Stand On Common Ground

This past week we observed several events that took place recalling the memorable March on Washington in 1963.  There have been gatherings in Atlanta; on the Washington Mall where the President and several others gave speeches at the Lincoln Memorial; and there was even a brief march here in Providence, last Wednesday.

In an essay titled “Remembering the Power of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Words,” Clayborne Carson, professor of history at Stanford University, and the founding director of the Martin Luther King, Jr., Research and Education Institute, wrote the following:

When I participated in the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, I was fortunate to witness an exquisite example of Dr. King's oratory, but I did not then understand the full meaning of King's concluding "I Have a Dream" speech.  Only after his widow, Coretta Scott King, chose me to edit her late husband's papers did I begin to appreciate Dr. King's most famous speech in the broader context of his life and times.  In cogent, metaphorically rich passages, his speech expressed the universal longing for freedom and justice.

Dr. King's visionary ideas remain relevant a half century since his death.  Because of the expanding breadth of his vision, he remains an inspiring symbol for history's greatest freedom struggle--that is, the long and continuing efforts of the majority of humanity to overcome oppression based on class, race, ethnicity, gender, physical disability, and sexual orientation.  Dr. King saw a "Promised Land" awaiting not only black Americans but "all of God's children" struggling to be "free at last."

It was a pleasure to notice that some young people were present at these events.  One of the young children who spoke at the Lincoln Memorial last Wednesday referred to “stand your ground’ laws and said we should instead stand on common ground.  This was an impressive and cogent remark.  It reflects what Jesus was about in our Gospel today as he, in the parable of the wedding feast, turned the prevailing practice of exclusiveness upside down.

When Jesus was at the house of a leader of the Pharisees he noticed how the guests chose places of honor.  He responded by telling a story about guests at a wedding banquet.  The point of the parable was that “all who exalt themselves will be humbled, and those who humble themselves will be exalted."  Then he said to his host, "When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous."

All of us are the same in God’s sight.  It does not matter whether one is rich or poor, or the color their skin, or their gender or physical state.  What matters is that we understand and behave as people on common ground.  We are united as one people, all are God’s children, and we are called by God to live as “members one of another.”

The theologian Walter Brueggemann reminds us that Jesus used “a social occasion to show that what the world honors is not what is valued in the new order of God—an order engaged on behalf of the poor, crippled, lame, and blind, those whom the world devalues.”

 The Letter to the Hebrews echoes this theme when it says, “Let mutual love continue.  Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers.”  As Brueggemann comments, “The imperative is to reach outside the zone of social safety to the “others,” “strangers,” and “prisoners,” exactly those whom we might think defiled.  Real defilement is in the violation of promises of fidelity and love of money.”

Then, in our reading from the Old Testament, Jeremiah focuses on the trouble we humans have brought upon ourselves so much earlier in our history: “Thus says the Lord: What wrong did your ancestors find in me that they went far from me, and went after worthless things, and became worthless themselves?”  Jeremiah’s point was that the people had neglected to pay attention to what really matters.  He asked, “Has a nation changed its gods, even though they are no gods?  Be appalled, O heavens, at this, be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord, for my people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.”

Have we as a nation forsaken our common purpose?  We need always to be reminded of the things we do to separate us from our fellow brothers and sisters.  Denying the right to vote because of onerous identification requirements, or paying subsistence wages to workers in many very profitable corporations, are just two examples.  Any policy that discriminates, any action that pits one person above another, any law that gives preference to one individual over another, violates the law of God’s love for all people.

When you and I gather for worship we use the Book of Common Prayer.  It is common in the sense that all people throughout the Anglican Communion around the world share in a common act of worship, of praise and thanksgiving to God.

When a child tells us that standing on common ground is more important than “standing on your [individual] ground” that is a message worth practicing.  Amen.