasn't Moses' fault that the spies brought back a report that caused the people to lose faith in God. It wasn't Moses fault that they had been forced to wander for forty years in the wilderness. Nevertheless, it was God's will, apparently, that Moses be buried short of his ultimate goal and that someone else lead the nation into Canaan. I understand the story better now, particularly as I reflect on the words of Martin Luther King. None of us knows the time and place of our death. We all have plans, but who knows whether we will see them through to the end? What we learn from both Moses and King is that our focus should not be on our role in God's great work but on the work itself. If we are part of something that God is doing in the world, we are already blessed beyond measure. Moses willingly turned over the mantle of leadership to a younger person, and we need to be willing to do the same when the time comes. The Bible is a great story of the history of God's salvation, and salvation history continues to this day. The part we play in it may be great or small, but we are not indispensable, and thank God for that. Because we recognize that the role we play, no matter how important now, is only transitory, we can step back and let others play their roles as well without feeling threatened or unappreciated. Like King, our only concern in the great divine drama of history should be this: "I just want to do God's will."
Republicans have controlled Congress for the past 11 years, and Democrats controlled Congress for the 40 years before that. Communism held sway in Eastern Europe for 40 years from the 1940s to the 1980s (longer in Russia), and now capitalism is the dominant economic system there. U.S. education is dominated by those who emphasize the importance of standardized testing as a measure of classroom success, but in years to come this emphasis will undoubtedly fade. Fads come and go, and so do ideologies. When the ideas and ideals we support are ascendant, we hope things will always stay the same. When our ideological opponents rule the day, we long for a change. Like the psalmist, we pray to God, "Make us glad as many days as you have afflicted us, and as many years as we have seen evil." In the midst of the important struggles for peace and justice in which we are involved, it's good sometimes to take a step back to remember that public opinion on so many issues is like a pendulum, swinging back and forth. A pendulum starts at one extreme, swings to the opposite extreme, and then swings back. However, in real life the pendulum of thought and opinion never swings back exactly where it was before. Like Foucauld's pendulum, which not only swings back and forth but also progresses with the rotation of the earth, temporal oscillations in viewpoint incorporate new information, so that the political (or religious) left of today is not exactly like the left of decades ago, and neither is the political (or religious) right. As progressive Christians, we long for changes in attitude among our fellow Christians and our fellow citizens, but at the same time we have to admit that even our most ardent opponents don't hold all the same views as the right-wingers of years past did (e.g., overt racism and sexism; I leave aside those universally recognized as fringe elements). Yes, we desperately need change, but a longer view of history reminds us that, in general, we're moving in the right direction. Racism and sexism are still problems, but we've made progress. Homophobia is a problem, but who would have thought ten years ago that public opinion would have changed as much as it did as quickly as it did? Imperialism and neo-colonialism are big problems, but world opinion is pretty united in opposition, so it's just a matter of time before the extreme positions held by the neo-cons are acknowledged as such, even by the Republican Party. So as we cry with the psalmist for God to reverse our fortunes, we can also agree confidently with the psalmist when he says, "Lord, you have been our dwelling place in all generations." When we look at the big picture, we can see that God is still in control.
Joseph Goebbels was a master of deception. He could turn a brutal assault on his enemies into a justified response to provocation. He could make the victims of the worst abuses complicit in their own destruction. He could take an unpopular, unnecessary war and make it a campaign vital to the survival of the nation. He was an artist, his medium was words, and his palette was covered with a variety of paints: lies, half-truths, innuendo, patriotism, prejudice, and fear. As Minister of Propaganda during World War II, he kept the people united, convinced in the justice of their cause until the very end. Goebbels died by his own hand, but his legacy continues to this day in many forms and in many different settings. National governments offer "disinformation" to their enemies and to their own citizens. Politicians of all stripes bend and stretch and twist the truth. Journalists and writers distort the truth in order to ingratiate themselves to those in power. Company executives withhold the truth from stockholders while they themselves sell off their stock prior to a sharp decrease in value (though they sometimes warn their friends, the rich and powerful). Even religious leaders frequently twist the truth in order to get their followers to vote against their political enemies (remember Jerry Falwell's peddling of tapes that purported that Bill Clinton had authorized murder, or various religious leaders promoting the lies of the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth?). They also deny the findings of science in order to fool their constituents into misunderstanding the issues (e.g., the false link between abortion and breast cancer, the pseudoscientific nonsense of creation "science," and the "heated" denials of the reality of global warming). Perhaps most egregiously, religious leaders sometimes pervert the gospel message in order to get people to think that non-biblical, anti-Christian views have a basis in the teachings of Jesus himself (e.g., the morality of preemptive war, aggressive militarization, capital punishment, or the government's abandonment of the poor). Paul tells his readers in Thessalonica that deception is not the Christian way. "We proclaimed the gospel of God in spite of great opposition," he said, and without resorting to deceit, impure motives, trickery, or flattery. Paul believed in the power of the gospel to change lives, and to change the world for the better. Do we have the same view of the power of the gospel?
