wfn.org | [ENS] MLK: Remembering his sermon at Washington National Cathedral

["Matthew Davies" <mdavies@episcopalchurch.org>]

Daybook, Episcopal News Service

January 13, 2006 -- Friday Forum

MLK: Remembering his sermon at Washington National Cathedral

[Episcopal News Service] As the nation and the church devote this
weekend to
honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and his civil rights achievements,
Episcopal News Service offers its readers the following reprint of his
"Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution" sermon preached March 31,
1968,
at Washington National Cathedral.

Given four days before King was slain on April 4, 1968, in Memphis,
Tennessee, the sermon offers perspectives on time, change and
non-violence.
It also acknowledges Dean Francis Sayre's welcome of King to the
cathedral -
which is not only a "house of prayer for all people" but the central
sanctuary of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and denomination
churchwide.

________________________

Note: This online reprint reflects one-time permission granted to ENS;
editors wishing to reprint text must request separate permission from
Intellectual Properties Managment.

Permission granted by Intellectual Properties Management, Atlanta,
Georgia,
as manager of the King Estate.	Further Dr. King's legacy by making
community service a way of life.  Please visit the King Center's website
to
find a service opportunity in your neighborhood:
http://www.thekingcenter.org)

Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution
by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., sermon preached Sunday, March
31,
1968, at Washington National Cathedral

I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here this morning,
to
have the opportunity of standing in this very great and significant
pulpit.
And I do want to express my deep personal appreciation to Dean Sayre and
all
of the cathedral clergy for extending the invitation.

It is always a rich and rewarding experience to take a brief break from
our
day-to-day demands and the struggle for freedom and human dignity and
discuss the issues involved in that struggle with concerned friends of
goodwill all over our nation. And certainly it is always a deep and
meaningful experience to be in a worship service. And so for many
reasons,
I'm happy to be here today.

I would like to use as a subject from which to preach this morning:
"Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution." The text for the morning
is
found in the book of Revelation. There are two passages there that I
would
like to quote, in the sixteenth chapter of that book: "Behold I make all
things new; former things are passed away."

I am sure that most of you have read that arresting little story from
the
pen of Washington Irving entitled "Rip Van Winkle." The one thing that
we
usually remember about the story is that Rip Van Winkle slept twenty
years.
But there is another point in that little story that is almost
completely
overlooked. It was the sign in the end, from which Rip went up in the
mountain for his long sleep.

When Rip Van Winkle went up into the mountain, the sign had a picture of
King George the Third of England. When he came down twenty years later
the
sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the
United
States. When Rip Van Winkle looked up at the picture of George
Washington-and looking at the picture he was amazed-he was completely
lost.
He knew not who he was.

And this reveals to us that the most striking thing about the story of
Rip
Van Winkle is not merely that Rip slept twenty years, but that he slept
through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountain
a
revolution was taking place that at points would change the course of
history-and Rip knew nothing about it. He was asleep. Yes, he slept
through
a revolution. And one of the great liabilities of life is that all too
many
people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and
yet
they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that
the
new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution.

There can be no gainsaying of the fact that a great revolution is taking
place in the world today. In a sense it is a triple revolution: that is,
a
technological revolution, with the impact of automation and cybernation;
then there is a revolution in weaponry, with the emergence of atomic and
nuclear weapons of warfare; then there is a human rights revolution,
with
the freedom explosion that is taking place all over the world. Yes, we
do
live in a period where changes are taking place. And there is still the
voice crying through the vista of time saying, "Behold, I make all
things
new; former things are passed away."

Now whenever anything new comes into history it brings with it new
challenges and new opportunities. And I would like to deal with the
challenges that we face today as a result of this triple revolution that
is
taking place in the world today.

First, we are challenged to develop a world perspective. No individual
can
live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can
live
alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is
geographically one. The challenge that we face today is to make it one
in
terms of brotherhood.

Now it is true that the geographical oneness of this age has come into
being
to a large extent through modern man's scientific ingenuity. Modern man
through his scientific genius has been able to dwarf distance and place
time
in chains. And our jet planes have compressed into minutes distances
that
once took weeks and even months. All of this tells us that our world is
a
neighborhood.

Through our scientific and technological genius, we have made of this
world
a neighborhood and yet we have not had the ethical commitment to make of
it
a brotherhood. But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We
must
all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as
fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in
an
inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly
affects
all indirectly. 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 way God's universe is
made;
this is the way it is structured.

