Reading: Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution (MLK Jr.) – Read by Cynthia Phinney

One of the great misfortunes of history is that all too many individuals and institutions find themselves in a great period of change and yet fail to achieve the new attitudes and outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution. And there can be no gainsaying of the fact that a social revolution is taking place in our world today. We see it in other nations in the demise of colonialism. We see it in our own nation, in the struggle against racial segregation and discrimination, and as we notice this struggle we are aware of the fact that a social revolution is taking place in our midst. Victor Hugo once said that there is nothing more powerful in all the world than an idea whose time has come. The idea whose time has come today is the idea of freedom and human dignity, and so allover the world we see something of freedom explosion, and this reveals to us that we are in the midst of revolutionary times. An older order is passing away and a new order is coming into being.

Sermon: Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution – Rev. Eric Banner

It is Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, and so I always take some time on this Sunday to pause and ask what it was that this modern prophet taught that we need to listen to. King, was, of course, a Baptist. Now we talked about another Baptist last week, but that’s not what I want us to focus on just now. What I want you to know is that although King was a Baptist he also had a special connection to our faith, to Unitarian Universalism. When he was in graduate school in Boston he regularly attended the Arlington Street Church where William Ellery Channing once served 37 years as senior minister, and where King got to know the future president of the Unitarian Universalist Association, Dana McLean Greeley. It was King who preached the funeral service for the Unitarian Universalist minister, James Reeb, who was struck down and killed in Selma while supporting the work of non-violent protest against racial segregation and discrimination. And, in a text you won’t find much in collections of his work, but which I hold dear, King was invited to give the Ware Lecture at our General Assembly, in 1966. He titled his message “Don’t Sleep Through the Revolution.”

And though the specific issues in our nation he addressed that year have shifted and changed, it is still the case that there is a revolution going on in this world, and it is just as true today as it was 60 years ago that we have a choice about what to do about it. Do we huddle under the warm blankets of personal and private comfort hoping things turn out ok, or do we keep on listening, learning, growing, and building the world we dream about together, as we say is our mission at this church?

Now, I had the chance to do some research, because I was looking at Dr. King’s message and I found myself wondering if he was the one who had coined the meaning behind what has been called wokeness in recent years, and it turns out he didn’t. No, there are records of movements encouraging people to stay awake dating all the way back to the year Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860. And there were plenty of African American cultural leaders who talked about staying awake all through the 20th century.

But in recent years we’ve all heard the way that so many of the core values we hold in a church like this, values like the shared and common humanity of all people, the right to equal treatment both under the law AND in society at large, freedom from government interference in the privacy of your home and your health care, a commitment to looking at the data to ask what is really going on, and not just what people say is going on, and so much more, we’ve heard those values labeled wokeness, and depending on who says it we’ve heard it denigrated or described as performative or divisive. “Oh, you’re so woke.”

Now that’s not what Dr. King meant when he told those Unitarian Universalists so many years ago to not sleep through the revolution. No, he meant that the world was shifting around us, and that it was our job, our responsibility, to not just let the world pass us by, but to be part of the conversation, listening, and learning, all along the way. All of us. He opened his remarks by harkening back to that old tale by Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle.” You know the story – a man goes on a hike and lies down to rest, only to wake up 20 years later. Much has changed around him, but King said what we often fail to recognize is that not only had his beard grown long, and the people in his community gone on with their lives, but also that when he left town to go on his hike there was a portrait of King George III on the wall, and when he came back there was a portrait of George Washington up instead. He had literally slept through the revolution.

“One of the great misfortunes of history,” King said, “is that all too many individuals and institutions find themselves in a great period of change and yet fail to achieve the new attitudes and outlooks that the new situation demands. There is nothing more tragic,” he said, “than to sleep through a revolution.”

The world has changed. The world is still changing. And each and every day each and every one of us is asked in one way or another whether we are changing with it, whether we are responding in ways of creativity and love to the new possibilities emerging. Now, I’m not one to say that every change is good. I’m not one to say to you that every shift, or every election, or every policy, or every technology is good. I’m not here to say those things to you. But I am here to say that in his words to us so many years ago King offered up both the essence of his core teachings and the particulars of what he thought it meant that year, in that time, in that place.

He said “that all life is inter-related, and somehow we are all tied together. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the inter-related structure of all reality. John Donne caught it years ago and placed it in graphic terms, “No man is an island entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”

He goes on to say “any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, therefore send not to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee.” This realization is absolutely necessary if we are to remain awake in this revolution.”

But he said that nearly 60 years ago, and still, still we struggle. Just a few weeks ago we hosted an event here, right in this sanctuary, and we were part of something with people from multiple Jewish communities, from our own and other Unitarian Universalist communities, and the good people of For His Glory Christian Fellowship Church, a Black church out in Aurora, and as we gathered here, in this place that was filled with people who had come to build community, and to make atonement for the sins of racism and bigotry that have been part of our nation’s history. We were seated in those very chairs you’re seated in now and Pastor Martin from For His Glory looked out at us and noted that even in that moment we had still segregated ourselves. That, though the lines were not perfectly clear, the overwhelming sense of the room was that there was a black section and a white section, and he called on us to cross over. He asked if we couldn’t do it then, how in the world would we do it in the wider world?

