The Study Guide in Four Weekly Segments

Week One: Getting Over it.

We will remember where we were when King died, where social conditions were when he was born, what his leadership meant to us. We will mourn, lament and yield ourselves to hope. We will let go of the great sadness that he is not here to see this new day.

Harriet Tubman said, “And when there is a promise of a storm, if you want change in your life, walk into it. If you get on the other side you will be different. And if you want change in your life and you’re avoiding the trouble, you can forget it. Wade on in the water, it’s really going to be troubled water.”

Read the story of Babel in Genesis 14 and following and the story of the exile and the covenant, Genesis 12 : 1 – 3. Read it out loud to yourself and with others. Read the story of Pentecost in Acts 2.

Consider what racism is to you and to yours.

“White folk want everything but the burden,” said James Cone. Many like to respond to human suffering by saying, “It’s not my fault.” This is the cul de sac we are in. We circle and circle, offloading the responsibility for racism. Stokeley Carmichael said “Racism may not be your fault but it is your responsibility.”

Define your fault and your responsibility with regard to racism.

Define your community’s fault and its responsibility with regard to racism.

Enter into a pattern of forgiveness but not forgetting. Push yourself beyond the luxury of guilt.

Tell at least one other person the story of where you were when King was murdered.

Tell that same person what you plan to do now and in the first 100 days of the new administration to live free from the past on behalf of the beloved community.

Week Two: Getting On with it.

“What is the matter with the poor is Poverty; what is the matter with the rich is Uselessness." George Bernard Shaw

Read Ezekiel 37: 15 – 19; 22 – 24a, which is the theme for the 2009 Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, January 18 – 25. Find a stick on which to write that we are all one. It takes about 4 acres to feed one human being. The planet no longer has 4 acres for each human being. We are full up. The average American takes 24 acres to produce his or her food. Imagine what that means.

Rethink what it took for King to defend Vietnamese people in his Riverside speech. What must he have been thinking about? Remember how unpopular it was for him to link one people’s suffering to another’s.

The nation is in a profound period of turmoil, inner and outer. The poor suffer. Markets tumble. Barney Smith – a laid off factory worker, representing many – speaks at the Democratic National convention while the congress bails out Smith Barney. The poor suffer some more and have new people added to their ranks. Health insurance languishes. Immigrants are deported. The earth, air and water are threatened. The young will probably not have Social……Security. Or clean water.

We go through a campaign in a kind of denial of the depth and length of the problems, then we come to anger. Many suggest that we just “accept” it. We refuse to accept injustice. We remember Tookie, Abner, Sean Bell – and many more whose names are less well known. We remember. We do not forget. We are furious. Statistics are just numbers with tears on them.

Touch the anger in your heart about injustice. Recall that the Zapatistas call us to creative rage and dignity as our only weapons. Don’t tell each other, any more, that we have no power. Read Sara Luria’s sermon on power, appendix 6.

See what King did with anger. Learn non violence in your heart, then in your behaviour and then in our movement. Give yourself a Sabbath from anger, every week, till it has gone and has dissolved into the love at its base. Anger is love misspent. It is passion wasted. Turn from anger towards the community.

Week Three: Getting to it.

“Fidelity to truth butters no parsnips.” Scott Nearing

First we must secure ourselves. We must learn to live together, take responsibility for ourselves as well as the beloved community. Confronting materialism in ourselves is an important step. Before we can take the kind of political risks which will be essential in the future (and have been essential in the past), we must follow the laws of Tzdekah, which tell us to take care of ourselves first. We don’t need to become dependent on the community; we need to depend on the community and make sure we ourselves are dependable. Personal responsibility joins public repsponsibilty. What does this mean? It means taking care of our own health so that we are well. It means living simply so that we not use more than our share. It means raising our children with vigor and joy and loving our partners well. Are you secure enough to be a part of a movement? Can you really afford to tithe and to Sabbath with others? Or are you in time famine or money famine? If so, eat first.

You are ready now to read the King Speech on the triplets. You have confronted your own materialism and the fact that you are a body. Read it and choose a few lines to memorize by heart. Speak them softly and to others when the time is right.

How do we change our legacy and become good ancestors? What will we do about militarism, materialism and racism – now that their siblings of climate change, peak oil, homophobia, and ongoing sexism join them? How will we keep from going crazy from the multiplying gone wrongness? What is the nugget of hope in the nastiness of the interlocking messes? Some of us are so tangled that no one even wants to bother to unravel us. We must Sabbath our way to freedom from distortion and distractions. We must help each other. We can Sabbath our way to freedom from distortion and distractions. We can help each other.

The tomato on my lunch sandwich has a source in creation – and another human being picked it. Tomato workers in Florida just received a one per cent increase in the 32 pound bucket of tomatoes they pick. It will cost one cent more and is the first pay increase workers have received in thirty years.

Some people cal these matters political. They say we should steer clear of them, especially from the context of religion. I disagree. Reverencing people who pick 15 32 pound buckets an hour to earn Florida’ s minimum wage of $6.79 cents an hour is a spiritual, not a political act. Give thanks for the people who pick tomatoes, for the policeman in the squad car, for the soldier in Iraq. Humanize all people, as you have humanized yourself.

Week Four: Celebrating the Change we are Free to be and become

“We must undergo a vigorous reordering of our national priorities,” and could start by halting the bombing of North Vietnam and declaring a willingness to negotiate with the Viet Cong. American society simply had to alter its entire course, King Emphasized. “I am disappointed with our failure to deal positively and forthrightly with the triple evils of racism, extreme materialism and militarism.”

We have looked at racism, just a little. We have looked at materialism just a little. We have grieved, we have become acquainted with our rage. We are ready for a change – and its name is not acceptance. It is to come to terms with the joy we know in the beloved community – and how the forces of violence will not like it. This is no time to forget Bull Connor or the children murdered in Birmingham. When we take our joy to the movements it deserves, we need to be ready for violence as one possible response.

Partner with as many people as you can. Tell them you will help them stay safe as the movements build. Learn the arts of non violence. Get a trainer. Be ready.

Secondly, learn the art of linking as a nonviolent response to the destruction of lumping. Note that King’s key strategy was to see the smorgasboard of issues as one. He saw God’s people as one. Not as scattered exiles but home comers. Not as babbling Babels but as spirit filled people. Not as yellow people or black people but as people membered and remembered in the beloved community.

Read the essay “Life is Too Short to be White …or Straight” and learn how to put things together in a world where others fling them apart. Discuss with others your response.

Reread the Exodus texts and the Babel Text and the Ezekiel 37 selections. Write them on your heart. Restate out loud the segment you have written on your heart from King’s speech. Let the cup of endurance overflow into the cup of hope. Pray from your heart for peace and justice. Tithe your time and energy and money, and Sabbath your way to genuine peace for yourself and for all. We are ready.

King's Speech at Riverside: "Beyond Vietnam"

Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence, Martin Luther King, Jr.

delivered 4 April 1967, at a meeting of Clergy and Laity Concerned at Riverside Church in New York City

You can also click here to listen to Dr. King delivering the speech and download an MP3 file to replay any time. A great way to share the speech with a group of people.

Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen, I need not pause to say how very delighted I am to be here tonight, and how very delighted I am to see you expressing your concern about the issues that will be discussed tonight by turning out in such large numbers. I also want to say that I consider it a great honor to share this program with Dr. Bennett, Dr. Commager, and Rabbi Heschel, some of the distinguished leaders and personalities of our nation. And of course it’s always good to come back to Riverside Church. Over the last eight years, I have had the privilege of preaching here almost every year in that period, and it is always a rich and rewarding experience to come to this great church and this great pulpit. I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice. I join you in this meeting because I am in deepest agreement with the aims and work of the organization which has brought us together: Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam. The recent statements of your executive committee are the sentiments of my own heart, and I found myself in full accord when I read its opening lines: "A time comes when silence is betrayal." And that time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government's policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one's own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexed as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we are always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty; but we must move on.

And some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony, but we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for surely this is the first time in our nation's history that a significant number of its religious leaders have chosen to move beyond the prophesying of smooth patriotism to the high grounds of a firm dissent based upon the mandates of conscience and the reading of history. Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.

Over the past two years, as I have moved to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart, as I have called for radical departures from the destruction of Vietnam, many persons have questioned me about the wisdom of my path. At the heart of their concerns this query has often loomed large and loud: "Why are you speaking about the war, Dr. King?" "Why are you joining the voices of dissent?" "Peace and civil rights don't mix," they say. "Aren't you hurting the cause of your people," they ask? And when I hear them, though I often understand the source of their concern, I am nevertheless greatly saddened, for such questions mean that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment or my calling. Indeed, their questions suggest that they do not know the world in which they live.

In the light of such tragic misunderstanding, I deem it of signal importance to try to state clearly, and I trust concisely, why I believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church -- the church in Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate -- leads clearly to this sanctuary tonight.

I come to this platform tonight to make a passionate plea to my beloved nation. This speech is not addressed to Hanoi or to the National Liberation Front. It is not addressed to China or to Russia. Nor is it an attempt to overlook the ambiguity of the total situation and the need for a collective solution to the tragedy of Vietnam. Neither is it an attempt to make North Vietnam or the National Liberation Front paragons of virtue, nor to overlook the role they must play in the successful resolution of the problem. While they both may have justifiable reasons to be suspicious of the good faith of the United States, life and history give eloquent testimony to the fact that conflicts are never resolved without trustful give and take on both sides.

Tonight, however, I wish not to speak with Hanoi and the National Liberation Front, but rather to my fellowed [sic] Americans, who, with me, bear the greatest responsibility in ending a conflict that has exacted a heavy price on both continents.

Since I am a preacher by trade, I suppose it is not surprising that I have seven major reasons for bringing Vietnam into the field of my moral vision. There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I, and others, have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor -- both black and white -- through the poverty program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam, and I watched this program broken and eviscerated, as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So, I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.

Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem. And so we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. And so we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would hardly live on the same block in Chicago. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.

My third reason moves to an even deeper level of awareness, for it grows out of my experience in the ghettoes of the North over the last three years -- especially the last three summers. As I have walked among the desperate, rejected, and angry young men, I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they ask -- and rightly so -- what about Vietnam? They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

For those who ask the question, "Aren't you a civil rights leader?" and thereby mean to exclude me from the movement for peace, I have this further answer. In 1957 when a group of us formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, we chose as our motto: "To save the soul of America." We were convinced that we could not limit our vision to certain rights for black people, but instead affirmed the conviction that America would never be free or saved from itself until the descendants of its slaves were loosed completely from the shackles they still wear. In a way we were agreeing with Langston Hughes, that black bard of Harlem, who had written earlier:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath --
America will be!

Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America's soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read: Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over. So it is that those of us who are yet determined that America will be are led down the path of protest and dissent, working for the health of our land.

As if the weight of such a commitment to the life and health of America were not enough, another burden of responsibility was placed upon me in 1954 [sic]; and I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man." This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances, but even if it were not present I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I'm speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the good news was meant for all men -- for Communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative? Have they forgotten that my ministry is in obedience to the One who loved his enemies so fully that he died for them? What then can I say to the Vietcong or to Castro or to Mao as a faithful minister of this One? Can I threaten them with death or must I not share with them my life?

And finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood, and because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned especially for his suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them.

This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation's self-defined goals and positions. We are called to speak for the weak, for the voiceless, for the victims of our nation and for those it calls "enemy," for no document from human hands can make these humans any less our brothers.

And as I ponder the madness of Vietnam and search within myself for ways to understand and respond in compassion, my mind goes constantly to the people of that peninsula. I speak now not of the soldiers of each side, not of the ideologies of the Liberation Front, not of the junta in Saigon, but simply of the people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now. I think of them, too, because it is clear to me that there will be no meaningful solution there until some attempt is made to know them and hear their broken cries.

They must see Americans as strange liberators. The Vietnamese people proclaimed their own independence in 1954 -- in 1945 rather -- after a combined French and Japanese occupation and before the communist revolution in China. They were led by Ho Chi Minh. Even though they quoted the American Declaration of Independence in their own document of freedom, we refused to recognize them. Instead, we decided to support France in its reconquest of her former colony. Our government felt then that the Vietnamese people were not ready for independence, and we again fell victim to the deadly Western arrogance that has poisoned the international atmosphere for so long. With that tragic decision we rejected a revolutionary government seeking self-determination and a government that had been established not by China -- for whom the Vietnamese have no great love -- but by clearly indigenous forces that included some communists. For the peasants this new government meant real land reform, one of the most important needs in their lives.

For nine years following 1945 we denied the people of Vietnam the right of independence. For nine years we vigorously supported the French in their abortive effort to recolonize Vietnam. Before the end of the war we were meeting eighty percent of the French war costs. Even before the French were defeated at Dien Bien Phu, they began to despair of their reckless action, but we did not. We encouraged them with our huge financial and military supplies to continue the war even after they had lost the will. Soon we would be paying almost the full costs of this tragic attempt at recolonization.

After the French were defeated, it looked as if independence and land reform would come again through the Geneva Agreement. But instead there came the United States, determined that Ho should not unify the temporarily divided nation, and the peasants watched again as we supported one of the most vicious modern dictators, our chosen man, Premier Diem. The peasants watched and cringed as Diem ruthlessly rooted out all opposition, supported their extortionist landlords, and refused even to discuss reunification with the North. The peasants watched as all this was presided over by United States' influence and then by increasing numbers of United States troops who came to help quell the insurgency that Diem's methods had aroused. When Diem was overthrown they may have been happy, but the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace.

The only change came from America, as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us, not their fellow Vietnamese, the real enemy. They move sadly and apathetically as we herd them off the land of their fathers into concentration camps where minimal social needs are rarely met. They know they must move on or be destroyed by our bombs.

So they go, primarily women and children and the aged. They watch as we poison their water, as we kill a million acres of their crops. They must weep as the bulldozers roar through their areas preparing to destroy the precious trees. They wander into the hospitals with at least twenty casualties from American firepower for one Vietcong-inflicted injury. So far we may have killed a million of them, mostly children. They wander into the towns and see thousands of the children, homeless, without clothes, running in packs on the streets like animals. They see the children degraded by our soldiers as they beg for food. They see the children selling their sisters to our soldiers, soliciting for their mothers.

