Sunday
January 19
Everybody Invited, Everybody Loved
By Marsh Chapel
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Everybody Invited, Everybody Loved
I enrolled at the School of Theology 10 years ago to study theology and ethics. I wanted to be able to contribute to making the term “business ethics” less oxymoronic. Like you, I expect, my call is to the laity. So, I did not, as my master of divinity colleagues did, take the introductory class in preaching. Despite STH’s excellence in homiletics, I knew that peaching classes were not something I would ever need. It’s not like I would ever be in any pulpit, never mind that of the chapel adjacent to Martin Luther King’s alma mater on the Sunday when we celebrate his legacy. I. mean, something like that was never going to happen.
Oops !
So the truth is I am a teacher, not a preacher. What I can do, however, is pray that the holy spirit has something to say to you this morning, integrate a smattering of the brilliance of The Rev Dr. King, and try to summon the wisdom to stay out of their way. So, “ Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.
The late comedian Groucho Marx is reported to have once said in a resignation letter to a social club that he did not want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. Perhaps it’s because whatever club it was, it did not feature the following two characteristics of the kingdom of God. First, the kingdom offers an invitation to everyone. As Jesus said. “In my Father’s house are many rooms; if it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” Second, the kingdom is a house of all-encompassing, inescapable, unconditional love.
Everybody is invited and everyone is loved
I rely heavily this morning on “Where do we go from here: Chaos or Community” – MLK’s fourth and final book. In it, he illustrates how God has a room for everyone. There is a special practicality to this. You’ve heard the expression that one man’s meat is another man’s poison. I totally get this. I’m a night owl. If you want to take a class in management at 6:30 in the evening, I’m your guy. On the other hand, if the world were full of me, well, nothing much would happen before 10:00 in the morning. King wrote “All men are interdependent. Every nation is an heir of a vast treasury of ideas and labor to which both the living and the dead of all nations have contributed. Whether we realize it or not…We are everlasting debtors to known and unknown men and women. When we arise in the morning, we go into the bathroom where we reach for a sponge which is provided for us by a Pacific Islander. We reach for soap that is created for us by a European. Then at the table, we drink coffee which is provided for us by a South American, or tea by a Chinese or cocoa by a West African. Before we leave for our jobs we are already beholden to more than half of the world.”
Unfortunately, there is increasing denial of human interdependence as we see push back against inclusivity and public policies designed to distribute opportunities fairly. In Florida, for example, public colleges are banned from using state and federal funds on programs to promote diversity equity and inclusion. Recently, a colleague shared with me a story of how a former refugee from the Soviet Union set up a $100 million venture capital fund to support immigrant entrepreneurs. I couldn’t help but reflect on an interesting juxtaposition. This man, Semyon Dukach saw that immigrants needed opportunities to start businesses and created a venture capital firm to fund them. I applaud him for filling a need suffered by a marginalized group. In 2018 Simone and Ayana Parsons established “the fearless fund”, a venture capital fund for black female entrepreneurs. They were similarly responding to the needs of a marginalized group. Even though Black women found businesses at a higher rate than anyone else, in 2020 VC firms invested less than 0.35% of available money in companies founded by Black women. Simone and Parson’s fund was sued by the American Alliance for Civil Rights, an organization founded by conservative legal activist Edward Blum, the architect behind the fight to overturn race-based affirmative action in school admissions. After losing in an appeals court they settled with Blum, permanently closing their strivers program which had awarded 10 and 20 thousand dollar grants to businesses at least partially owned by black women.
To answer the pushback, we must remind ourselves that the benefits of inclusivity extend to everyone. In her book “The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together,” Author Heather McGhee stresses this theme. She cites the example of public pools in the United States, which numbered around two thousand by World War II. Some were amazingly grand, capable of accommodating thousands of swimmers at a time. When black people sued to integrate these pools in the 1950’s, they were met with privatizations and closures. In Washington D.C. alone, 125 private swim clubs were established within the 10 years after pool desegregation. In the end, many white residents, who had enjoyed swimming for free, now had to pay. McGhee also notes that the subprime lending practices that led to the Great Recession in 2006 were first practiced on black and brown communities, often on credit-worthy borrowers who would qualify for higher-quality loans. Had we stopped the more nefarious of these practices when they were visited on those typically at the margins of our society, perhaps we could have avoided the catastrophic unemployment and loss of wealth that befell us all.
Morally, we know that we are not just interdependent we are meant to live together peaceably. Dr. King shared this anecdote to illustrate the point: “Some years ago a famous novelist died. Among his papers was found a list of suggested plots for future stories, the most prominently underscored being this one: “A widely separated family inherits a house in which they have to live together.” This is the great new problem of mankind. We have inherited a large house, a great “world house” in which we have to live together—black and white, Easterner and Westerner, Gentile and Jew, Catholic and Protestant, Muslim and Hindu—a family unduly separated in ideas, culture and interest, who, because we can never again live apart, must learn somehow to live with each other in peace.”
