Sunday: Second Sunday after the Epiphany/Martin Luther King, Jr.
Reading: Isaiah 49:1-7; Psalm 40:1-12; 1 Cor. 1-9; John 1:29-42
Preacher: D. Maurice Charles

"When Jesus turned and saw the disciples following them,
he said to them, ‘What are you looking for?"

What are you looking for?

For nearly forty years I tried to make sense of recurring nightmares of fire, of the ever-present fragment of a memory. Every year in late July, as the Midwestern sun began to shine with an indirect intensity, I would find myself covered mysteriously by a shroud of foreboding. The experience usually lasted through that season I would later come to know as Advent. Before I moved out of my East Cleveland home, I used to face the East window in my dining room every summer. "Will we go to war soon?" "Will there be another fire?" A series of questions would fill the air, seemingly non-sequiturs-that is, until I uncovered the mystery I was looking for.

Now as you can imagine, psychologists had a field day with this one, propounding elaborate theories of metaphorical fires, Jung's anima, the need to befriend one's passions, and so on. But sometimes fire is just fire. Fortunately for me, where psychology stumbled, history prevailed. Last year, after asking my family some troubling questions, scouring the Web for newspaper articles and Regenstein library for books, and laying out maps of the old neighborhood on the hardwood floor, I found what I was looking for.

July, 1968: I was five years old and living in our newly purchased home on Elm Avenue in a newly integrated suburb where blue collar whites and blacks found themselves neighbors. The happenings near the East Cleveland border that summer electrified the tension, and the sheer intensity of anxiety made an indelible mark on my young soul.

If I could take you by the hand back to 1968, we could exit my house, walk a few blocks West, and in a few minutes you and I would run into the cordon put in place by the National Guard at the mayor's request, separating us from an urban war zone.ⁱ Oppression had grown impatient and Glenvilleⁱⁱ was in flames.
To the Southwest of us, the late Carl B. Stokes, the first African American mayor of a major city, arrived to survey the situation. This is what he saw:

As we arrived at the cordoned-off area, we were challenged by the guardsmen. It was a sight that made you sick at heart. As I got to 105th Street and Wade Park Avenue, I saw a half-track with cannons and a couple jeeps with two guardsmen carrying machine guns, and as we pulled up they signaled the car while asking us where we were going. I identified myself, and Barrett took out his badge and pinned it on his lapel so they would see immediately he was a police officer. The guardsmen told me they couldn't permit me to ride into the area, because they felt that some of the men, seeing two black men in a black Lincoln Continental, might let go. A captain with them insisted that the only way he could approve our going in was under his escort. So I had to go in with the captain and two other men, all in a jeep with a machine gun mounted on it.
We got to Superior Avenue and were greeted by a tank. Not a half-tank. A tank. In the center of my city, an army of occupation had taken over. My reaction was a bottomless revulsion, an uncontrollable visceral churning; I was cast down. The streets were deserted, there was nothing out there but soldiers with guns.ⁱⁱⁱ

Some twenty years prior to those desperate days, a young student struggled with the question posed by Jesus to his new disciples: "What are you looking for?" As a son of Africa and the American South, Martin Luther King, Jr. dared to dream of a time when oppressed people would no longer succumb to the violence of poverty, segregation, and terror. His search was for a method of change worthy of a disciple of Christ. What was he looking for? Quite simply, to follow Jesus in his own time. But while this son of a Baptist preacher found it easy to accept Jesus' invitation to "come and see" what it meant to be a disciple, he found it challenging to find a means of discipleship that was worthy of God's dream for humanity. His experience with violence, how it has a way of ravishing the perpetrator and the victim alike, led him to seek a different way. From Jesus himself he learned to meet violence with love, and from Gandhi, mediated in part through his contact with another African American, Bayard Rustin of the Fellowship of Reconciliation,^iv he would learn the method of non-violent resistance. Nonviolent resistance, King insisted, was the means worthy of the dream. If you look for peace, King concluded, then the means for achieving it must be peaceful as well. His message was not always popular even in his own day, particularly in the urban ghettos of the North. King was well aware of this.

I do not want to give the impression that nonviolence will work miracles overnight. Men are not easily moved from their own mental ruts or purged of their prejudices and irrational feelings. When the underprivileged demand freedom the privileged first react with bitterness and resistance . . . The non-violent approach does not immediately change the heart of the oppressor. It first does something to the hearts and souls of those committed to it. It gives them new self-respect; it calls up resources of strength and courage that they did not know they had. Finally, it reaches the opponent and so stirs his conscience that reconciliation becomes a reality.^v"

"What are you looking for?" Today's Gospel reading is not the one generally appointed for the commemoration of this visionary man. Rather the readings are those appointed for the Second Sunday after the Epiphany, this season where we continue the celebration of the revealing of the Son of Righteousness. Yet, they could not be more fitting. The author of John was a skilled and poetic writer. Jesus' question, "What are you looking for?" which begins his public ministry, anticipates a later question. If we follow Jesus through the Gospel of John he will eventually ask, "Who are you looking for?" The narrative then will lead us to the heart of human violence.^vi

"What are you looking for?" "Come and see." "Who are you looking for?" he later asked the soldiers who lead him to Pontius Pilate. "Jesus of Nazareth," they replied. Jesus replied, "I am." John uses a construction that signifies the divine name of God given to Moses. When Jesus says, "I am" the soldiers fall backwards. When they approached him again, Peter met the threat of violence with violence and Jesus commanded him to put his sword back in his sheath. Without resisting, Jesus offered himself, while demanding that they leave his disciples alone.