What do the peasants think as we ally ourselves with the landlords and as we refuse to put any action into our many words concerning land reform? What do they think as we test out our latest weapons on them, just as the Germans tested out new medicine and new tortures in the concentration camps of Europe? Where are the roots of the independent Vietnam we claim to be building? Is it among these voiceless ones?

We have destroyed their two most cherished institutions: the family and the village. We have destroyed their land and their crops. We have cooperated in the crushing of the nation's only noncommunist revolutionary political force, the unified Buddhist Church. We have supported the enemies of the peasants of Saigon. We have corrupted their women and children and killed their men.

Now there is little left to build on, save bitterness. Soon the only solid physical foundations remaining will be found at our military bases and in the concrete of the concentration camps we call "fortified hamlets." The peasants may well wonder if we plan to build our new Vietnam on such grounds as these. Could we blame them for such thoughts? We must speak for them and raise the questions they cannot raise. These, too, are our brothers.

Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. What of the National Liberation Front, that strangely anonymous group we call "VC" or "communists"? What must they think of the United States of America when they realize that we permitted the repression and cruelty of Diem, which helped to bring them into being as a resistance group in the South? What do they think of our condoning the violence which led to their own taking up of arms? How can they believe in our integrity when now we speak of "aggression from the North" as if there were nothing more essential to the war? How can they trust us when now we charge them with violence after the murderous reign of Diem and charge them with violence while we pour every new weapon of death into their land? Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts.

How do they judge us when our officials know that their membership is less than twenty-five percent communist, and yet insist on giving them the blanket name? What must they be thinking when they know that we are aware of their control of major sections of Vietnam, and yet we appear ready to allow national elections in which this highly organized political parallel government will not have a part? They ask how we can speak of free elections when the Saigon press is censored and controlled by the military junta. And they are surely right to wonder what kind of new government we plan to help form without them, the only party in real touch with the peasants. They question our political goals and they deny the reality of a peace settlement from which they will be excluded. Their questions are frighteningly relevant. Is our nation planning to build on political myth again, and then shore it up upon the power of new violence?

Here is the true meaning and value of compassion and nonviolence, when it helps us to see the enemy's point of view, to hear his questions, to know his assessment of ourselves. For from his view we may indeed see the basic weaknesses of our own condition, and if we are mature, we may learn and grow and profit from the wisdom of the brothers who are called the opposition.

So, too, with Hanoi. In the North, where our bombs now pummel the land, and our mines endanger the waterways, we are met by a deep but understandable mistrust. To speak for them is to explain this lack of confidence in Western words, and especially their distrust of American intentions now. In Hanoi are the men who led the nation to independence against the Japanese and the French, the men who sought membership in the French Commonwealth and were betrayed by the weakness of Paris and the willfulness of the colonial armies. It was they who led a second struggle against French domination at tremendous costs, and then were persuaded to give up the land they controlled between the thirteenth and seventeenth parallel as a temporary measure at Geneva. After 1954 they watched us conspire with Diem to prevent elections which could have surely brought Ho Chi Minh to power over a united Vietnam, and they realized they had been betrayed again. When we ask why they do not leap to negotiate, these things must be remembered.

Also, it must be clear that the leaders of Hanoi considered the presence of American troops in support of the Diem regime to have been the initial military breach of the Geneva Agreement concerning foreign troops. They remind us that they did not begin to send troops in large numbers and even supplies into the South until American forces had moved into the tens of thousands.

Hanoi remembers how our leaders refused to tell us the truth about the earlier North Vietnamese overtures for peace, how the president claimed that none existed when they had clearly been made. Ho Chi Minh has watched as America has spoken of peace and built up its forces, and now he has surely heard the increasing international rumors of American plans for an invasion of the North. He knows the bombing and shelling and mining we are doing are part of traditional pre-invasion strategy. Perhaps only his sense of humor and of irony can save him when he hears the most powerful nation of the world speaking of aggression as it drops thousands of bombs on a poor, weak nation more than eight hundred, or rather, eight thousand miles away from its shores.

At this point I should make it clear that while I have tried in these last few minutes to give a voice to the voiceless in Vietnam and to understand the arguments of those who are called "enemy," I am as deeply concerned about our own troops there as anything else. For it occurs to me that what we are submitting them to in Vietnam is not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war where armies face each other and seek to destroy. We are adding cynicism to the process of death, for they must know after a short period there that none of the things we claim to be fighting for are really involved. Before long they must know that their government has sent them into a struggle among Vietnamese, and the more sophisticated surely realize that we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor.

Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home, and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as one who loves America, to the leaders of our own nation: The great initiative in this war is ours; the initiative to stop it must be ours.

This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:

Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the heart of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism (unquote).

If we continue, there will be no doubt in my mind and in the mind of the world that we have no honorable intentions in Vietnam. If we do not stop our war against the people of Vietnam immediately, the world will be left with no other alternative than to see this as some horrible, clumsy, and deadly game we have decided to play. The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong from the beginning of our adventure in Vietnam, that we have been detrimental to the life of the Vietnamese people. The situation is one in which we must be ready to turn sharply from our present ways. In order to atone for our sins and errors in Vietnam, we should take the initiative in bringing a halt to this tragic war.

I would like to suggest five concrete things that our government should do immediately to begin the long and difficult process of extricating ourselves from this nightmarish conflict:

Number one: End all bombing in North and South Vietnam.

Number two: Declare a unilateral cease-fire in the hope that such action will create the atmosphere for negotiation.

Three: Take immediate steps to prevent other battlegrounds in Southeast Asia by curtailing our military buildup in Thailand and our interference in Laos.

Four: Realistically accept the fact that the National Liberation Front has substantial support in South Vietnam and must thereby play a role in any meaningful negotiations and any future Vietnam government.

Five: Set a date that we will remove all foreign troops from Vietnam in accordance with the 1954 Geneva Agreement.

Part of our ongoing...part of our ongoing commitment might well express itself in an offer to grant asylum to any Vietnamese who fears for his life under a new regime which included the Liberation Front. Then we must make what reparations we can for the damage we have done. We must provide the medical aid that is badly needed, making it available in this country, if necessary. Meanwhile... meanwhile, we in the churches and synagogues have a continuing task while we urge our government to disengage itself from a disgraceful commitment. We must continue to raise our voices and our lives if our nation persists in its perverse ways in Vietnam. We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative method of protest possible.

As we counsel young men concerning military service, we must clarify for them our nation's role in Vietnam and challenge them with the alternative of conscientious objection. I am pleased to say that this is a path now chosen by more than seventy students at my own alma mater, Morehouse College, and I recommend it to all who find the American course in Vietnam a dishonorable and unjust one. Moreover, I would encourage all ministers of draft age to give up their ministerial exemptions and seek status as conscientious objectors. These are the times for real choices and not false ones. We are at the moment when our lives must be placed on the line if our nation is to survive its own folly. Every man of humane convictions must decide on the protest that best suits his convictions, but we must all protest.

Now there is something seductively tempting about stopping there and sending us all off on what in some circles has become a popular crusade against the war in Vietnam. I say we must enter that struggle, but I wish to go on now to say something even more disturbing.

