Following in the Footsteps of Martin Luther King

Exodus 3:1-13


Rockville United Church
Rev. Dr. Duncan D. Newcomer

January 20, 2008

One of Martin Luther King’s signature phrases centered on his use of the terms “beloved community.” Beloved community. A gathering blessed by being full of love, blessed by being fully loved—by God.

The urgency of this hour of worship is that it is our best time to impress upon ourselves that we, too, are a community, a loving, loved, beloved community. In these fleeting Sunday mornings we make outward and visible our inward and spiritual reality: we long to be and to be in a sacred community—and in real time in our real bodies!

The rest of the week we are a nearly or merely a virtual community of emails and phone messages, and an Alexander Calder mobile of moving meeting committees and subgroups—practically whirling in the wind of high pressure D.C. life.

One gift I hope to bring to you is ways and practices by which we can stay spiritually connected during the week. Our web site can work almost as an altar place, a sacred screen. We could have a Wednesday noon, stop-wherever-you-are minute of RUC silent prayer together. We could text message prayers and we can still visit personally. As a fund raiser we could sell each other lunch here Thursdays or breakfasts on Monday, and beer and Bible in a back room somewhere. We could have random Bible study at every Karibou or Majorga coffee shop we can easily get to—led by each other with no shortage of study guides. I learned this week about this new way of learning conversational Spanish called Black Belt language study. You pay your couple of hundred dollars and you meet your teacher at a coffee shop and he or she talks with you in your new foreign language for an hour, you and your 2, 3, 4 fellow students! We could do that. Bible Black Belt!

So I brain storm with you here to stimulate a framework for how to “do church,” how to be the beloved community—because to follow in the footsteps of Martin Luther King, we will have to walk together and talk together in ways he never dreamed of—great dreamer though he was.

Just as protest marches and sit-ins were used in new says, propelled by the media, especially television, so we will find new ways to be together in our beloved community, our congregational unity life together, as we will also find new ways to walk out into the world and be lovers of the wider community and be justice makers and be peace makers: our unity and diversity in mission.

New ways of walking. Somebody made a movie once of an adult dinner party just filming their feet. Interesting perspective! It is so interesting, intriguing, to watch the feet of the shepherd Moses in our scripture this morning. He’s obviously walking to do his job—keeping track of sheep. He turns aside. Watch his feet: stop, pause, turn, move towards what the corner of his eye has just noticed: a burning bush that is not consumed. And then he takes off his sandals. With or without a sound track this is very interesting to see. Baring his feet: Jesus does this with his disciples at the Last Supper. He washes their feet. What is holy about the ground on which we place our naked feet? Moses is given the message: my people are to be a free people! And then of course, just watching Moses’ feet we would see quite a journey—to Egyptian palaces, through Red Sea dry ground, the wildernesses for forty years, up a holy mountain, down a holy mountain, then back up to re-do the broken Ten Commandments, then to the very borderland of the promised land. Moses and his walking feet. Andrew and Jesus then Peter walking over to Jesus’ house at four o’clock in an afternoon.

Some of you know the great great contemporary Jewish philosopher and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel. I got to meet him personally for a life changing hour. He of course looked like our idea of Moses, even with his cigar! When Martin Luther King asked Abraham Joshua Heschel to join him in the march to Selma, Alabama, Heschel reportedly explained to some of his more pious colleagues that he was going there to Selma and the protest march, “to pray with his feet.” To pray with his feet.

On the last Tuesday night of each month we can meet at the National Cathedral to walk the labyrinth. I’ve just done it my first time in November! Praying with our feet, meditation and motion go together. Meditation and mission go together. I invite you to consider signing up for the Wesley Seminary workshop called “Prayer as Radical Action” on sacred movement in worship and as mission.

You see, my friends, many miles have been walked since Martin Luther King first led us all to the boundaries of a very promising promised land. And the model of church and mission invented by King when he took the movement out of the local congregation no longer will help us be a congregation. King could not get his daddy’s church, the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, to fund and fuel the Civil Rights Movement. And he couldn’t take over his whole denomination either. So he created the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the SCLC, a political advocacy faith in action new organization that took an enormous amount of pressure off his local congregation, off of every local congregation. In a way it out-sourced the church’s mission to a non-church ministry. It was a brilliant organizational move. It allowed the Civil Rights Movement to have a faith energy at its core and it allowed the local churches to feed the movement without dividing over how to lead the movement.

Of course this was the same ingenious design that Don MacCalum came up with here to create RUC with its new union, congregation and CMR, Community Ministries of Rockville, to carry out social change advocacy and then direct service to the poor in ways a local congregation could not do, or even agree to do. Obviously Don wanted to be a minister but he didn’t want to be saddled down by a church congregation. And for forty years splitting the difference between congregation and mission, in differing degrees, has worked. The enormous foundational shift before us today is to have mission come out of our community, to have us be both the beloved community and the lovers of the wider community. How we each and all walk and talk together to bring that union about will be new, will be rewarding, will be hard, and will be our unique adventure in furthering the inspiring Christian walk we saw and heard so many years ago in the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Today we celebrate and honor the birth, life and mission of the greatest American, ever; the greatest preacher, ever; the greatest leader for non-violent social change, ever. Martin Luther King, Jr.: truly a light for the world, a man who put our hope back on the top of the hill in our cities, on our mountain tops.

But how we keep on keeping on with hope in our hearts and power in our actions: all will be different. What is so, so vital, exciting, fervent really, is that we here at RUC now are generating circle after circle of conversations, dreamy and detailed, council, committees, personal, staff, new moon rising sun, prayer, phone, email—generating talk that will—with God’s grace—build on this unique and important past and take us to a special and valuable, great future. That is our dream!

Amen.