Rabbi Horowitz, a well-known 16th-17th century Jewish Kabbalist, noted that there are 620 letters in the Ten Commandments. The first 613 letters stand for the 613 commandments in the Torah. The last seven are the leg on which the rest of the commandments stand, for the last seven letters of the Ten Commandments are the two words "which are your neighbor's." In other words, the commandments that are directed toward God are integrally related to those that are directed toward people. The leg in the reference above is an allusion to the Talmudic story of Hillel, who, when asked to recite the whole Torah while standing on one leg, said, "What you would not have others do to you, do not do to others. This is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary." The realization that love of God and love of one's neighbor are two sides of the same coin goes back at least as far as the second century B.C.E. within Judaism, where the Testament of Issachar commands, "Love the Lord and your neighbor." In our gospel reading for today, an expert in the law asks Jesus what the greatest commandment is. Jesus' answer is in line with accepted Jewish teaching: love God and love your neighbor. It's interesting to compare Matthew's version of this story with the versions found in Mark and Luke. In Mark, a scribe who has been observing Jesus answer his questioners well decides to ask Jesus a question himself, apparently with no antagonistic motivations. After Jesus answers his question about the greatest commandment, he states his evaluation that Jesus has answered wisely. In Luke, when the lawyer asks the question, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?" Jesus doesn't answer directly but instead invites the lawyer to answer the question. When the lawyer answers that one must love God and love one's neighbor, Jesus agrees that he has answered correctly. Only in Matthew does Jesus provide an answer with which the questioner gives no sign of agreement. Perhaps this subtle shift in Matthew is the result of the gospel being written in a period of intense rivalry between Jews and Christians, as both struggled to identify themselves in the wake of the destruction of the Second Temple and of a growing Gentile presence in the church. At that time, near the end of the first century C.E., while both Jews and Christians would profess a love for God, it was questionable whether either group as a whole really felt any love for the other group, their neighbor. Unfortunately, this situation continues to the present among many believers of all faiths. Loving God is paramount in the teaching of all three monotheistic faiths of the West, but many adherents of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam draw the line at recognizing those from the other faiths as their neighbors, much less loving them. Muslim suicide bombers kill themselves in their zeal to kill their Christian enemies. Christian pilots and bombardiers, at the instruction of Christian generals and presidents, drop bombs on their Muslim enemies. Jewish and Muslim zealots lob mortars, fire missiles, and shoot bullets at one another in Israel and Palestine. What happened to loving one's brother? Social commentators have noted the growth in fundamentalist forms of various religions around the world today, but unfortunately, these manifestations of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam seem to know nothing about loving their fellow human beings. On the contrary, we are treated to the spectacle of a popular televangelist calling for the assassination of an elected president of another country, to self-appointed Muslim leaders preaching hate and murder, and to isolated Jewish leaders calling for Israel to hold onto the land taken from the Palestinians. Fortunately, none of these people speaks for the majority within the religion, but opposing voices, voices of rationality that advocate peace and justice, are all too silent. Yes, there are some speaking out, but their voices need to be joined by the voices of the masses of people of goodwill, people who hate not their neighbors but the violence of war and oppression. Jewish, Christian, and Muslim voices of reason need to encourage their followers to take a stand for peace, and at the same time they need to renounce the excesses of their co-religionists. It does little good for Christian leaders to renounce Muslim extremists. Instead, Muslims must renounce Muslim extremists, Christians must renounce Christian extremists, and Jews must renounce Jewish extremists. In this world of more than six billion people and growing, it is imperative that we learn to love our neighbors--all of them.