The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit, and if we ignore this sobering reality...and if we ignore this sobering reality, we will find ourselves organizing "clergy and laymen concerned" committees for the next generation. They will be concerned about Guatemala and Peru. They will be concerned about Thailand and Cambodia. They will be concerned about Mozambique and South Africa. We will be marching for these and a dozen other names and attending rallies without end, unless there is a significant and profound change in American life and policy.

And so, such thoughts take us beyond Vietnam, but not beyond our calling as sons of the living God.

In 1957, a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. During the past ten years, we have seen emerge a pattern of suppression which has now justified the presence of U.S. military advisors in Venezuela. This need to maintain social stability for our investments accounts for the counterrevolutionary action of American forces in Guatemala. It tells why American helicopters are being used against guerrillas in Cambodia and why American napalm and Green Beret forces have already been active against rebels in Peru.

It is with such activity in mind that the words of the late John F. Kennedy come back to haunt us. Five years ago he said, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that come from the immense profits of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin...we must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights, are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.

A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.

A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This kind of positive revolution of values is our best defense against communism. War is not the answer. Communism will never be defeated by the use of atomic bombs or nuclear weapons. Let us not join those who shout war and, through their misguided passions, urge the United States to relinquish its participation in the United Nations. These are days which demand wise restraint and calm reasonableness. We must not engage in a negative anticommunism, but rather in a positive thrust for democracy, realizing that our greatest defense against communism is to take offensive action in behalf of justice. We must with positive action seek to remove those conditions of poverty, insecurity, and injustice, which are the fertile soil in which the seed of communism grows and develops.

These are revolutionary times. All over the globe men are revolting against old systems of exploitation and oppression, and out of the wounds of a frail world, new systems of justice and equality are being born. The shirtless and barefoot people of the land are rising up as never before. The people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. We in the West must support these revolutions.

It is a sad fact that because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch antirevolutionaries. This has driven many to feel that only Marxism has a revolutionary spirit. Therefore, communism is a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions that we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when "every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain."

A genuine revolution of values means in the final analysis that our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Every nation must now develop an overriding loyalty to mankind as a whole in order to preserve the best in their individual societies.

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 mankind. This oft misunderstood, this oft misinterpreted concept, so readily dismissed by the Nietzsches of the world as a weak and cowardly force, has now become an absolute necessity for the survival of man. When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am not speaking of that force which is just emotional bosh. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-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 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 hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.

We can no longer afford to worship the god of hate or bow before the altar of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever-rising tides of hate. And history is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path of hate. As Arnold Toynbee says: "Love is the ultimate force that makes for the saving choice of life and good against the damning choice of death and evil. Therefore the first hope in our inventory must be the hope that love is going to have the last word" (unquote).

We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late. Procrastination is still the thief of time. Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with a lost opportunity. The tide in the affairs of men does not remain at flood -- it ebbs. We may cry out desperately for time to pause in her passage, but time is adamant to every plea and rushes on. Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, "Too late." There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect. Omar Khayyam is right: "The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on."

We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. We must move past indecision to action. We must find new ways to speak for peace in Vietnam and justice throughout the developing world, a world that borders on our doors. If we do not act, we shall surely be dragged down the long, dark, and shameful corridors of time reserved for those who possess power without compassion, might without morality, and strength without sight.

Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message -- of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.

As that noble bard of yesterday, James Russell Lowell, eloquently stated:

Once to every man and nation comes a moment to decide,

In the strife of Truth and Falsehood, for the good or evil side;

Some great cause, God's new Messiah offering each the bloom or blight,

And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Though the cause of evil prosper, yet 'tis truth alone is strong

Though her portions be the scaffold, and upon the throne be wrong

Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim unknown

Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

And if we will only make the right choice, we will be able to transform this pending cosmic elegy into a creative psalm of peace.

If we will make the right choice, we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our world into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

"Life is Too Short to be White" by Donna Schaper

Life is too short to be white…and straight. This essay, by Donna Schaper, is especially for white and straight and Christian people. It shows one root of racism, which is scapegoating.

In the world of the goat – shorthand for scapegoating – the beat goes on. The beatings go on. There really isn’t much difference between anti-Semitism, homophobia, racism and sexism: they all count on their being a goat, someone on whom to blame what is disliked or feared in the self. There is, of course, lots of difference when the goating comes on you, as an individual, discrete person – and when it combines laterally with goating of black and brown, Jew and gay, etc. Lumping hurts; it is another way of disallowing individuality. Still, the underlying cause of goating – bad theology, particularly bad atonement theology – is the same for all those lumped as other than NORMAL. Atonement theology: that God goated Jesus in order to save us from our sins. This precedent for scapegoating, and therefore racism and its siblings, is the heart of the matter. If we can touch the heart, we can change the world. First I will try to convince you of the size of the problem in our hearts when they goat.

The possibilities for goating are endless. With Jews the “Goat” is greed, women it is softness, gays it is sex, blacks it is laziness. The goat is what needs to be sacrificed, murdered, destroyed, and made holy by violence. We lay the goat we have slain on a holy altar, barbecue it, and act like we have done something for God. We have not – but at least our own suffering goes away for a while and is replaced by the intensity of violent energy. The goat projections are the drumbeat of the less than ideal history we have known. It could be different – especially if we could all embrace all of ourselves and not throw off what we “normals” don’t like on to the famous “Other.”

A review of goating history (state side) travels through witches and Jews, then Italians and Irish immigrants. Before that slaves were otherized, goatized, to justify white supremacy and use of them. God gets called in on the oddest missions! Lately in a new twist of the ancient twistedness, immigrants are no longer called just immigrants, a privilege the Irish and Italians enjoyed while they were demonized. “Illegal” appears to be the word of necessity to attach to immigrants. Gays are likewise scapegoated as all that is wrong with America. There is a serious paranoid pattern in Christian cultures – and the need to blame somebody for something is ever present. Its source is the sacrifice, the burnt offering and the substitution of Jesus as Christ goat. The big word for this is atonement, the price paid for our sins. To change any of the isms we have to change the way we substitute Jesus and cross for salvation. We have to atone for the atonement theory. But first we must define some terms. If the violence and the goating is clear enough as the heart of our suffering and the suffering we cause for others, what is ITS source? Its source is what I call “whiteness”, what I could call “Westernness” or just bad atonement theology, lined up to shoot the others who threaten to reveal our own suffering.

We can define Western whiteness as the bland, nearly unconscious, color devoid externalization of fault. James Cone puts it well when he says, “White Folk want everything but the burden.” What we do to gays and blacks is to blame them for what we refuse to imagine is wrong in ourselves. (I know that homophobia is not restricted to whites. It is an equal opportunity employer. Nevertheless it comes from the white theology for the other.) Externalization and “goating” is deep within our psyche: it is almost as though we take the color and puzzlements of life and move them, physically, in somebody else’s house, taking all the color and joy out of our own. Blacks are lazy, we are not. We just sit on our couch with our clicker, imagining that we are hard at work. Gays are dirty, we are not. We just masturbate in our car in traffic and imagine no one sees us. We wouldn’t have “fun” sex at home. Of course these are exaggerations: some whites are sexy and some are puzzled by their own laziness. Mythically and culturally, however, we externalize at a great rate.

