The Beloved Community

Rev. Amy Russell - 2009-01-18

The Beloved Community
Rev. Amy Russell
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. understood the phrase from the Bible, “Love thy enemies” better than most humans can. He exemplified this love by teaching non-violent resistance to oppression. Now, most of us don’t have “enemies” or people that hate us. But Martin Luther King did. There was a whole movement of people who did not believe in civil rights who hated what he was doing in trying to bring the African American into fully recognized citizenship in this country. People hated him for challenging the status quo, for wanting to change the oppressive society that America was from the beginning of slavery.
What Martin Luther King understood in his heart and in his soul was that each individual is worthy of love. He believed that God loved every human being and that meant they were worthy of love. The kind of love that the Bible calls “agape”- an overflowing, generous love that doesn’t judge, but simply loves. It’s very hard for us to understand how someone who was being oppressed, jailed, and whose family’s home was bombed could profess love for the very people who oppressed him. He says that agape is the “love of God working in the lives of men.”
In our responsive reading earlier today, we quoted King’s words “the inescapable network of mutuality”. Our own seventh principle of the interdependent web of existence reflects this concept. In King’s expectation that humans learn to love each other is that underlying network of everyone in the world being connected. We are connected in so many ways. When we look at the world affairs today, we can see that what happens in one country affects everyone in every other country. The bombs that fall in Gaza and in Israel fall on our world. The hunger that is prevalent in Africa is our hunger. When a woman is beaten in Afghanistan for showing a leg, it’s our sister who is being beaten.
When King spoke of the “Beloved Community”, he was speaking of many things: a loving community, a dream of God’s kingdom on earth, and a world in which people would no longer be caught up in the Three Evils of racism, militarism, and materialism. A world where people would truly learn to the meaning of the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
We know that the Golden Rule is the most universal religious teaching in the world. Words very similar to the ones spoken by Jesus are reflected in religions much older than Christianity and ones that are relatively new. What the Golden Rule is asking us to do is to see the inherent worth and dignity of every single person. Every single person.
That means the homeless man who wears dirty clothes and may not smell very good. That means the person who accosts us on the bus and asks us if we have been saved. That means Osama Bin Laden and yes, even George W. Bush. Do unto others as we would have them do unto us.
People tend to stick to people like them. We tend to feel most comfortable in a group where we feel we share characteristics with the other people around us. As UU’s we tend to feel more comfortable with people who are intellectual, share certain liberal values, and profess an openness about religion.
Other groups may select their members based on race, on socioeconomic status, or on religious preference. Evangelicals feel more comfortable with evangelicals. People who are extremely wealthy probably feel more comfortable with other people of means.
But Martin Luther King in his dream of a Beloved Community is saying that everyone in the world is a part of the same community and must be treated equally. Not just treated equally, but treated with respect and with love. That was his dream. Part of his dream is coming true on January 20th. Seeing an African American president take office in this county is a dream many of us can hardly believe is coming true.
But there are so many parts of his dream that are not yet true. And when I look at the world and the mess it’s in, I wonder, what can I do that would help move us toward this Beloved Community?
I think that something we can do is to move outside our own community and into other communities to learn more about them. To become friends with people very different from us. Doing unto others that we may not have anything in common with. Doing unto others even when we’re not sure they will welcome us.
Something I can do is to speak up for the rights of others, even when doing so makes me uncomfortable. Even when I’d rather go do something else. When a group of us travel to Columbus to speak to our legislators about equal housing and employment for the GLBT community, I sometimes feel a little uneasy about how we will be received by people who may not share our views. But once we’ve done that, I always feel better. I always feel like I’m helping move us slowly forward, inch by inch.
In Martin Luther King’s speech “Beyond Vietnam” he says, “A time comes when silence is betrayal.” King broke his silence about the Vietnam War in this speech, saying that America was one of the world’s “largest purveyors of violence”. Even while he had supporters who said that by speaking out against the war, he was hurting the cause of civil rights- he still didn’t stay silent. So loving your enemies doesn’t mean being silent about what you disagree with. It means speaking out with love about oppression in the world that still exists, about wars that are still fought without the support of the country or the rest of the world, about material values that prevent us from moving toward a green planet.
So, what can we do to move away from the Three Evils and toward the Beloved Country. We can speak out for the equality of rights for all citizens regardless of their sexual orientation or gender identity. We can do this by lobbying our legislators, by going to local community organizations with others to speak up about the rights of families with same sex parents. We can work with other churches to move them toward being open and affirming.
We can keep ourselves informed about issues of oppression in the world such as modern slavery, the rights of women in other countries, and access to health care here in our own country. We can write our legislators, write letters to the editor, and get involved in our own communities in organizations that fight poverty and oppression. We have an opportunity to do that even this week. A group of us are going to take part in a new community organizing effort that was a part of VOTE Dayton. If you want to join us, we will all learn something new about other communities in Dayton.
Working toward the Beloved Community is also very personal. “Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you” starts in our own families. It starts with our co-workers in our workplaces. And it starts right here in this Beloved Community. If we are to remain a Beloved Community, we must be sure that we are radically welcoming. We must make sure that we are a welcome place for people with disabilities, for people who may not have an education, for people who consider themselves Christian, people who are Republican? Do we truly welcome everyone, or do we just think we do?
Martin Luther King’s dream about Beloved Community starts with each one of us and how we act in the world. We celebrate Martin Luther King’s birthday to keep his dream about Beloved Community alive. Let’s wake up and make it a reality.