Beloved Community

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On the weekend we remember Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in the US, we look to be inspired by perhaps his most enduring contribution to theology: "the Beloved Community".

SPEAKER NOTES

Beloved Community

Intro

• For the weekend when we remember Dr. King in the US, it is our tradition at BLC to re-inspire ourselves with some of his writings or sermons.
• Kings words continue to ring out as revolutionary, though our context has shifted and evolved.
• We are still very much in need of his preaching, his reminders and calls to action as slavery and segregation in the US continue to rebrand instead of giving way to a full liberation.
• Our theme we’ve been talking through this month - neighboring - breaks down the ways we can participate in a vision Dr. King spoke about often: Beloved Community.

So to start our time today we’re going to highlight some of his words from Birth of a New Nation:

Quote from Birth of a New Nation

A sermon delivered at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church (Montgomery, AL) in 1957

The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community. The aftermath of nonviolence is redemption. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation. The aftermath of violence are emptiness and bitterness. This is the thing I’m concerned about. Let us fight passionately and unrelentingly for the goals of justice and peace. But let’s be sure that our hands are clean in this struggle. Let us never fight with falsehood and violence and hate and malice, but always fight with love, so that when the day comes that the walls of segregation have completely crumbled in Montgomery, that we will be able to live with people as their brothers and sisters.

• King is setting up consequences of violence and nonviolence as ways of living: Out of violence, we have emptiness and bitterness. Out of nonviolence we have beloved community, redemption, reconciliation
  • I love the wording here- the aftermath of non-violence, the aftermath of violence. The consequences of actions contributing to a whole.
    • Choice by choice, we build community and reimagine reality.
  • And these are core themes that Dr. King returns to again and again
    • Non-violence vs violence
    • Love vs hate
• “Beloved community” — this phrase popularized by Dr. King
  • First coined in the early 20th century American Pragmatist tradition as part of a “Philosophy of Loyalty” (like loyalty to one another)
    • A society where conflict is resolved peacefully.
    • A society where people recognize the interdependent nature of all life.
    • A society where people are motivated by kindness, compassion, and love.
  • As we were thinking about all that’s packed into that vision of the “beloved community” (it’s not just sunshine and rainbows and holding hands, it’s got teeth!), we thought one thing we could do to show that was put King into conversation with two BLC-favorite contemporary writers:
    • Hartmut Rosa & Tricia Hersey
    • Two very different contemporary voices but who overlap profoundly (one a German Sociologist, one a black American social activist — so yeah they couldn’t really get more different, but that’s why we feel so drawn to the way their descriptions of modern life intersect)
  • Tricia Hersey:
    • Author and Founder of The Nap Ministry - often refered to as the nap bishop. I found her book Rest Is Resistance extremely helpful, you may have heard me talk about her work before
    • Preaches the power of rest in understanding that our sacred value is not tied to our ability to contribute to a capitalist system that exploits people
    • Rest as nonviolence and grind culture as violence
    • Buzz term she breaks down as grind culture= capitalism + white supremacy
    • Her wording: I’m not donating my body to grind culture
    • The capitalist system we are presented with - which started with seeing black bodies as commodities - is not the reality we are doomed to accept
    • Hersey presents rest and dreaming as deliberate choices to step outside the established norm, because the established norm is not working for all of us.
      • In fact, it’s not working for any of us, even if we currently benefit from systems of oppression
      • It is exhausting us, exhausting the planet, leading us into bitterness and emptiness
    • Rest is resistance. Dreaming as the foundation of imagining a different version of the world a Beloved Community, really
      • And again, not just oh those are nice ideals or dreaming only as escape.
      • But trusting collaborative dreaming as a source of wisdom that guides us to take concrete actions that disrupt systems and bring us into a new creative way
    • Hersey and King together are encouraging us to not just recreate the systems we are pushing against.
      • A creative way, a nuanced way driven forward by a longing for flourishing of all humanity
      • Balance of urgency and patience - we need to act and make changes now and know that this is lifelong work, in it for the long haul. Deprogramming from grind culture (white supremacy + capitalism) will not happen overnight.
  • Rosa:
    • He’s the sociologist I cite all the time here because I think he describes the human condition today better than anyone.
    • Rosa says the defining features of modern societies, especially in our current era, what’s known as the Neoliberal era (beginning with the 1980s), are a sense of everything accelerating all the time and a felt need to have to constantly grow and innovate or else you’ll fall behind or get trampled, and this is why we all feel busy all the time.
    • Our highest values have become formed not by cultural or sacred narratives encouraging loyalty or courage or sacrifice, but by market pressures demanding speed, return on investment, and being singularly authentic or innovative.
    • And we both love and hate this at the same time — it excites us and comes with benefits, but it also alienates us — from other people, from the world, from ourselves, from the sacred, the beautiful, the divine.
    • And I think about King in Jim Crow-era America saying the aftermath of hate and violence is emptiness and bitterness. Rosa is saying in Neoliberal-era America the aftermath of our frenetic, aggressive, competitive existence is emptiness and bitterness.
    • Where King talks about beloved community, Rosa talks about a society open to resonance — where people are not driven to control or manage others and the world as instruments for the sake of growth or speed or innovation, but rather people are called into genuine relationships with others and the world.
    • I see so much overlap there with that vision of peaceful conflict resolution, interdependence, and being motivated by harmonious relations rather than market incentives.
    • Especially later in King’s public life, when he was more explicitly critical of capitalistic practices that favored the rich and insisted that harmonious race relations alone were not enough to build beloved community, but economic redistribution for black Americans was necessary, that the country had “defaulted on its promissory note to black Americans.”
• All to say: beloved community is a robust vision for society, just as captivating today as a half century ago.