We are human beings my friends. We want to be around people who are like us. We don’t mean to be rude. We don’t mean to be bigoted. We don’t mean to be hurtful. But we like people who are like us. As the psychologist Katherine Kinzler put it in the opening of a book a few years ago, we are joiners. But in doing so, we create social divisions. “Decades of social psychology research,” she wrote, “on intergroup and interpersonal relations suggest that we can’t seem to turn off our ‘category detectors,’ which divide the world into us and them.”

And in this day and age partisans on every side are encouraging people to not just notice when we aren’t crossing over, but to come up with reasons why we should disown one another, forevermore. To not just notice our category detectors, but telling us we should see them as reasons to fight one another instead of seeing them as reasons to learn how we can both be wholly ourselves and welcome the diversity of experiences and views that enrich our lives. Not to make everyone like ourselves, nor to give up what makes us uniquely who we are, but to stay awake long enough that we can find the “strength in the differences between us and the comfort where we overlap,” as the folk singer Ani DiFranco once so memorably put it.

And here’s my specific encouragement to you, in this place that is trying so hard to build a real intergenerational community that includes people of many backgrounds and experiences. One of the ways that some people are trying to divide us is by saying that the revolution that is unfolding around us is about taking away what it means to be you.

But what if, instead, what’s happening is that more people are getting to be who they truly are? What if the changes in the ways that people talk about their lives, their experiences, their truth, can also live side by side with your life, and your experience, and your truth? Sometimes that comes up in the way we talk. The words we use. The way that some people want us all to turn back the clock on so much progress in building a shared understanding of humanity that includes people of every race and kind, of every gender and identity, as equally worthy in the world. “Don’t be so woke,” they say.

But those words, those changes, aren’t asking you to stop being you, they’re asking us all to make room for everyone. To avoid assuming that changes in the world are automatically a sign of moral decay and decline, and to remember that we can be the Rip Van Winkles of the world, or we can be the people who rise to the true meaning of those words that we share, to remember the worth and dignity of every person, to make true the claim that all people are created equal.

Tomorrow there is an inauguration. We’ll swear in a president who ran ads that cast his opponent as un-American, and out of touch, as too woke. “She’s for they/them, I’m for you,” he said. And I know a lot of people in this church are worried about what’s coming. I know a lot of us are scared and angry about what’s happening. And I’m not here to say that everything is going to be ok. But I am here to say we have a choice. A choice about what we do with the revolution that has been going on my whole life, and continues still.

And I believe that if we are to truly honor the legacy of Dr. King, we would do well to remember the words said by his mentor, and the founder of the first intentionally racially integrated church in America, the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, the Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman. On the night that Dr. King was killed, Dr. Thurman went on the radio and he said –

“Tonight there is a vast temptation to strike out in pain, horror, and anger. Riding just under the surface, all the pent up fury, the accumulation of a generation’s cruelty and brutality. A way must be found to honor our feeling without dishonoring him whose sudden and meaningless end has called him forth. May we harness the energy of our bitterness and make it available to the unfinished work which Martin has left behind. It may be—it just may be—that what he was unable to bring to pass in his life, can be achieved by the act of his dying. For this there is eloquent precedence in human history. He was killed in one sense because mankind is not human yet. May he live because all of us in America are closer to becoming human than we ever were before.” –Howard Thurman the evening of King’s assassination (pg. 186-187 in Strange Freedom)

And also –

We can’t control everything. But we can control what we choose to do with what happens around us, and even to us. May we become more kind to our fellow people. May we live more fully the promise of America that never was, and yet must be, as Langston Hughes put it. May we keep listening to one another, and learning from one another, and crossing over with one another. This weekend, and next weekend, and the one after that and the one after that. And as we do, may we do it remembering the closing words that Dr. King shared with us so many years ago

“I have not despaired of the future. I believe firmly that we can solve this problem. I know that there are still difficult days ahead. And they are days of glorious opportunity. Our goal for America is freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with America’s. Before the Pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before Jefferson etched across the pages of history the words that I just quoted from the Declaration of Independence, we were here. Before the beautiful words of the Star Spangled Banner were written, we were here. For more than two centuries our forbearers labored here without wages. They made cotton king. They built the homes of their masters in the midst of the most oppressive and humiliating conditions. And yet out of a bottomless vitality they continued to grow and develop. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery couldn’t stop us, the opposition that we now face will surely fail. We’re going to win our freedom because both the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of the almighty God are embodied in our echoing demands. And we can sing We Shall Overcome, because somehow we know the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

If he, who faced so many threats and challenges far greater than most of us, did not despair for the future, then neither should we. If he believed we could solve America’s problems, so do I. Friends, may we walk together, you and I, and bend that arc with the glory of connection, community, and spiritual growth, now and in the days ahead.

So may it be.