Dr. King may well have been channeling what St Paul tells us today in his letter to the Corinthians: “there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good”.
To each is given the manifestation of the Sprit for the common good!
After giving us a list of examples of the various ways in which the Sprit is manifested, he writes that “All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.”
Each of us has a unique gift offered to us by God for the purpose of serving each other. We are here to love our neighbor, and If we exclude our neighbor, then we exclude their gifts. If we exclude our neighbor we weaken the kingdom. Inclusion is not only of practical benefit, it is a moral imperative. King wrote that “The large house in which we live demands that we transform this worldwide neighborhood into a worldwide brotherhood.” King believed that Together we must learn to live as brothers and sisters or together we will be forced to perish as fools”
When I opened this talk I spoke of two characteristics of the Kingdom of God. We just talked about inclusion. Let me remind you of the second, the all-encompassing, inescapable, unconditional love of neighbor. Again in “Where Do We Go From Here”, Dr King wrote that “All inhabitants of the globe are now neighbors. This worldwide neighborhood has been brought into being largely as a result of the modern scientific and technological revolutions.” This is even more true now than it was in the 60’s. In its 2023 annual report meta – the parent company of Facebook – reported that their monthly active users reached 3.98 billion across their family of applications as of December 31 of that year. That’s nearly half the world.
Love of neighbor means that those of us who advocate for inclusion must develop a message for those that we feel have excluded others. When a seat at the proverbial table opens for those who were excluded because of color, sex, gender identity, religion, ethnicity, national origin, poverty, ability, or isms of any kind, we must all say to the excluders:
Don’t Leave. Don’t drain the pool, pull your children from their school, or sell your house in a panic when those who had been excluded come to join you.
Don’t leave because if you do, you will not experience the all-encompassing, inescapable, unconditional love of Christ that you will have unleashed by halting your exclusion. We have not come to replace you but rather to join you in the “world house” where we are all able to exhibit our manifestations of the Sprit for the common good.
Everybody invited, everybody loved.
For those of us who have felt the sting of exclusion, this is a challenge. There are two responses to oppression. One is vengeance and the other a commitment to ensuring that such oppression is never visited on anyone else, former oppressors included. This second response is the way of love. It is King’s response. It is not easy but it is essential. In reference to the race exclusion of his time King wrote that a “A guilt-ridden white minority fears that if the Negro attains power, he will without restraint or pity act to revenge the accumulated injustices and brutality of the years…Only through our adherence to nonviolence— which also means love in its strong and commanding sense —will the fear in the white community be mitigated.”
Loving people you feel have wronged you is difficult enough, but for us here today, there is another challenge. Though no less a warrior for racial Justice, King began to center his attention on the issues of poverty, not just for black people but by name for Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Indians and Appalachian whites, and I’m sure by sentiment all the poor regardless of demography. King argues that the problem of poverty is solvable. He quotes the then assistant director of the Office of Economic Opportunity in saying that “the poor can stop being poor if the rich are willing to become even richer at a slower rate”.
What makes these facts difficult for us is that it puts most of us now in the category of the excluder. Most in this chapel are likely secure in in the true necessities of life: food, clothing, shelter. We may have been lulled into the belief that somehow the poor suffer from their own bad choices, but social science is beginning to unveil that myth. Studies of farmers during periods of deprivation vs anticipated abundance show significant differences in tests of fluid intelligence. The temporary state of poverty had similar effects to losing 13 points of IQ. This research and more like it suggests that is not bad choices that lead to poverty but rather the reverse. Poverty impairs our thinking leading to those bad choices. We are reducing the ability of the poor to flourish in the Kingdom of God because we allow them to be poor.
So now it is us who must make room at the table for the excluded. It is us who must then not leave and pray for their grace and love.
Let us pray then that we are invited and that we can be loved
As King wrote at the end of his book, “This call for a worldwide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one’s tribe, race, class and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all… This often misunderstood and misinterpreted concept has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love, I am speaking of that force which all the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is the key that unlocks the door which leads to the ultimate reality. This Hindu-MuslimChristian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the First Epistle of Saint John: Let us love one another: for love is of God: and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.”
Let us go forth from here recognizing the spirit of God in each and every one of God’s children here on earth past and present. Let us acknowledge that God has woven them into the ultimate reality that Dr. King speaks of for the purpose of the common good. Let us go forth and love all our neighbors as ourselves, doing our best to replicate the all-encompassing, inescapable, unconditional love of Christ.
Everybody invited, everybody loved.
Amen