Scripture

When King would call people into beloved community, he would preach a God of liberation, connecting the liberation struggles of his day to the story of the Exodus in the Hebrew Bible.

From Exodus 3:7-8

The Lord said [to Moses], “I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, 8 and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians and to bring them up out of that land to a good and spacious land, to a land flowing with milk and honey

• The Hebrew Bible’s Exodus story, a story of deliverance, remains among the most important narratives in the history of the world, should we engage it a mature way like King did.
• This is a story of a long, difficult road out of slavery, through a wandering in the wilderness, yet toward freedom in a spacious land, with God’s empathetic presence and power to deliver along the way.
• Of course, as we all know or could assume, there are plenty of immature ways to use the Judeo-Christian scriptures for harmful ends.
• Often, I think especially with the Exodus narrative, this is done by co-opting the story and it’s theme of liberation by those who are in power or have significant privilege, though it’s a story of God’s provision for the oppressed.
• Placing wilderness and deliverance in its context is necessary. I think it’s Barbara Brown Taylor that says if there isn’t an actual threat of danger, you’re not in the wilderness, you’re in a park

Ha! Right, but in the mature hands of King, and his incredible eloquence and ability to turn a phrase, here’s how he relates the Exodus narrative to his current events.

From the same sermon in Montgomery, AL, in 1957…

Like all slavery, like all domination, like all exploitation, it [comes] to the point that the people [get] tired of it.

And that seems to be the long story of history. There seems to be a throbbing desire, there seems to be an internal desire for freedom within the soul of every man. And it’s there; it might not break forth in the beginning, but eventually it breaks out. Men realize that, that freedom is something basic. To rob a man of his freedom is to take from him the essential basis of his manhood. To take from him his freedom is to rob him of something of God’s image.

Male-centric language of his time aside, what a preacher! Right?

I never believe in God more than when people like King are telling me about God. He’s both reassuring and empowering — reassuring that there is a liberating God who hears the cries of the exploited and exhausted and is always luring the world toward more freedom and beauty and harmonious relations, AND empowering that we need to partner with that God if beloved community is to be realized; it isn’t done to us passively.

Yes! It’s a reminder that hope is an active choice. We aren’t passively waiting for a God that will save us, we have agency and are called to listen to that longing for freedom and act in ways that bring about freedom now.

King’s legacy

Transition: What else feels important for us right now to visit from King’s legacy, Hayley?

• When I think of King’s encouragement toward Beloved Community I really think of the importance of Dignity

  • Upholding the intrinsic value, the image of God in all of humanity, in all of Creation
  • Beloved community extends, its expansive — which means we have to humanize everyone in the story.
  • You can both challenge the oppressor (and the moderate like we see in King’s Letter From Birmingham Jail) AND refuse to demonize those you would see on a scale of different all the way to enemy
  • This expansive vision of community (one that includes everyone, not just the people we naturally like) is brought into being by concrete actions, choices, rhetoric, what we say and what we do— it all is rooted in dignity
    • we can either resort to hateful language that actually reflects what we are critiquing or we can refuse to participate in returning hate with hate
  • Affirming dignity of all of humanity while maintaining your own dignity
  • It’s humanizing from both ends/sides:
    • bringing up and affirming dignity for the oppressed
    • but also bringing down and humanizing those who have been given God-like power and status
    • King also wanted the oppressor to be free. That’s how these violent and unjust systems actually change
    • The byproduct of beloved community and liberation is that those who are abusing power would be freed from how that power and privilege distorts their lives
    • Tricia Hersey talks about this in her work as well — the lineage of terror, violence and enslavement strips white people of humanity through white supremacy
    • White supremacy and capitalism dehumanize everyone. Even those who are profiting
  • (As king talks about in Birth of a Nation and elsewhere) Power is not voluntarily given up; there must be pressure and agitation, persistently rising up against systems of evil
  • AND the end goal is to live in connection with one another - this vision of a Beloved Community. So the end result cannot be to defeat or humiliate people
    • That bitterness and disconnection King is warning against
  • The quote we referenced at the start of this message goes on to say our goal is not to defeat particular people, but to defeat the evil that’s in them and win their friendship in the process
    • I think holding to that goal can be really difficult. Especially when we have particular figures that seem to really represent the beliefs we don’t subscribe to. When we witness blatant dehumanizing actions and rhetoric - almost like evil personified.
    • Meme-able tendencies we have right now
      • When the goal often is to defeat and humiliate
      • You can and should still name when people are acting in unjust ways! You can put pressure on people to act differently, you can expect better. Agitation and action and pressure and revolt. Bringing down the mighty is humanizing
    • But we can’t replace hierarchy with hierarchy. And King’s words are calling us to keep dignity at the center. To refuse to give into that temptation of returning hate with hate
  • Transition: what about you, Vince? Anything else from King’s legacy that feels worth highlighting today?

