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4th Anniversary War in Iraq, 17 March 2007, Stop the War Rally & WalkI’m a preacher, I can’t help it, I preach. Dr. King says all preaching is plagiaristic! Everything worth saying has been said more than once and better than we can say it again. But some stuff is so worth hearing and doing, we say it again and again anyway. The company of speakers I am glad to be in today makes that very point! 40 years ago the antiwar/pro-peace movement marched on the Pentagon. 40 years ago next month, exactly a year before his death, Dr. King delivered a sermon entitled “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence” at Riverside Church, New York City. I intend to plagiarize that sermon for all it’s worth! Call it “channeling” Dr. King’s spirit, if you will. We need his spirit with us – as we do all those gone before us in this witness and work – we are not alone! This is the essence of prophetic preaching, preaching even the preacher does not want to hear, much less to say. Well-meaning friends warn against such trouble-making – opposing national policy in time of war, mixing peace and civil rights, hurting whatever the particular “cause of our people.” Dr. King says conscience leaves us no other choice! “A time comes when silence is betrayal!” Our call to speak, our call to act, is a “vocation of agony.” We are distracted, intimidated, perplexed -- “mesmerized by uncertainty” – yet we must move on! War upon poor and oppressed peoples anywhere is war upon poor and oppressed peoples everywhere. We are at war with ourselves. Those most in need among us – young and old, sick and addicted, immigrant and imprisoned – are under attack by the costs of this war – these wars. Many we send to fight are driven by miseducation and underemployment. We deny them if they return dead. We neglect them if they return wounded. We wonder at violence in our own culture and schools – while we use violence in massive doses to pretend to solve problems – really to protect interests and promote investments. Dr. King calls his own government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” To those who try to keep us divided and conquered in limited, labeled affinity groups – to those who say to Dr. King, “Aren’t you a civil rights leader?” – thereby to exclude him from “peace” – Dr. King says his goal is “To save the soul of America” – the collective soul to which and whom we all belong – albeit at times reluctantly! He quotes Langston Hughes – “O, yes, / I say it plain, / America never was America to me, / And yet I swear this oath -- / America will be!” Sisters and brothers, a much different America must be! If our soul becomes totally poisoned and polluted, part of the autopsy will read “Iraq.” We can never be saved so long as we are destroying the deepest hopes of people anywhere. We are called far beyond national border and allegiance – beyond every limit and label. The good news of justice leading to peace is promised equally to us all. In the hearts and minds of Iraqi people, our war against them did not begin only four years ago. We seem always to put first our own interests and investments. We took sides and prolonged a deadly eight-year war with Iran. We destroyed infrastructure and living standards in the first Gulf War and imposed relentless sanctions to keep them destroyed. Dr. King speaks of “people who have been living under the curse of war for almost three continuous decades now.” “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!” That is the very “self-image” so many of our “leaders” hold of themselves today. He speaks of “the deadly Western arrogance” that leads to a sense of “imperial any-ness” in us – that we can go anywhere at any time to anyone to do anything in any way we choose to do it! Dr. King concludes of our constant preemptions and escalations, “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.” Sound hauntingly familiar? Surely we must understand Iraqi feelings even if we do not condone Iraqi actions. What do our billions of dollars a month on this war leave them to resist with but their own lives? If ever war was going to work, this war would have worked now! For God’s sake, stop it! Compassion, solidarity, nonviolent struggle help us to see the “enemy” point of view – to hear questions and assessments of ourselves, to see basic weaknesses of our condition, and – if we respond wisely – to learn and grow and change and profit by the corrective perspective and insight of those we oppose. Otherwise, warns Dr. King, we do ultimate damage to those we send there to fight for us – “not simply the brutalizing process that goes on in any war” – but “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!” “We are on the side of the wealthy and the secure while we create hell for the poor.” Now hear these words of his in full with one obvious substitution –
Dr. King goes on to outline five steps to stop the war, as timely now as then –
“We must be prepared to match actions with words by seeking out every creative means of protest possible.” For the war in Iraq “is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.” We continue to be “on the wrong side of a world revolution.” With Dr. King, we continue to quote John F. Kennedy: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Again we hear Dr. King’s urgency –
Dr. King urges us to believe all over the world today sisters and brothers are revolting against old systems and structures of exploitation and oppression. “Out of the wombs of a frail new world new systems of justice and equality are being born” – even in places where we think we see them least. The people have seen great light. None of us can plead ignorance, or dare plead indifference any more. We must support these revolutions wherever they can be peaceful and just, inclusive and nonviolent. Our loyalties must be to every people of every nation – and to the United Nations of earth-shaking growth -- from 50 nations to start with, to 192 and counting today! We are called to “all-embracing and unconditional love” for all – not love as “some sentimental and weak response,” assures Dr. King. Rather, love as “that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life! Love as “the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality!” Facing the fact that “tomorrow is today,” living in the “fierce urgency of now,” let us choose once and for all – “nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation.” “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.” A new power to a new people in a new world. Thank you.
-- John Auer, First United Methodist Church, Reno, NV
Full text of Dr. King's Speech
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