How white do you have to be to president of the United States? White enough, I guess. At least that’s what we learned from the remarks Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid made about Barack Obama in the run up to the election last year. Reid said that Obama would be ok because he is “light skinned” and “has no Negro dialect unless he wanted to have one”…

In other words, Obama looks like “us,”  talks like “us” and won’t bother “us” by being too black. What a relief….

Do you wonder sometimes…Have we really made any progress on racial justice, on understanding white privilege, in understanding race? (Even my spell checker won’t let me enter Obama’s name without changing it to Osama)

Pastor William R. Long writes, “The anguish of historical living, or living in time, is that each one of us is endowed with a sense of justice and fairness but often we must live with and face so much injustice that seems unchangeable or beyond our ability to change.”

And so here we are, celebrating Martin Luther King Jr. day, again, taking a hard look at what this nation, this community, we ourselves, have accomplished and looking again at how much further we have to go.

Will we ever arrive at true freedom, “free at last, free at last?”

Today’s text from Habakkuk is from the African American Lectionary a recent project developed by The African American Pulpit Journal and the Divinity School at Vanderbilt University and “designed to create new national conversations concerning the use of Scripture in worship and preaching.” It was launched December 2007.

Habakkuk’s words speak to communities in waiting, communities that live amidst the struggle and pain of oppression and long awaited justice. In Habakkuk’s time the Israelites were staring their own destruction in the face. The Babylonians were a world power, crushing nations on every side. It was just a matter of time before they came. One could stand at the watchtower and wait, but disaster was coming. When the armies did come, they destroyed Israel, laid waste to the Temple, carted the educated off into exile, and left a broken population.

Freedom seemed an impossible goal, an impossible wait. And God seemed absent. The book of Habakkuk, only three chapters long, truly a minor prophet, is in great part Habakkuk’s complaint against God: where have you been?! The people suffer and you do not care.

In response God says, “Write the vision; make it plain on tablets, so that a runner may read it. For there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.”

So what is our vision for racial justice and true freedom in this country? Can you name it or frame it?

Imagine for a moment you are granted a billboard, one with great visibility here in Lansing, and you get to decide what it says. You are able, as Habakkuk says, to write the vision, make it plain so a runner, (or a commuter,) can read it.  What does it say?.... (silence)

If I were writing with my son in mind, my son who is not white, and will one day soon know the social penalty for not being white in this nation, I might write…brown is beautiful.  Or perhaps I would write, the Bill of Rights, number 11 “You have the right to be the color that you are.”

You might say that is covered in the declaration of independence, the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. But true freedom is not a reality, not now.

We look back on the year. We have a black president, well, sort of black—biracial actually, with a “nice” speaking voice. Not too black...

And we have prominent black professors at our top universities…. who are arrested for trying to get into their own houses when they forget their keys.

Then there was an experiment done by ABC news with actors portraying Hispanic day workers struggling to order a sandwich in broken English at a neighborhood deli with the clerk, also an actor, shouting racial slurs at them. The experiment found that sixty percent the other customers who came upon the scene just left, even when those posing as workers asked for assistance. Ten percent joined the clerk in yelling slurs at the workers, with the remaining 30% trying to help, telling the clerk they would boycott the store or yelling back.

Thirty percent…Sigh...  Where is the vision? Where is the promise of true freedom, an end to racism?

In our gospel reading “Jesus marches into the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

“And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, ‘Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’”

If not careful, we might think, ok, Jesus has shown up and all that stuff will be done. Great. We’re really getting it done now. But that is not what Jesus says. He says I am here, I’ve shown up to speak the good news, now let’s get working on this stuff. Jesus lifts up the vision—the good news-- in a dramatic way and says, ok, are you with me? If so, let’s go.

Jesus speaks of what he is called to do and says it is fulfilled in your hearing.

Has this vision been accomplished? No, it hasn’t. Poverty still exists, captives still await freedom, there is oppression.

But Jesus wasn’t saying that the tasks had been fulfilled but instead that God was moving in world, that the vision of a leader had been fulfilled. That’s a big difference.

Martin Luther King Jr. started preaching and teaching in the 50’s. He talked about freedom. He protested injustice. He asked people to join him in the struggle for equality. And they did. And the civil rights movement emerged. And change happened. And he was murdered.

