Day of Service~ “King For A Day”

© Rev. Susan Karlson

January 15, 2012

Unitarian Church of Staten Island

When I was very young in the mid-fifties, there was a television show called Queen For A Day on which the host opened every program asking, “Would YOU like to be Queen for a Day?” His query was greeted with shouts and applause.

This show was a forerunner of contemporary reality television—a genre I admit I don’t fully appreciate. Women were asked to tell why they wanted to be Queen for a Day—their reason was almost always about the difficult times they were having. Maybe they wanted to help their ill child or alleviate some painful condition the family suffered. They broke down telling their stories. As exploitive of suffering as it sounds, at least it was a way for the American public to listen and empathize with the realities other people face.

When I first read the title of Jason Shelton’s song “King for a Day” that formed the core of our meditation this morning, I thought of that 50’s television show. However, the lyrics to the song run so much deeper than that show’s themes. Shelton asks the listener to ponder the living legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King’s dream. He asks us to empathize. Of course we do -- some people in this sanctuary, today, or other Sundays, suffer illness, sorrow, grief, pain, loneliness that ties them up in a bundle, seemingly impossible to unwrap or unravel— to handle alone. We start with ourselves because we always occupy this body we’re given, this mind, this spirit. It is not the only place we occupy, however.

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote a book, Where Do We Go From Here back in 1967, not long before his assassination. It was re-released in 2010 through Beacon Press, the Unitarian Universalist publisher that printed the “Pentagon Papers” that no other publisher dared print. The book shows the evolution of King’s thinking, how he had gotten to a point where many in the Civil Rights Movement were unprepared to go.

He saw clearly that the Constitution legally supported the stands that had been taken by the movement but in the late sixties, he wrote, “We have left the realm of constitutional rights and we are entering the area of human rights…there is no assurance of the right to adequate housing, or the right to an adequate income…And yet in a nation which has a gross national product of $750 billion a year it is morally right to insist that every person have a decent house, an adequate education and enough money to provide basic necessities for one’s family.” (Introduction for “Where Do We Go From Here”, xvii)

Vincent Harding, his friend and colleague, and the first Director of the King Center in Atlanta (have you ever been there—what an incredible pilgrimage that is!), writes in the introduction to King’s book about “this King who had grown and expanded his areas of concern to what he called ‘the triple evils’ of racism, materialism and militarism.”

Harding recalls King preaching at Ebenezer Church: “I choose to identify with the underprivileged. I choose to identify with the poor. I choose to give my life for the hungry…This is the way I’m going. If it means suffering a little bit, I’m going that way. If it means sacrificing, I’m going that way. If it means dying for them, I’m going that way, because I heard a voice say, ‘Do something for others.’ (xvi, xvii)

Harding says it is this King that implored middle class Blacks to take up the struggle. It was this King that expanded the scope of the Civil Rights Movement beyond the racism of the South to the pervasive, deeply rooted but more subtle racism of the North. It was this King that offended some with his call for a Poor People’s Campaign, for poor people of all races to come to Washington and insist that the money used on the war in Vietnam be redirected to fight poverty (introduction xx).

Here we are in 2012 some forty-four years from his violent death. How slowly bends the arc of justice, even with the service of so many. How gnarled and thick are the roots of racism! To realize a tangible example, look how long it took to pass a law declaring Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a national holiday—15 years from his death in 1968 to 1983. It took another three years to have it observed for the first time in 1986 and it was not until 2000 that all fifty states chose to observe the day. A number of southern states, some where I’ve lived and served, in a sad effort to hold onto their confederate past, celebrate Lee’s and Jackson’s birthdays alongside King’s Birthday. King’s name always comes last in the list of honorees.

Yet it is the Martin Luther King Day of Service we lift up this morning. This Day of Service, signed by President Clinton on August 23, 1994, was inspired by King’s core belief that “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is ‘what are you doing for others’?”. It asks Americans to move beyond a day off to a day of service to honor the slain Civil Rights Leader.

For me, this Martin Luther King Jr. Day of Service is not only about helping others less fortunate, which can be perceived as being somewhat paternalistic, it is also about looking at our whole lives, examining how racism, classism, homophobia, and ableism are so deeply ingrained in us, in our society.

In this country, people from European American backgrounds have a certain amount of inherent power and privilege just because they’re perceived to be white. People with greater wealth have more status. Straight people, people without accessibility issues are afforded a normative position. It is possible to create a different future if we use our varied identities that afford some of us power and privilege to tell the whole truth about our history and work on reconciliation.

When I served as Consulting Minister for a congregation in Mississippi, I once stopped by a park near the beach in my Gulfport neighborhood where a family celebrated a young child’s birthday. I was the only white person in that park. I approached an empty swing and a young man began talking to me, telling me about his relatives and identifying each family member’s relationship to him. And later, some girls in the family asked me to give them a push on the swing. One girl asked if that was my park or if I built it. That opened my eyes wide!

I like to think that our interactions opened up something inside of each of us—that to them, I became at least one white woman who could be trusted to swing them or a person interested in their family celebrations and how much they meant to one another. That year living in the Deep South transformed my natural prejudices that antiracism and working for justice, reconciliation and transformation were most direly needed in that part of the country. It reminded me once again that I carry white skin privilege and power wherever I go and how all of my experiences can transform and open my heart, my life and that of others.

What difference would it make in your life, in the lives of others, in the world if you were King for a day or a month or a year or a lifetime? I am talking, too, about the ancient call of our ancestors—Black Unitarians like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Black Universalists like Joseph Jordan, Annie B. Willis and countless numbers of people of color that found a home in this denomination.

Here in this church, a bulwark of liberal religion on conservative, provincial Staten Island, do we know their stories, or appreciate the legacy bequeathed to us by those people of color who felt called to a liberal religion but were sometimes marginalized by this predominantly white faith?

I think of a story shared by one of our African American leaders who has served our congregations through his work on the District, continental and congregational levels. He told about an ad campaign designed to welcome people of color to Unitarian Universalism. One person lamented that the ad did not work—people of color did not become Unitarian Universalist. He was astounded—because in fact, he had come to this faith through that ad. I wonder if we as a predominantly white denomination emphasize and bemoan how few people of color consider this church their home, failing to recognize and appreciate the remarkable gifts and beauty of the people of color who have joined this church, sometimes against all odds?

As did Martin Luther King, Jr., they call us to examine where the vestiges of primordial ingrained fear or pre-judgment separate us from others. They call us back to developing our moral selves. They enliven our yearning for justice, embedded in a deep-rooted faith that fed the “network of mutuality” in them and holds out that same promise and possibility for us.

It is a profound question, “Would YOU like to be King for a day?” Will YOU work against Dr. King’s “triple evils of racism, materialism and militarism”? He had a dream and he gave it to us. Not one of us can do it all and yet there is some aspect of service we each can do. May you practice the awareness of being “King for a Day”, each and every day, and may that shift in awareness and perspective serve you and move this world beyond the dream to reality.