Consider Senator Larry Craig for a minute. Talk about denial getting us in trouble with the truth. I don’t ordinarily feel compassion for Republicans but this man is breaking my heart. Nina Burleigh in The Huffington Post carried an incredible story about Gay Republicans, most of whom didn’t add Senator Craig’s cell phone mishap to their resume of hiddenness but resembled his self-deceit. (Not everyone heard but indeed he called someone he thought was a press pal and told him how to manipulate his story. It turned out he had “misdialed.” With the Craigs of the world, the excuses run wild.) “Prick any conservative, “ Burleigh says, “and the Kink oozes out. The rockier the rib, the more likely you’ll find pink lingerie under the trousers or a bull whip and machete in the beside table.” We may find Senator Craig’s self deceit either pathetic or humorous or tragic – or all three. The message of the Haggards and the Foleys and now the Craig’s, however, begs us to repent deceit. Why hide in bathrooms? Burleigh’s argument is that conservatives are so afraid of their own sexual interests that they want the government to save them from themselves – thus the punishmentalist legislation.

Why not be the people whom we are, out loud? In the eyes of God, we don’t need to be perfect. Nor do we need to hide our shame at not being perfect. We need “big fat grace” to get over that and come to Jesus, just as we are. The key to ungoating goating is grace: it is to accept the fact that some whites are lazy, some Jews greedy, some fundamentalists over-sexed (what a concept!), and the like. When we know we are not perfect, we “goat” less. Humility in the heart stops much suffering.

Let me expand the argument about externalization, projection, goating and the faith. We live by grace and not works righteousness. For a completely different example, which will show us just how dependent we are on denial, consider the environmental crisis. We are people who have not noticed that the environment is in a lot of trouble. As Grace Paley put it so well, we just didn’t see how big our thighs were getting. Now we notice. Now we are outed or out ourselves or just peek out the closet door. We see. We were blinded, self blinded, culturally oppressed by others – who we thought wouldn’t understand our concern or punish us for having it – but any which way you cut it, we were in denial. But now HALLELUJAH, we see. We don’t need to be embarrassed for not having seen for so long. We can “confess” our blindness. We can ask each other for help. We might even (in an odd twist of Burleigh’s argument about getting the state to stop us) ask the state for help.

When I say we need the government to “punish”/ “Liberate” us from ourselves by, let’s say, raising gas prices, do I mean that we are not capable of self-discipline or self-disclosure? Are we in some kind of denial about just how weak and peer conscious we are? Yup. We appear to need help. We appear to be in trouble. We appear to need help. Some of us are in so much trouble that we send out a self-promoting message to the wrong cell phone number in a loud cry for help. Won’t somebody help us get to the truth about who we are and what’s going on? Senator Craig’s mishap reminds me ever so much of a twelve year old who is doing drugs and hides them in his mother’s laundry basket.

What is hard for “white” folk is that we don’t know how to suffer. We think we’re not supposed to suffer so we play games with the human condition. Others are to suffer, not us.

Punishmentalist theology – the kind that is light on grace and heavy on law -- tries to blame others for what is wrong. Grace filled theology – the kind that is light on law and heavy on grace -- accepts both blame and shame and knows that both white folk and black folk, immigrants, legal and not, gay and straight, the whole kit and caboodle, have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. Translated, we have missed the mark of our true humanity. We need help. We don’t need to hide from the fact that we all need help.

We don’t need to hide from our “sins” and indeed we may need others to help us out of our trouble. That is not a crime so much as a blessing. When we see the vigor with which violence against Blacks and Gays has occurred, we have to go to its bottom in our own self-loathing. From there we can reapproach the cross and the atonement. But there are deeper levels, still, to the way our internal difficulties externalize into racism and homophobia and more.

THE PLOT THICKENS

Being “Alien” is bad enough. Being blamed for being alien is worse. Being blamed for your poverty is also pretty rotten. “It’s your fault!” We scream this at others because we don’t want to bear the “fault” of our own suffering. We don’t know how to suffer. Having a demonic alien seems to pacify something in people. Gays get a little different language beyond demonic alien: they are not normal, implying that normal is good. But the demonizing, externalizing, scapegoating pattern is the same. You can almost hear its hatred winding up, like a pitcher about to throw a fast ball. When the phrase “You people” comes out, watch out. When the phrase, “Them” comes out, duck. When the phrase “Not like ordinary people” shows up, put on your bullet proof vest or at least your helmet. The OTHERIZING is the pattern that links the civil rights movement, the gay movement and many others. Those people, you people, the people not known as people but the ones known as them are the problem. We ”normal” people no longer have a problem: we gave it to you to carry.

Some folk want everything but the burden.

By normal I mean me. White, Straight, uncomfortable with people who are not. The poverty of the normal white straight person is extraordinary. We are spiritually homeless. We are in need of shelter – and we look for shelter in all the wrong places. We look for shelter in acting as though we are better than everyone else. We look for our goodness by making other people look bad. The gay rights movement and the civil rights movement are alike in being on the receiving end of the demonizing. “They” make “us” uncomfortable. That is the main thing that joins the movements: the externalization on the one called the other who then becomes the goat in the system. We look good in cheap ways. We look good in ways we don’t pay for. We get a virtue bargain by making others less than we think we are. We then add institutional power – health insurance, segregated schools – to our cultural and mythical superiority and live dull lives. The lies are too deep to allow life to be exciting. Excitement is the tension between the is and the ought. Excitement knows whom you really are and that you are ok anyway. “I’m not ok, you’re not ok, and that’s ok, “ is Bill Coffin’s best line. That is excitement. That is a level playing field. That is colorful living; it has tension, exposed, rather than hidden.

Life is just way too short to be white. One way or another the lies will catch up with us. And why do we tell lies? To protect ourselves from the truth. We think we are protecting “others” but that is a lie on top of a lie.

Unfortunately there is a great expense in this way of being. It only looks like a bargain. In fact, it is extraordinarily expensive. “If you are not who I think you are, then I am not who I think I am”, said James Baldwin. The deceits and fictions wear away at our soul. White people become “white”, vacated of color, empty vessesls of false virtue, supported not just by the psychological games of white privilege but the systemic intrusions of same in schools, on jobs, and in real estate patterns. The white man’s burden becomes something OTHERS carry. Straight people become narrow and not just straight. I may be straight but I am not narrow” is a telling slogan: it names the problem of what happens to those who are anti gay. We/ they become narrow.

I would like to think that I am but a recovering racist and a recovering sexist and a recovering heterosexist but the truth is a little less. I am more a racist, a sexist and a heterosexist than not. If one more white person assures me “I am not racist…but…” or one more straight person tells me, “I am not prejudiced but…”, I will scream. Why all the buts? What in the world are we trying to defend? Our whiteness and our straightness, that’s what, and the health insurance, (phony) moral superiority and housing that go with it.

We also live in communities that share our values. We are very likely to be corrected as long as we stay “white.” I can tell my system (a liberal congregation with a great history in the Avant Garde in Greenwich Village) that life is too short to be white till I am blue (colored) in my face but they are not that interested.

A well-educated black woman took an internship at my church. One of my ultra liberal congregants said to her, “It must be hard on you being at a church where every one is so well educated.” That happened two months ago.