Has King’s vision been accomplished? No it hasn’t.

But Lewis Baldwin, a professor at Vanderbilt writes, “like the prophets, King experienced one failure after another, was often unpopular and castigated, and died before accomplishing his goals, but he was sustained by the conviction that though he was unsuccessful at times, the God of history would not ultimately fail.  (Lewis Baldwin, Vanderbilt University, theafricanamericanlectionary.org)

And to step back to Harry Reid for a moment. Reid’s comments were reprehensible, racist, wrong. But in spite of the fact that he made those comments, Reid was also one of the very first significant political leaders to approach Obama, offer him support and strongly urge him to run for president. 

One step forward, one step back, one step forward.

So what are we to do? I think the tasks for honoring Martin Luther King Jr Day are three fold:

One: We celebrate the coming of prophets and teachers who write the vision plainly, in large letters, so that we can see it. Thank you, Dr. King, for the vision.

Two: We look at how far we have come, the victories, however small, the steps forward.

Three: We take a deep breath and commit to keeping on going, to fix the vision once more upon our minds and follow knowing that we will not see its fulfillment. Knowing as Habakkuk says, “there is still a vision for the appointed time; it speaks of the end, and does not lie. If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay.”

King said “I may not get there with you,” and he didn’t. Moses never made it to the promised land either. We may not get there, in fact, we probably won’t.

But are you willing to continue walking forward, speaking out, marching, singing, working, praying, fighting, anyway? Are you willing to continue pushing through the wilderness headed for the Promised Land?

There are moments when the vision does come alive. When we can see it, really see it. One experience I had in Berkeley during seminary sticks out in my mind. I was at some fundraiser community event, I can’t remember what, and as part of the program the Berkeley civic leaders, the city council or something, all got up on stage.  I looked up and saw these folks standing there, just the regular people serving in these positions, and I was caught up short. For as I looked at the people on the stage I realized that they just happened to be African American and Hispanic. There was an openly gay man and a differently-abled woman in a wheelchair and a young man whose parents had immigrated from India. It was such a moment of clarity; I can still see it in my mind. This is what true freedom looks like.

It was a moment. The moment passed.

The reality is that we are racist people living in a racist society. Some of us benefit from white privilege. All of us know of injustice. Some of us experience the violence of racism head on.

Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was murdered in El Salvador for standing up for the poor notes: “This is the mission entrusted to the church, and it is a hard mission, to uproots sins for history, to uproot sins from the political order, to uproot sins from the economy, to uproot wherever they are. What a hard task!…No one wants to have a sore spot touched, and therefore a society with so many sores twitches when someone has the courage to touch it and say, you have to treat that. You have to get rid of that.”

But we have a vision. And we are to write the vision. Make it plain. In large letters. Much like the vision we are putting together in the Edgewood Book of Dreams. We state it, frame it, write it large.

Earlier this morning I was listening to an interview with Rev. Samuel “Billie” Kyles who was on the balcony in Memphis with Martin Luther King Jr the day he was shot. Rev. Kyles was saying, “I hear some people say, well, you know it's bad now. It's worse now than it was then. I said the only reason you can say that is you were not here then. It is not worse now than it was then. It is - we've made tremendous progress.” The host then asked what Kyles would be preaching on today.

He replied, “I'll be talking about knocking holes in the darkness. It is said that Robert Louis Stevenson was a man who never enjoyed good health. He spent a lot of time in his room even as a child. He was always looking out the window. His nurse asked him one day, Robert, what are you doing? He said, I'm watching that old man knock holes in the darkness. She said, what are you talking about?

“He would climb up the ladder and light the light, come down, move the ladder to the next pole, climb up, come down, move the ladder. And everywhere he would light a light it appeared to him with his little quick mind that a hole was being knocked in the darkness.

“And so I'm suggesting that those of us who have the strength and the ability, we should be knocking holes in the darkness. So, Martin Luther King came to Memphis - it was a dark place to come, but he came and he came knocking holes in the darkness.” (Weekend Edition Sunday, January 17, 2010)

Write the vision. Make it plain so that a runner can see it. For there is still a vision…it speaks of the end, and does not lie.”

Amen.