To follow this Jesus, King insisted, the means of resisting evil must be worthy of the dream, the dream of reconciliation and peace. Not everyone agreed. Even Christians of good will who generally were not given to violence disagreed. To this very day Mother tells me, "When they invited us every Sunday after church to head South to follow King, I didn't budge out of my pew. Oh, I believed in the movement. But I also know that if I had gone down in that protest, I would have taken one of those Southern police officers down with me! So your daddy and I sent our hard earned money instead." There is more than one way to follow Jesus.

Over the years, King's conviction of the appropriateness of non-violent resistance for local social change was broadened to include nations. Chastened by direct contact with violence and the intransigence of political machinery, he embraced nevertheless what he came to call a realistic pacifism-a lesser evil than war. Even some of those who embraced his methods of resistance at the local level thought he went too far in embracing pacifism on a national scale. He addressed this, almost prophetically, in April of 1967 in New York's Riverside Church:

[My thinking] grows out of my experience in the ghettos of the North over the last three years-especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. . . . But they asked, what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettoes without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today-my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of the government, for the sake of the hundreds and thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.^vii

April, 1968: King was felled by an assassin's bullet. Many urban neighborhoods erupted immediately. Stoke's pleas for calm were heeded until the summer of ‘68, the moment where this sermon began.
An historic irony, rarely mentioned, is that Ahmed Evans, who is credited with leading the group of angry young men who started the Glenville shootout, was himself a decorated Korean War veteran.^viii Evans had been deployed twice. During his second tour of duty, he was discharged on account of what his medical records labeled a "paranoid type personality," what we have now learned to call post traumatic stress disorder. They went on to say that, "He has much hostility, normally under control, but under stress he exhibits aggressive behavior. The condition could become progressive, causing him to act psychotic-like when under stress." Ahmed Evans, a disturbed veteran of war and self-proclaimed revolutionary, whose own country was hostile to his presence once he returned did what he had learned to do as a soldier: set up surveillance, amass an army, stockpile weapons. King had always argued that violence begets violence, regardless of the original intention...

Now, not every Christian agrees with all of King's conclusions. Many Christians of good will may begrudgingly support the use of force for the protection of the innocent: St. Augustine of Hippo,^ix Mayor Carl Stokes, King himself before he changed his mind, even the priest standing before you. Yet history invites each of us to take seriously the questions: "What are we looking for?" "Is the means worthy of the dream?" I believe with all of my heart that if Christians of good will can keep these questions alive, we will not only honor the memory of this courageous man, we will walk with integrity in the footsteps of Jesus. Amen.

Copyright 2008 D. Maurice Charles

ⁱ Louis H. Masotti and James R. Corsey, Shootout in Cleveland: black militants and the police, July 23, 1968. (New York Times Books, 1969). For a map of the cordoned off area, see the first page of the center plates, "The Shoot Out: A photographic essay." Perhaps I had orginally faced the East window 40 years ago in an attempt to look away from the action, rather than toward it as I mistakenly suggested during the preaching of this sermon.
ⁱⁱ Glenville was and remains a black inner-city neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio. We had moved from Glenville just across the border to suburban East Cleveland in 1967, a year after the riots in Hough, at the time a deeply impoverished neighborhood South of Glenville. During the Hough riots of ‘66 there had been sporadic arson and gunfire in Glenville as well.
ⁱⁱⁱ Carl B. Stokes, Promises of Power: A Political Autobiography. www.clevelandmemory.org/ebooks/stokes, (2002), 220ff. The Simon & Schuster (1973) edition contains photographs not found in the web edition.
^iv Bayard Rustin, until very recently, had been written out of the history of the civil rights movement on account of his open homosexuality. He orchestrated the 1963 March on Washington. Adam Clayton Powell threatened to spread rumors about a sexual liaison with King, causing King to distance himself form Rustin. King and Rustin would eventually reconcile.
^v Martin Luther King, Jr., "Pilgrimage to Nonviolence," Christian Century 77 (13 April 1960), 439-41. It may also be found in A Testament of Hope, James Melvin Washington, ed., (Harper and Row, 1986), 39.
^vi A Greek speaking reader of the text might recognize the connection more readily. Ti zeteite? What do you seek? Tina zeteite? Whom do you seek?
^vii "A Time to Break Silence," Freedomways 7 (1967), A Testament of Hope, 233.
^viii Masotti and Corsey, 19-22.
^ix See especially Book XIX of Augustine's City of God. Earlier (Book III, Ch. 28) in reference to the continual oppression meted out to the losers of a particular civil war during peacetime, Augustine quipped, "Peace and War had a competition in cruelty, and Peace won the prize." Augustine understood it as the duty of the Christian to use force to protect the innocent if necessary.