The same woman was asked to sing gospel songs. No one knew that she knew opera. She was other and in her cage and someone had thrown away the key. It is of course an interpretive cage. She has the key and her interpreter is actually the one locked up.

She preaches a sermon, which says nothing about the congregation being racist. A member of long standing gets up and says the congregation is not racist, that many people have paid their dues in the movement. Life for him is NOT too short to be white. He had a lot to defend and hold on to.

A Malaysian man tells his parents he is gay. They say, “Just don’t tell your sister.” Why not? Because she couldn’t handle it, which is to say they couldn’t handle it because the lie we tell is the one that hides us from ourselves.

The New York Times shows the demonization pattern against Jews, even in 2007. When asked to rename the Christmas concert at a New Hyde Park School, the winter concert, parents exploded. “They execute the baby Jesus in the arena of political correctness.”. (Paul Vitello, story August 15, 2007, “A skirmish in the secularism wars”) Apparently being politically incorrect is better than being correct, in this anti-Semitic code.

Bigotry is an equal opportunity employer. It is not just for people of color or gays but also Jews and immigrants. It also internalizes with the great dance of the devil, the “twist”, and we find Jews demonizing immigrants and blacks demonizing gays. Anybody who is not part of the power sorority or fraternity is fair game to be scapegoated. How else would people in power hold on to our power, save by putting others down? As much as we would like to think that the Gay and Civil Rights and Anti-Semitism movements have put themselves out of business by their successful achievement of goals, unfortunately, the truth is different.. There is plenty left to do – and its has to do with noticing how the scapegoating pattern works and also just how unnecessary it is.

A black, gay woman walks down a street in a liberal town in Western Massachusetts. She is “dredding” again, as she put it, and her hair is in the early stages of the re-dred. A white woman, sexual status unknown, whom she does not know, says to her, “What happened? Did you see a ghost?” The permission the white woman has to say this is white privilege at its most ignorant: it knows not what it is doing and because of the privilege, doesn’t think it needs to know what it doesn’t know.

Consider Congressman Craig, more deeply. He taps his foot in a Minneapolis bathroom in order to solicit some gay sex. This married Republican who has voted against gay rights every chance he gets has to go to a toilet stall to get a little satisfaction. He is demonized by fellow Republicans and forced to resign. The poor man. I pity him when I am not furious at him. What will happen in the great American creed of “honesty” and “Transparency” is that he will be vilified, lose “everything”, all because he couldn’t find a safe way out of his toilet stall closet. Talk about hate twisting life into knots. The racist homophobic plot thickens and twists into trouble of a nearly insurmountable kind.

THE ALTERNATIVE

There is another way. It starts with reconceptualizing Jesus as other than a goat. He becomes a grace not a goat. It moves to a powerful knock you out idea that scriptures(of all varieties) are right when they say, “The stranger is the ROUTE to God.” The route. You can’t get to God except through the strange and the stranger, the strange about yourself and the stranger you are trying to avoid. It moves to another picture of human goodness and power. We are not good because of ourselves, we are good by grace.

Power is exciting when it is not damning. The atonement theology keeps us with a disempowered Jesus, who “lost” the war with the devil, took on all our sins and recommends that we do the same to others.

Since we still need power, we find it in phony, graceless, domineering ways. We flip into the ever so white and Western concept of domination. The concept of power as domination and the dominating other is what the 2/3 world, mostly people we call “of color”, are so sick of. Domination is what the goating folk are after. Being on top is EVERYTHING TO THEM. But it is not everything to either Jesus or God. The alternative to being one among many -- as opposed to penthoused with the guard at the door -- is not powerlessness, as otherwise progressive theologian Tony Campolo implies in a disappointingly affirming concept of atonement (“God as the Suffering Servant”, Tikkun May/June 2007). It is not a choice between no power and power. The alternative to power of a different kind – the power to inspire, support and empower, rather than to conquer, kill and destroy. Imagine white, heterosexual folk using THOSE kinds of power! What a different world it would be! God’s power does not come through “sacrificial love expressed in his death by dying on the cross.”

The goating starts here in this misinterpretation of scriptures. We turn our beloved Savior into King Goat. We focus on Jesus’ murder rather than on his life and the dance of distortion begins.

In some extreme views, focus on Jesus’ murder as God ordained sacrifice entails the weird idea that the Roman death system was actually part of God’s plan. What kind of God requires blood lust or a human sacrifice to satisfy his own rage at his children? What kind of God wants me on top and others of God’s children beneath me? Jesus knew that the domination system might kill him, and it did. The fact that even death couldn’t conquer life, however, was a mind bogglingly powerful revelation for Jesus’ followers, past and present. Life after death, as interesting as it is, does not prelude or take precedence over life before death.

What is the opposite of atonement theology? That Jesus is the mark and measure of conquering love ad mutuality and partnership. That nobody needs to be a goat or to have a goat. Sacrifice is Sacer Ficio, the holy doing of loving power. The monks who died in the process of protest in Burma did not die in vain. They did not suffer in vain. But that is because life and death are on a continuum, not because they were barbecued. The measure of life is love, mutuality and partnership. When those things happen, so does immortality. In the West we will tend to see their deaths as evidence that their movement did not work. Our pragmatism will fall in line with our failed atonements. Others will see their life as their love and be transformed by those facts.

Genuine Christianity knows there is another way to see Jesus than as the goat that was fried by the powerless. The very self-donation or kenotic emptying of the self of the self is the pattern Jesus of the scriptures did – and it is the solution. Jesus did not die for our sins. He died because domination power caught him in the act of challenging it at its deepest level.

The lies we tell about the other are the keys that trap us. “The other, “ said Rumi, “is yourself, in the mirror.”

Listen to James Cone show this in Jesus-like love of white folk. “You must accept white people and accept them with love. They are in effect still trapped in a history, which they do not understand. We cannot be free until they are.”

Becoming free is loving our enemies, as Cone does. It is understanding that Jesus is not King Goat, nor crucified King, but instead a partner with us in love of who we are, as we are, flawed, and still held by an astonishing grace.

Tim Wise, “This is your nation on White Privilege”

Tim Wise is the author of White Like Me (Soft Skull, 2005, revised 2008), and of Speaking Treason Fluently, publishing this month, also by Soft Skull. For review copies or interview requests, please reply to publicity@softskull.com

A lecture by Tim Wise.
http://www.citizenorange.com/orange/2008/06/tim-wise-speaks-the-truth-on-w.html

If you think racism is a thing of the past, see this summary of Bill O’Reilly’s recent statements

If you have started to think that racism is a thing of the past…

This latest in a depressingly long series of O'Reilly racial dustups began last week on his syndicated radio program, while he was discussing a recent dinner he had enjoyed at Sylvia's with his new pal Al Sharpton.

O'Reilly told his audience he "had a great time, and all the people up there are tremendously respectful." (For Bill, it's somehow always all about him!) He added, "I couldn't get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship."

Later, while talking with Fox News contributor (and National Public Radio senior correspondent) Juan Williams, O'Reilly further exposed his cosseted ignorance, saying, "There wasn't one person in Sylvia's who was screaming, 'MF-er, I want more iced tea.' You know, I mean, everybody was -- it was like going into an Italian restaurant in an all-white suburb in the sense of people were sitting there, and they were ordering and having fun. And there wasn't any kind of craziness at all."

