The Long Arc of Justice, Part 1

Sunday, January 15, 2011

Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemoration

Rev. Dr. Craig S. Strobel

“Free at Last” – I’m going to begin this morning where Dr. King ended in his famous speech on August 28, 1963 outside of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

James Cone in his book, The Spirituals and the Blues, points out that many spirituals have double meanings – one is spiritual but also a particular political or material meaning, which was often the hidden or coded meaning.

E.g. today’s hymns:

“Over My Head” – “I see trouble in the air – there must be a God some where.” Or, “Wade in the Water” – “God’s gonna trouble the water.”

Reminds one of the story of the Pool of Siloam in Jesus’ time, where people with afflictions and ailments waited for an angel to “trouble the water.” The first person in the pool after it was troubled would be healed. Notice carefully that word “trouble.” When God troubles the water, healing occurs.

Recognition that this is often how God operates in establishing justice for God’s children in the world – by troubling the waters that have been kept artificially placid and stagnant by a status quo that favors the few and treats the rest with contempt.

“Free at Last” - this same double layer of meanings can be discerned:

“free at last, free at last, thank God a’mighty I’m free at last. /Surely been ‘buked and surely been scorned/ but still my soul is a heaven born. /If you don’t know that I been redeemed / Just follow me down to Jordan’s stream.”

Spiritual, inner level of meaning talks about salvation – being “heaven born” because of having been down to “Jordan’s stream.”

Relays a powerful truth – that regardless of my external circumstances – the rebukes and scorns of life – I partake of an inner reality that that is sealed in the power and reality of heaven – in the reality of God. You may put me down, lock me up, keep me in chains, beat my body and cause a thousand sufferings, but you can’t touch my soul. I am somebody – even when you call me less than nobody. I am somebody because God has made me somebody.

The second layer emerges as a result of reflecting upon this inner spiritual reality: If God has made me somebody; if I am indeed made in the image and likeness of God; if indeed God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, and I am part of that world, and if I do indeed believe in his name, and I therefore am indeed a child of God – then there is something that stirs up within my soul that compels me to see to it that the outer material circumstances of my life accurately reflect my inner state of being.

This is precisely the work of justice when viewed from a Biblical and Christian point of view.

There are over 130 references to the word “justice’ in the Bible, not counting “just”, “Justly,” or “judgment.” It is a significant concern in the Bible.

The concern of the Bible is to align the inner and outer realities, the spiritual and the material realities. Work of Justice is to align the external material conditions with the internal spiritual conditions. E.g. song “Free at Last” speaks of being redeemed by God – a term very specifically referring to slavery and being bought out of slavery. Paul uses this terminology to speak of our salvation. Thus when Black people came to understand their worth as persons redeemed by God in Jesus Christ, then the next step was to actualize that freedom in their material conditions. Dr. King illustrates this in his essay, “Nonviolence and Racial Justice:”

“Living under these conditions, many Negroes lost faith in themselves. They came to feel that perhaps they were less than human. So long as the Negro maintained this subservient attitude and accepted the "place" assigned him, a sort of racial peace existed. But it was an uneasy peace in which the Negro was forced patiently to submit to insult, injustice and exploitation. It was a negative peace. True peace is not merely the absence of some negative force--tension, confusion or war; it is the presence of some positive force--justice, good will and brotherhood…. A myriad of factors came together to cause the Negro to take a new look at himself. Individually and as a group, he began to re-evaluate himself. And so he came to feel that he was somebody. His religion revealed to him that God loves all his children and that the important thing about a man is "not his specificity but his fundamentum," not the texture of his hair or the color of his skin but the quality of his soul. This new self-respect and sense of dignity on the part of the Negro undermined the south's negative peace, since the white man refused to accept the change. The tension we are witnessing in race relations today can be explained in part by this revolutionary change in the Negro's evaluation of himself and his determination to struggle and sacrifice until the walls of segregation have been finally crushed by the battering rams of justice.”