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." And he goes on toward the end to say, "Any man's death
diminishes
me because I am involved in mankind; therefore never send to know for
whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." We must see this, believe this, and
live
by it if we are to remain awake through a great revolution.

Secondly, we are challenged to eradicate the last vestiges of racial
injustice from our nation. I must say this morning that racial injustice
is
still the black man's burden and the white man's shame.

It is an unhappy truth that racism is a way of life for the vast
majority of
white Americans, spoken and unspoken, acknowledged and denied, subtle
and
sometimes not so subtle-the disease of racism permeates and poisons a
whole
body politic. And I can see nothing more urgent than for America to work
passionately and unrelentingly-to get rid of the disease of racism.

Something positive must be done. Everyone must share in the guilt as
individuals and as institutions. The government must certainly share the
guilt; individuals must share the guilt; even the church must share the
guilt.

We must face the sad fact that at eleven o'clock on Sunday morning when
we
stand to sing "In Christ there is no East or West," we stand in the most
segregated hour of America.

The hour has come for everybody, for all institutions of the public
sector
and the private sector to work to get rid of racism. And now if we are
to do
it we must honestly admit certain things and get rid of certain myths
that
have constantly been disseminated all over our nation.

One is the myth of time. It is the notion that only time can solve the
problem of racial injustice. And there are those who often sincerely say
to
the Negro and his allies in the white community, "Why don't you slow up?
Stop pushing things so fast. Only time can solve the problem. And if you
will just be nice and patient and continue to pray, in a hundred or two
hundred years the problem will work itself out."

There is an answer to that myth. It is that time is neutral. It can be
used
wither constructively or destructively. And I am sorry to say this
morning
that I am absolutely convinced that the forces of ill will in our
nation,
the extreme rightists of our nation-the people on the wrong side-have
used
time much more effectively than the forces of goodwill. And it may well
be
that we will have to repent in this generation. Not merely for the
vitriolic
words and the violent actions of the bad people, but for the appalling
silence and indifference of the good people who sit around and say,
"Wait on
time."

Somewhere we must come to see that human progress never rolls in on the
wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts and the
persistent work of dedicated individuals who are willing to be
co-workers
with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the
primitive forces of social stagnation. So we must help time and realize
that
the time is always ripe to do right.

Now there is another myth that still gets around: it is a kind of over
reliance on the bootstrap philosophy. There are those who still feel
that if
the Negro is to rise out of poverty, if the Negro is to rise out of the
slum
conditions, if he is to rise out of discrimination and segregation, he
must
do it all by himself. And so they say the Negro must lift himself by his
own
bootstraps.

They never stop to realize that no other ethnic group has been a slave
on
American soil. The people who say this never stop to realize that the
nation
made the black man's color a stigma. But beyond this they never stop to
realize the debt that they owe a people who were kept in slavery two
hundred
and forty-four years.

In 1863 the Negro was told that he was free as a result of the
Emancipation
Proclamation being signed by Abraham Lincoln. But he was not given any
land
to make that freedom meaningful. It was something like keeping a person
in
prison for a number of years and suddenly discovering that that person
is
not guilty of the crime for which he was convicted. And you just go up
to
him and say, "Now you are free," but you don't give him any bus fare to
get
to town. You don't give him any money to get some clothes to put on his
back
or to get on his feet again in life.

Every court of jurisprudence would rise up against this, and yet this is
the
very thing that our nation did to the black man. It simply said, "You're
free," and it left him there penniless, illiterate, not knowing what to
do.
And the irony of it all is that at the same time the nation failed to do
anything for the black man, though an act of Congress was giving away
millions of acres of land in the West and the Midwest. Which meant that
it
was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic
floor.

But not only did it give the land, it built land-grant colleges to teach
them how to farm. Not only that, it provided county agents to further
their
expertise in farming; not only that, as the years unfolded it provided
low
interest rates so that they could mechanize their farms. And to this day
thousands of these very persons are receiving millions of dollars in
federal
subsidies every years not to farm. And these are so often the very
people
who tell Negroes that they must lift themselves by their own bootstraps.
It's all right to tell a man to lift himself by his own bootstraps, but
it
is a cruel jest to say to a bootless man that he ought to lift himself
by
his own bootstraps.

We must come to see that the roots of racism are very deep in our
country,
and there must be something positive and massive in order to get rid of
all
the effects of racism and the tragedies of racial injustice.