Just imagine -- those crazy MF-ers in Harlem "ordering and having fun" just like they do in Italian restaurants in the "all-white" suburbs that O'Reilly STILL inhabits! What will they think of next -- donning leisure suits? (Frankly, the only crazy people I've ever heard yelling obscenities in New York restaurants were O'Reilly's Fox fellow travelers screaming for more booze in Langan's, the Irish pub they hang out in near their Sixth Avenue headquarters.)

The racist ranter then compounded his idiocy by noting, "I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves. They're getting away from the Sharptons and the Jacksons and the people trying to lead them into a race-based culture. They're just trying to figure it out. 'Look, I can make it. If I work hard and get educated, I can make it.'"

As noted above, this embarrassing outburst is far from the first time O'Reilly has made provocative statements about race. (See Media Matters for America for documentation.)

But here are a few past lowlights:

• During the Feb. 5 edition of Fox News' "The O'Reilly Factor," in a conversation about President Bush's description of Barack Obama as "articulate," O'Reilly told a Temple University professor, "Instead of black and white Americans coming together, white Americans are terrified. They're terrified. Now we can't even say you're articulate? We can't even give you guys compliments because they may be taken as condescension?"
• On the Aug. 16, 2006, edition of "The O'Reilly Factor," O'Reilly called for "profiling of Muslims" at airports, arguing that detaining all "Muslims between the ages of 16 and 45" for questioning "isn't racial profiling," but "criminal profiling."
• In a Feb. 27, 2006, conversation with a caller about the disproportionately few jobs and contracts that have gone to locals in the rebuilding of New Orleans, O'Reilly said: "[T]he homies, you know ... I mean, they're just not going to get the job."
• On the Sept. 13, 2005, broadcast of "The Radio Factor," O'Reilly claimed that "many of the poor in New Orleans" did not evacuate the city before Hurricane Katrina because "[t]hey were drug-addicted" and "weren't going to get turned off from their source," adding, "They were thugs."

On the recent (Sept. 19) edition of O'Reilly's Westwood One program "The Radio Factor," the all-white-suburb-inhabiting race man once again opined with false authority about "black people," whom he clearly has little-to-no contact with. Here's part of the transcript:

O'REILLY: Now, how do we get to this point? Black people in this country understand that they've had a very, very tough go of it, and some of them can get past that, and some of them cannot. ... So it's there. It's there, and I think it's getting better. I think black Americans are starting to think more and more for themselves. They're getting away from the Sharptons and the Jacksons and the people trying to lead them into a race-based culture ..."

Then, after trashing Sharpton, the two-faced O'Reilly turns around and praises him as "a very, very interesting guy."

O'REILLY: You know, I was up in Harlem a few weeks ago, and I actually had dinner with Al Sharpton, who is a very, very interesting guy. And he comes on "The Factor" a lot, and then I treated him to dinner, because he's made himself available to us, and I felt that I wanted to take him up there. And we went to Sylvia's, a very famous restaurant in Harlem. I had a great time, and all the people up there are tremendously respectful. They all watch "The Factor" ...

Fat chance! Ain't nobody in Harlem watching this guy unless they want to know when to duck ... but Bill's ego, like his ignorance, apparently knows no bounds.

Is it at all possible, one wonders, that O'Reilly can't "get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia's restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City" because he hardly ever meets or talks with anyone outside the narrow little world his narrow little mind is exposed during his daily commute from Long Island's North Shore to 1211 Avenue of the Americas? "I mean, it was exactly the same," O'Reilly said with evident wonder. "Even though it's run by blacks, primarily black patronship. It was the same ..."

Fancy that, "those people" are capable of being just like "us!" Amazing! All you can add is "God Bless America," because after all, "that's really what this society's all about now here in the U.S.A."

To the newly and self-anointed Soul Brother No. 2: "There's no difference. There's no difference. There may be a cultural entertainment -- people may gravitate toward different cultural entertainment, but you go down to Little Italy, and you're gonna have that. It has nothing to do with the color of anybody's skin."

Incredibly, O'Reilly somehow stopped short of repeating the old saw that some of his best friends are black (even his most loyal listener would never believe that!) although he did add, "I like that soul food ... It was great."

I'll tell you what would really be great -- if Bill O'Reilly just took his ill-gotten gains and retired to his North Shore estate tomorrow. Instead, he blathers on ... and on. Not only do blacks not yell obscenities at the wait staff, we learn they also can dress well. Some even go so far as to wear tuxedos!

O'REILLY: You know, and I went to the concert by Anita Baker at Radio City Music Hall, and the crowd was 50/50 black/white, and the blacks were well-dressed. ... The band was excellent, but they were dressed in tuxedoes, and this is what white America doesn't know, particularly people who don't have a lot of interaction with black Americans. They think that the culture is dominated by Twista, Ludacris and Snoop Dogg.

A Summary of What we Learn from King by Dr. Warren Goldstein

Excerpt of a Lecture by Professor Warren Goldstein, University of Hartford

1. Means and ends are not only inextricably intertwined; corrupt, hateful, or violent means produce corrupt, hateful, violent ends. Only loving, respectful, non-violent means can produce comparable ends—though they may also fail. King challenges and trumps Malcolm X’s “by any means necessary,” which is morally shallow in comparison.
2. Martin Luther King’s career dissolves the distinction between “idealism” and “realism.” A crusader for human dignity and brotherhood on a grand scale, seeking to overcome 340 years of American history, King always sought the most effective tactics, the best public relations, and he knew the necessity of nonstop fundraising. He was an American pragmatist—as well as our most eloquent idealist.
3. It takes creative, nonviolent pressure to expose the “hidden tension” and injustice “that is already alive,” in the form of an “obnoxious, negative peace.” Appeals to “law and order” nearly always privilege unjust social arrangements that serve the powerful. Those seeking change cannot be afraid of “creative tension,” for that is what produces negotiation and change. Anything less produces “promises,” rather than action.
4. Movements for social change require as much psychological and spiritual change in the powerless as they do in the powerful. Even for the truly powerless, change is more difficult than continuing the status quo. Birmingham’s black establishment had gained certain advantages by its accommodation to segregation. Any movement for social change will challenge the passivity of those who prefer the devil they know to the one they don’t know.
5. With creative, determined, passionate, persistent, self-disciplined and committed tactics, the powerless can transform themselves and their society.
6. The news media are key to any effort at social change; they are also completely unreliable, and always tend to support the status quo. Only a large movement can change this dynamic, and not always, or for long. The “noise” made by the civil rights movement reached from Birmingham jails to the White House—and changed both.
7. King distinguishes theologically and socially between just and unjust laws, teaching us when to obey and when to resist.
8. The powerful will always call activists “outsiders” and “extremists.” King shows “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” so there can be no outsiders. Similarly, King embraces the “extremist” label, since it appears “the South, the nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”

On Power, a Sermon by Sara Luria

A Sermon on Power Preached by Rabbi to be and Community Organizer Sara Luria based in Genesis 21

Recognizing our Power for Good

Strength is power.

Grace is power.

Precision is power.

Or at least that’s Acura’s definition of power when they are advertising their latest line of cars.

Hmm. Let’s test their theory. Who do we think of as powerful today?

