Pastor Jim Clarke    Pastor Paula McCutcheon

On Preaching

Pastor Paula McCutcheon  

When I was in seminary the last class I wanted to take was preaching.  Instead, I got a job in the Audio Visual department; I videotaped the preaching class, getting invaluable information about what not to do.  I was also able to spend some office time listening to sermons on tape.  In this case, not of the preaching class, but of famous preachers.  I recalled this on Monday the 15^th of January when I was driving and listening to NPR – they were presenting a number of speeches (sic) of Martin Luther King, Jr.  I heard a good part of “Missing the Revolution” and the beginning of “Going to the Promised Land.”  (This was the sermon he preached in Memphis the day before he was assassinated.)

I have been impressed with how well the public schools celebrate Martin Luther King Day.  They have an assembly, and I think every child knows about King’s “I Have a Dream” speech during the march on Washington.  (Kenneth also gained a lot of social capital by sharing that his grandfather met M.L. King Jr.!)  I doubt that either school students or many adults know of any other of King’s sermons, such as, “Missing the Revolution.”

In this sermon, King has a lot to say about racism:  That it logically leads to genocide, using the experience of the Jews in Germany as an example.  He also responds to people who would say that the “Negro People” need to “pull themselves up by their own bootstraps”, reminding us all that only the African American was enslaved for 244 years.  Further, while free land was being given to white people out west, no land was ever given to the black people.  Finally he says, it’s unfair to tell someone to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and at the same time deny them a boot to begin with – or give them a boot and stand on their foot while talking to them about them getting on the move.  But, it really isn’t what he said about racism that was either surprising or radical.  People expected that.  And I wonder if he had just stuck to the issue of racism whether he would have been perceived as being so dangerous.  Before he castigates racism in “Missing the Revolution” he shares about his trip to India, and seeing the poverty there.  He tells us that everything is interconnected, interrelated, and interdependent, saying that we cannot ignore world poverty as if it has nothing to do with us.  He mentions the stockpiles of food in the United States at the time.  He also questions the amount of money spent on the military while people here in the U.S.A. go hungry.  In 1967, as some of you will remember, King came out against the war in Vietnam.  I believe it was these sorts of statements that made him dangerous.  In regard to racism, he was upsetting the social structure, particularly of the South.  But with the talk about poverty and war and things being interrelated he was striking at the core of our economic system and our sense of security. 

I think to be honest to the life and witness of Martin Luther King, Jr. we have to consider the whole person, which means being broader in our accounting of him and what he said.  I also think we have to wonder about what he would be saying today?  What would he say about the War in Iraq?  What would he say about our social relationships and structures?

Pastor Paula