There is another thing closely related to racism that I would like to
mention as another challenge. We are challenged to rid our nation and
the
world of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus, poverty spreads its nagging,
prehensile tentacles into hamlets and villages all over our world.
Two-thirds of the people of the world go to bed hungry tonight. They are
ill-housed; they are ill-nourished; they are shabbily clad. I've seen it
in
Latin America; I've seen it in Africa; I've seen this poverty in Asia.

I remember some years ago Mrs. King and I journeyed to that great
country
known as India. And I never will forget the experience. It was a
marvelous
experience to meet and talk with the great leaders of India, to meet and
talk with and to speak to thousands and thousands of people all over
that
vast country. These experiences will remain dear to me as long as the
cords
of memory shall lengthen.

But I say to you this morning, my friends, there were those depressing
moments. How can one avoid being depressed when he sees with his own
eyes
evidences of millions of people going to bed hungry at night? How can
one
avoid being depressed when he sees with his own eyes God's children
sleeping
on the sidewalks at night? In Bombay more than a million people sleep on
the
sidewalks every night. In Calcutta more than six hundred thousand sleep
on
the sidewalks every night. They have no beds to sleep in; they have no
houses to go in. How can one avoid being depressed when he discovers
that
out of India's population of more than five hundred million people, some
four hundred and eighty million make an annual income of less than
ninety
dollars a year. And most of them have never seen a doctor or a dentist.

As I noticed these things, something within me cried out, "Can we in
America
stand idly by and not be concerned?" And an answer came: "Oh no!"
Because
the destiny of the United States is tied up with the destiny of India
and
every other nation. And I started thinking of the fact that we spend in
America millions of dollars a day to store surplus food, and I said to
myself, "I know where we can store that food free of charge-in the
wrinkled
stomachs of millions of God's children all over the world who go to bed
hungry at night." And maybe we spend far too much of our national budget
establishing military bases around the world rather than bases of
genuine
concern and understanding.

Not only do we see poverty abroad, I would remind you that in our own
nation
there are about forty million people who are poverty-stricken. I have
seen
them here and there. I have seen them in the ghettos of the North; I
have
seen them in the rural areas of the South; I have seen them in
Appalachia. I
have just been in the process of touring many areas of our country and I
must confess that in some situations I have literally found myself
crying.

I was in Marks, Mississippi, the other day, which is in Whitman County,
the
poorest county in the United States. I tell you, I saw hundreds of
little
black boys and black girls walking the streets with no shoes to wear. I
saw
their mothers and fathers trying to carry on a little Head Start
program,
but they had no money. The federal government hadn't funded them, but
they
were trying to carry on. They raised a little money here and there;
trying
to get a little food to feed the children; trying to teach them a little
something.

And I saw mothers and fathers who said to me not only were they
unemployed,
they didn't get any kind of income-no old-age pension, no welfare check,
no
anything. I said, "How do you live?" And they say, "Well, we go around,
go
around to the neighbors and ask them for a little something. When the
berry
season comes, we pick berries. When the rabbit season comes, we hunt and
catch a few rabbits. And that's about it."

And I was in Newark and Harlem just this week. And I walked into the
homes
of welfare mothers. I saw them in conditions-no, not with wall-to-wall
carpet, but wall-to-wall rats and roaches. I stood in an apartment and
this
welfare mother said to me, "The landlord will not repair this place.
I've
been here two years and he hasn't made a single repair." She pointed out
the
walls with all the ceiling falling through. She showed me the holes
where
the rats came in. She said night after night we have to stay awake to
keep
the rats and roaches from getting to the children. I said, "How much do
you
pay for this apartment?" She said, "a hundred and twenty-five dollars."
I
looked, and I thought, and said to myself, "It isn't worth sixty
dollars."
Poor people are forced to pay more for less. Living in conditions day in
and
day out where the whole area is constantly drained without being
replenished. It becomes a kind of domestic colony. And the tragedy is,
so
often these forty million p
 eople are invisible because America is so affluent, so rich. Because
our
expressways carry us from the ghetto, we don't see the poor.

Jesus told a parable one day, and he reminded us that a man went to hell
because he didn't see the poor. His name was Dives. He was a rich man.
And
there was a man by the name of Lazarus who was a poor man, but not only
was
he poor, he was sick. Sores were all over his body, and he was so weak
that
he could hardly move. But he managed to get to the gate of Dives every
day,
wanting just to have the crumbs that would fall from his table. And
Dives
did nothing about it. And the parable ends saying, "Dives went to hell,
and
there were a fixed gulf now between Lazarus and Dives."

