n this day of honor for our prophet Martin Luther King, it is well that we remember that no individual, no matter how skilled or gifted, ever simply leads a people out of the valley of the shadow of sleep. No, the rising of a people is a work far more complex. It resists all science and prediction. But this much is sure. The greatness of a leader hangs on the people’s awakening to the severity of their crisis.
Misleaders claim that your cherished American liberty is about your freedom to do what you want where you want when you want without, as they love to say, government interference. Freedom from interference, freedom to buy stuff. This superficial promise of freedom from interference has always been dangled before “the mass of men, leading lives of quiet desperation” (Thoreau) to distract them from their inner crisis and their social crisis.
“There was once, in a far-away country where few people have ever traveled, a wonderful church. It stood on a high hill in the midst of a great city; and every Sunday, as well as on sacred days like Christmas, thousands of people climbed the hill to its great archways . . . ” — a story written by Raymond MacDonald Alden
It is still night now, which bears some advantage, for you can see some things better in the dark: stars, for example, and prayers. What is the dark? Shall we say? Shall we pray?
With the Reverend Harry Emerson Fosdick, the founding minister of The Riverside Church, I hold– as I imagine, many of you do–that the teaching that Jesus was literally born of a virgin is not an essential of Christian faith. Faith can thrive in the presence of the hunch that “virgin Mary mother mild” is a myth.
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