• Focus on means, not just ends

  • King refused to see victimness as a blank check to accomplish your ends by any means necessary
  • King was so aware that the psychological torment of being a victim of oppression results in temptations toward violence or revenge or just inverting unjust systems (rather than re-imagining systems to be just)
  • Trying to defend oneself as guiltless or pure or without temptation gets no one anywhere. And being a victim does not automatically make you allowed to do anything in response.
  • This was his insistence on “how” we get to liberation — love not hate, nonviolence not violence
  • The realism of “how” is what leads to “beloved community”, it’s not guaranteed by the idealism of pursuing liberation
  • He preached not just about the Hebrews escaping Egypt, but also about the wilderness wandering of the Hebrews before reaching the Promised Land, where they had to battle their own internal demons (because the external demons of their enslavers are not the only demons).
  • If I can bring in one more conversation partner, this one just prior to King in history: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the young WWII-era German ethicist and theologian who was executed by the Nazis.
    • (I've also been citing him a lot lately, as I've been listening to a multi-part audio documentary on his life)
    • Bonhoeffer, in 1943, 10 years after Hitler’s rise to power, reflected on the complicity of so many “good people” in Germany with the Third Reich, and concluded that, despite various claims of ethical purity or moral high ground or clean conscience, no one is guiltless.

  > Who stands firm? Only the one whose ultimate standard is not his reason, not principles, not conscience, freedom, or even virtue. Only the one who’s prepared to sacrifice all of these when in faith and in relationship to God alone he is called to obedient and responsible action. Such a person is the responsible one, whose life is to be nothing but a response to God’s question and call. Where are these responsible ones?
  
    - You feel his lament with that last question. I am so moved by that very realist acceptance than no one is morally pure, that disinterest in justifying oneself, and that conclusion to not bury one’s head in the sand in response to this lament, but to commit all the more to responsibility to the call of God in each moment.
    - And that feels connected to King’s realist focus on means and not just ends, on our “how” being what builds beloved community, not it being guaranteed by our pursuit of an ideal like liberation.

  • Where King was saying “love not hate” “nonviolence not violence” in Jim Crow-era America, I think we today, in our era of grind culture and Neoliberalism that favors the rich, need to have a message about means too (not just ends).
    • We need to say “humility not purity”
    • The pressure to be a pure or guiltless consumer will not help us be the responsible ones, no matter how careful we are about where we shop
      • It will just keep us purity testing each other
      • And honestly, the way purity makes it feel like the biggest problem is with our everyday consumer choices and not with the choices of the powerful at the top of the chains of production and supply and regulation plays right into the hand of systemic injustice.
      • It’s an unfair burden for individual consumers to carry
    • If we want to be the responsible ones who help build beloved community that can liberate people from oppressive systems, the call is to humility not purity
      • I, just like everyone, cannot be guiltless, BUT I can be responsible, best I can, to God’s call in each moment.
      • Purity puts pressure on us: “make a responsible choice, or else!” — we hear ideals condemn us.
      • Humility sustains us: “you can make this responsible choice” — we hear God encourage us.
      • You can feel the difference.
  • In every era, our “how” is key to building beloved community. It’s not guaranteed just by having worthy ideals. That’s a lesson from King for us today.

• That persistent, inner desire for freedom has to inform the choices we make. Listening to God’s call to participate in the Beloved Community with freedom and dignity at the forefront of our minds. An expansive liberation for everyone in the story

• Mahalia Jackson w MLK on steps of Lincoln memorial- giving a written speech and she interrupted and said “tell ‘em about the dream, Martin”

Prayer

• Hopefully King’s vision of Beloved Community can feed you this week.
• Let me pray for us to help us feel some of that right now.