There is nothing in that parable that said Dives went to hell because he
was
rich. Jesus never made a universal indictment against all wealth. It is
true
that one day a rich young ruler came to him, and he advised him to sell
all,
but in that instance Jesus was prescribing individual surgery and not
setting forth a universal diagnosis. And if you will look at that
parable
with all of its symbolism, you will remember that a conversation took
place
between heaven and hell, and on the other end of that long-distance call
between heaven and hell was Abraham in heaven talking to Dives in hell.

Now Abraham was a very rich man. If you go back to the Old Testament,
you
see that he was the richest man of his day, so it was not a rich man in
hell
talking with a poor man in heaven; it was a little millionaire in hell
talking with a multimillionaire in heaven. Dives didn't go to hell
because
he was rich; Dives didn't realize that his wealth was his opportunity.
It
was his opportunity to bridge the gulf that separated him from his
brother
Lazarus. Dives went to hell because he was passed by Lazarus every day
and
he never really saw him. He went to hell because he allowed his brother
to
become invisible. Dives went to hell because he maximized the minimum
and
minimized the maximum. Indeed, Dives went to hell because he sought to
be a
conscientious objector in the war against poverty.

And this can happen to America, the richest nation in the world-and
nothing's wrong with that-this is America's opportunity to help bridge
the
gulf between the haves and the have-nots. The question is whether
America
will do it. There is nothing new about poverty. What is new is that we
now
have the techniques and the resources to get rid of poverty. The real
question is whether we have the will.

In a few weeks some of us are coming to Washington to see if the will is
still alive or if it is alive in this nation. We are coming to
Washington in
a Poor People's Campaign. Yes, we are going to bring the tired, the
poor,
the huddled masses. We are going to bring those who have known long
years of
hurt and neglect. We are going to bring those who have come to feel that
life is a long and desolate corridor with no exit signs. We are going to
bring children and adults and old people, people who have never seen a
doctor or a dentist in their lives.

We are not coming to engage in any histrionic gesture. We are not coming
to
tear up Washington. We are coming to demand that the government address
itself to the problem of poverty. We read one day, "We hold these truths
to
be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed
by
their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are
Life,
Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." But if a man doesn't have a job
or
an income, he has neither life nor liberty nor the possibility for the
pursuit of happiness. He merely exists.

We are coming to ask America to be true to the huge promissory note that
it
signed years ago. And we are coming to engage in dramatic nonviolent
action,
to call attention to the gulf between promise and fulfillment; to make
the
invisible visible.

Why do we do it this way? We do it this way because it is our experience
that the nation doesn't move around questions of genuine equality for
the
poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically
in
terms of direct action.

Great documents are here to tell us something should be done. We met
here
some years ago in the White House conference on civil rights. And we
came
out with the same recommendations that we will be demanding in our
campaign
here, but nothing has been done. The President's commission on
technology,
automation and economic progress recommended these things some time ago.
Nothing has been done. Even the urban coalition of mayors of most of the
cities of our country and the leading businessmen have said these things
should be done. Nothing has been done. The Kerner Commission came out
with
its report just a few days ago and then made specific recommendations.
Nothing has been done.

And I submit that nothing will be done until people of goodwill put
their
bodies and their souls in motion. And it will be the kind of soul force
brought into being as a result of this confrontation that I believe will
make the difference.

Yes, it will be a Poor People's Campaign. This is the question facing
America. Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation. America
has
not met its obligations and its responsibilities to the poor.

One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk
in
terms of things we've done. Yes, we will be able to say we built
gargantuan
bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies.
Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths. We brought into
being many other things with our scientific and technological power.

It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, "That was not
enough!
But I was hungry, and ye fed me not. I was naked, and ye clothed me not.
I
was devoid of a decent sanitary house to live in, and ye provided no
shelter
for me. And consequently, you cannot enter the kingdom of greatness. If
ye
do it unto the least of these, my brethren, ye do it unto me." That's
the
question facing America today.

I want to say one other challenge that we face is simply that we must
find
an alternative to war and bloodshed. Anyone who feels, and there are
still a
lot of people who feel that way, that war can solve the social problems
facing mankind is sleeping through a great revolution. President Kennedy
said on one occasion, "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an
end
to mankind." The world must hear this. I pray God that America will hear
this before it is too late, because today we're fighting a war.

I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been
fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in
Vietnam
has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the
military-industrial
complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It
has
put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the
Vietnamese
people, and put us in the position of protecting a corrupt regime that
is
stacked against the poor.