Our minds may turn to political leaders, millionaires, or the military. Grace, maybe, precision, probably, strength, definitely.

And who do we think of as powerful people in Jewish history? King David, the political leader, the Maccabees or maybe the Israeli Defense Forces. Grace, not so much, precision, possibly, strength defined militarily, definitely.

What can Sarah, Abraham and Hagar teach us about power? In Genesis 16, a few chapters before the one we read today, Sarah, our matriarch, feels powerless to bear a child. Adonai atarani, God is restraining me, she says, restraining her from having a child. Sarah, in the well-known story, suggests that Hagar, her maidservant, lay with Abraham and bear a child for her. Sarah is clear that she wants to become more powerful since power for women of the bible came from bearing children. She says in a Hebrew play on words, oolai, eebane memena. Maybe I will have a son through her or otherwise translated, maybe I will be built up through her. Sarah needs to focus on building herself up.

When Hagar does have the child, just as Sarah asked her to, Sarah feels she has been lowered in the eyes of Hagar by her barren status and thus her power has been depleted. She becomes furious. When she asks Abraham to intercede, he does not use his power to improve the situation, instead, he hands over his power to Sarah to handle Hagar how she would like and Sarah, in her rage, deals harshly with Hagar.

So what can we say about power in Genesis 16? Sarah has some power but does not use it for good. Abraham, though powerful through his status as the head of the household, not to mention, his direct connection to God, barely seems to be an actor in this story -- he gives away his power.

The power dynamics are no less complicated in Genesis 21, our parsha for today about the birth of Isaac. When Sarah sees Hagar’s son playing with Isaac, she orders Abraham to cast out Hagar and Abraham, the text tells us, is distressed. He takes no action, he has the power to do the right thing in the situation but he is paralyzed. God intervenes and tells Abraham what to do.

In the middle of the chapter, Hagar sits across from her son in the wilderness, crying because he is near death. Hagar behaves much like Abraham did a few verses earlier, she is distressed but takes no action. God again intercedes hearing the cry of Hagar’s son and sends an angel to save them. God seems to be the only one in this story who uses power for good.

BREAK

When a child is young, parents often intercede to help the child solve conflict or resolve a distressing situation. Maybe, when our people Israel, our nation was young, avinu malkeinu, our father, our king, directly interceded to help us along the right path, to show us how to use power for good.

Now perhaps, God’s role in our lives has changed from what it was when Abraham and Sarah walked the earth. This is not to say that God is absent from our lives, rather to emphasize the importance of our power. God was our example in Genesis and now all of us as individuals and as a Jewish community must learn to realize our power and use it for good.

If we maintain that power is mostly defined militarily, which is where I started, it is hard to imagine power being used for holy ends. I was at a congregant’s house for dinner last night and he asked me what I was going to speak about today and I said, power. His response was, oh, the abuse of power? We think of the old adage power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. SLOW DOWN Yet, how can we as Jews possibly accept that definition of power when we think of God as all powerful?? I propose a redefinition. Power is the ability to act. It’s amoral – neither good nor bad, simply the ability to act. It’s what we do with it that gives it its character in the world.

Sarah deals harshly with Hagar when Hagar becomes pregnant with Abraham’s seed. Sarah’s feeling of powerlessness, her inability to act, manifests itself through frustration and anger. How many times have we become frustrated or angry because we feel powerless? A few years ago, during a meeting with my supervisor at the time, I proposed a change in the youth education program at the organization where I was working. He was furious at me for the proposal, saying I was young, inexperienced, didn’t understand how the organization worked, and on and on. I took it personally at the time, but I realize now, being much older and more experienced of course, that my proposal felt to my supervisor like I was trying to take away his power.

Fear of losing power is so scary because it seems like there isn’t enough power for both you and I to have it. But if it’s simply the ability to act, it’s not a zero-sum game. So if I have power that does not have to mean that you can’t have power. God made Isaac into a great nation but didn’t God also make of Ishmael a great nation? Does that somehow diminish Isaac’s nation? Of course not!

I backed down from asking for a change in the youth program where I worked because I knew that I just didn’t have the power at the time to make the change. I learned from that experience that change wouldn’t come from standing on principal alone. In a dialogue between the militarily strong Athenians and the small nation of Melos, the Athenians gave the Melians 2 choices, willfully join the Athenian empire or Athens would declare war. The Melians chose war, they wanted to remain a free people. They believed they would survive because they had justice on their side. The Athenians asserted: “The standard of justice depends on the quality of power to compel it.” “The standard of justice depends on the quality of power to compel it.” The small nation of Melos did not have the power to compel justice and was thus conquered by the Athenians.

Abraham might have believed that Sarah was unjust in her jealously and casting out of Hagar. After all, Ishmael was his son! But Abraham did not use his power to compel justice.

Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan, a 20^th century theologian, frames this concept in Jewish language: To be holy, he says, means for power and goodness to exist in perfect harmony. Power and goodness in balance.

A community organizer by the name of Ernesto Cortes was once asked to speak at a synagogue dinner. He gave the attendees what he thought would be a compliment, at one point in his speech saying that Jews were a powerful, influential people in the United States today. There was a palpable gasp in the audience. A congregant came over to Ernie after the speech and said, “the Jewish people have a history of being powerless at the hands of pharaohs, kings and nations that would destroy us. How can you say Jews are powerful??”

Rabbi Irving Greenberg delves into this issue in his book, the Ethics of Jewish power stating -----The Jewish people made a decision six decades ago with the establishment of Israel that there is no moral alternative to assuming power. It takes power to establish a just society. By contrast, powerlessness can cause great evils. Our historic task then is to create, all together, an ethic of Jewish power that works in the real world of power which we now inhabit.

Thus I ask you to reflect on your power, as a Jew, as an individual and as a community. Am I powerful in my own life? Do I give up my power as Abraham did in our story? Am I frustrated with feeling powerless as Sarah was? How can I use my power for good this year as one who is created in the image of an all-powerful God?

As Jews, we imagine, as our prophets did many centuries ago, the world as it could be, as it should be. And in the world as it is, we use our power to bring us closer to wholeness.

Stanley Chyet writes in Mishkan T’filah

We oughtn’t pray for what we’ve never known,

And humanity has never known:

Unbroken peace,

Unmixed blessing.

No.

Better to pray for pity,

For indignation,

Discontent,

The will to see and touch,

The power to do good and make new.

There is no question that this feels like a time of vulnerability, our banks are on the brink of failure, our investments are diminishing and our government is arguing over how to best protect us. As we enter this new year, perhaps feeling off balance and uncertain, may our own power steady us and may we build ourselves up by embracing and embodying our power toward good and holy ends.

Shana tova!

The World House (web site)

Visit http://www.theworldhouse.org to learn more about Dr. King's vision.

In his Nobel Peace Prize lecture in 1964, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. first articulated his vision of a World House in which a family of different races, religions, ideas, cultures and interests must learn to live together as brothers and sisters or perish together as fools. He identified racism, poverty/materialism, and war as the three major threats to human survival. He stressed the urgency of addressing these problems, warning that it might be humanity's last chance to choose between chaos and community. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 made Dr. King's predictions seem eerily prescient. His vision and agenda may be the key to our survival during the 21st century.