It has played havoc with our domestic destinies. This day we are
spending
five hundred thousand dollars to kill every Vietcong soldier. Every time
we
kill one we spend about five hundred thousand dollars while we spend
only
fifty-three dollars a year for every person characterized as
poverty-stricken in the so-called poverty program, which is not even a
good
skirmish against poverty.

Not only that, it has put us in a position of appearing to the world as
an
arrogant nation. And here we are ten thousand miles away from home
fighting
for the so-called freedom of the Vietnamese people when we have not even
put
our own house in order. And we force young black men and young white men
to
fight and kill in brutal solidarity. Yet when they come back home that
can't
hardly live on the same block together.

The judgment of God is upon us today. And we could go right down the
line
and see that something must be done-and something must be done quickly.
We
have alienated ourselves from other nations so we end up morally and
politically isolated in the world. There is not a single major ally of
the
United States of America that would dare send a troop to Vietnam, and so
the
only friends that we have now are a few client-nations like Taiwan,
Thailand, South Korea, and a few others.

This is where we are. "Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an
end
to mankind," and the best way to start is to put an end to war in
Vietnam,
because if it continues, we will inevitably come to the point of
confronting
China which could lead the whole world to nuclear annihilation.

It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence.
It
is either nonviolence or nonexistence. And the alternative to
disarmament,
the alternative to a greater suspension of nuclear tests, the
alternative to
strengthening the United Nations and thereby disarming the whole world,
may
well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our
earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind
of
Dante could not imagine.

This is why I felt the need of raising my voice against that war and
working
wherever I can to arouse the conscience of our nation on it. I remember
so
well when I first took a stand against the war in Vietnam. The critics
took
me on and they had their say in the most negative and sometimes most
vicious
way.

One day a newsman came to me and said, "Dr. King, don't you think you're
going to have to stop, now, opposing the war and move more in line with
the
administration's policy? As I understand it, it has hurt the budget of
your
organization, and people who once respected you have lost respect for
you.
Don't you feel that you've really got to change your position?" I looked
at
him and I had to say, "Sir, I'm sorry you don't know me. I'm not a
consensus
leader. I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the
budget
of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I've not taken a sort
of
Gallup Poll of the majority opinion." Ultimately a genuine leader is not
a
searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.

On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And
then
expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks
the
question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?

There comes a time when one must take the position that is neither safe
nor
politic nor popular, but he must do it because conscience tells him it
is
right. I believe today that there is a need for all people of goodwill
to
come with a massive act of conscience and say in the words of the old
Negro
spiritual, "We ain't goin' study war no more." This is the challenge
facing
modern man.

Let me close by saying that we have difficult days ahead in the struggle
for
justice and peace, but I will not yield to a politic of despair. I'm
going
to maintain hope as we come to Washington in this campaign. The cards
are
stacked against us. This time we will really confront a Goliath. God
grant
that we will be that David of truth set out against the Goliath of
injustice, the Goliath of neglect, the Goliath of refusing to deal with
the
problems, and go on with the determination to make America the truly
great
America that it is called to be.

I say to you that our goal is freedom, and I believe we are going to get
there because however much she strays away from it, the goal of America
is
freedom. Abused and scorned though we may be as a people, our destiny is
tied up in the destiny of America.

Before the Pilgrim fathers landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before
Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of 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 forebearers labored here without wages.
They
made cotton king, and they built the homes of their masters in the midst
of
the most humiliating and oppressive 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 so, however dark it is, however deep the angry feelings
are,
and however violent explosions are, I can still sing "We Shall
Overcome."

We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it
bends toward justice.

We shall overcome because Carlyle is right-"No lie can live forever."

We shall overcome because William Cullen Bryant is right-"Truth, crushed
to
earth, will rise again."

We shall overcome because James Russell Lowell is right-as we were
singing
earlier today,

Truth forever on the scaffold,

Wrong forever on the throne.

Yet that scaffold sways the future.

And behind the dim unknown stands God,

Within the shadow keeping watch above his own.

With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair
the
stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling
discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

Thank God for John, who centuries ago out on a lonely, obscure island
called
Patmos caught vision of a new Jerusalem descending out of heaven from
God,
who heard a voice saying, "Behold, I make all things new; former things
are
passed away."

God grant that we will be participants in this newness and this
magnificent
development. If we will but do it, we will bring about a new day of
justice
and brotherhood and peace. And that day the morning stars will sing
together
and the sons of God will shout for joy. God bless you.

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