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At First Baptist Church, Highland Avenue, the oldest African American Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, and our congregational home for the last 11 years, we have Holy Communion on the first Sunday of every month. The powerful ritual begins when each of us faces another member of the congregation and reads the church covenant—a guide to how we treat one another and respond to the world around us. Deacons, male and female, then come to the chancel, don white gloves, and the minister offers the ancient “words of institution” (“the tradition that was handed on to me came from the Lord himself, that the Lord Jesus on the night of his arrest took bread, broke it and said….). Then, the deacons distribute the “elements”—bits of unleavened bread and shot glasses full of temperance grape juice. Receiving them, we wait for a collective sharing in bread and cup. It is a typical Baptist moment of remembrance and grace. But there is an additional litany that overpowers me every time we gather at Christ’s table in that congregation, a simple, single phrase that stretches from Golgotha to our 21st century pews. When the elements have been distributed, before the Deacons return to the chancel, the minister lifts a hand and asks: “Has everyone been served?” Even after 11 years of hearing that inquiry, I still wait for it with expectation. “Has everyone been served?” I have never taken communion in an African American based congregation anywhere when the question was omitted from the Eucharistic moment. It is an interrogative of logistical and eschatological significance that I want to leave with you as you go from the School of Divinity at WFU. First, we ask, “Has everyone been served” in this graduating class? I hope so, but if not, there isn’t much we can do about it today. Clinging to the word “commencement,” however, I hope we served you as our mission statement says by offering “imaginative courses and diverse programs of community engagement” that equipped you “to be agents of justice, reconciliation and compassion” wherever you go in the world. Indeed, we served you well if we taught you to take seriously the question “Has everyone been served?”—an inquiry as important as the diploma you will receive momentarily. Second, let me thank you as students for opening the eyes of our faculty, indeed, our Divinity School community, to people and places we ourselves have sometimes overlooked. Your senior projects speak of your responses to the question “Has everyone been served?” from immigrants in Appalachia, to HIV/AIDS in the black church, to micro-financing possibilities for churches and non-profits. You have pressed us individually and collectively to find ways to ask and respond to that grand question here at the Divinity School. Your predecessors ask it daily at Riverside Church, New York, at the Potters’ House in Winston-Salem, in hospitals and parishes around the country, and in the Mississippi State Legislature, of all places. Step into that noble tradition of graduates from this school, serving others in the 5th year of a war that seems to have no end. Third, I hope you will ask that question wherever you are going and whatever “full time” vocation you pursue in the years ahead. Martin Luther King did, 40 years ago this spring. Indeed, he carried that question with him from Morehouse College, Crozier Seminary, and Boston University to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, Montgomery, AL, and Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta. He studied E. S. Brightman’s Boston Personalism, Gandhi’s Satyagraha, and Walter Muelder’s Christian Socialism, taking his academics into bus boycotts, Civil Rights marches, jail cells, opposition to a war, and, in the end, in behalf of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. Through it all, in ways he never imagined when he received his divinity degree, he learned to ask a NATION: “Has everyone been served?” Taylor Branch, historian of King and his era, wrote a brilliant editorial in the NY Times on the 40th anniversary of King’s death in which he reminds us that the Nobel Laureate was in Memphis to support sanitation employees, two of whom, Robert Walker and Echol Cole, had been crushed to death when the garbage compression unit in which they were sitting malfunctioned. They were “resting” there with the garbage because that was the only place they were allowed to sit to get out of the rain. In the weeks before his assassination, King’s participation with the workers, his expanding civil rights activities and his opposition to the Vietnam War led the St. Louis Globe-Democrat to dub him “one of the most menacing men in America today.” (Taylor Branch, “The Last Wish of Martin Luther King,” NY Times, April 6, 2008) We have forgotten such public attacks and labels in our tendency to mythologize our heroes after we shoot them. By 1968, in Memphis, Martin Luther King was asking “Has everyone been served?” in ways that had implications for under-resourced persons whatever their race, creed or color. As Taylor Branch writes: “Dr. King said the movement would liberate not only segregated black people but also the white South. Surely this is true.” Ironically, some people ultimately got served by the very black man and movement they vehemently opposed. Branch notes that the Civil Rights movement “de-stigmatized white Southern politics, …opened doors for the disabled, and began to lift fear from homosexuals.” It energized women to seek ordination as Episcopal priests, Jewish rabbis, and Baptist ministers. He insists that, “Parents now take for granted opportunities their children inherit from the Montgomery bus boycott,” and concludes: “It is both right and politic for all people, including millions who are benign or indifferent toward the civil rights movement, or churlish and resentful, to see that they, too, and their heirs, stand with us on the shoulders of Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers and Fannie Lou Hamer.” Branch reminds us of King’s last sermon preached on March 31, 1968, at the National Cathedral in Washington, DC on the Sunday before his death. The text was Luke 16, the story of the rich man and Lazarus. On that day, King reached back to a famous, stem-winding 1949 homily on that text, preached by Reverend Vernon Johns, his predecessor at Dexter Avenue Church. You remember the story? Lazarus is the beggar ignored for years by the rich man who passed him daily right at his doorstep. The two die and the rich man is in eternal torment while Lazarus rests peacefully in the “bosom of Abraham.” The rich man then converses with Abraham about his miserable state and the need to warn his family of the wrath that is to come. Dr. Johns, however, insisted that the rich man was not in torment because he was wealthy, or because he did not offer his funds to Lazarus. He was there, Branch writes, “because he never recognized Lazarus as a fellow human being. Even faced with everlasting verdict, he spoke only with Abraham and looked past the beggar, treating him still as a servant in the third person” by imploring Abraham to “send Lazarus” to warn the living. The rich man not only failed to ask “Has everyone been served?” he also failed to see that there was anyone in his world —at least not Lazarus—that needed serving. No doubt Martin Luther King’s eyes were opened again and again, year after year, to new venues of need, hurt and injustice he did not yet see when he graduated from Boston University a half century ago. The sanitation workers were yet another community of persons overlooked by many in the civil rights movement until Walker and Cole got crushed in the morning trash. Can we see their overlooked counterparts today? Father Samuel Weber, a member of our founding faculty, now off to serve as chant master/liturgist for the RC Cathedral in St. Louis, tells of the time, shortly after his ordination to the priesthood, when he served a suburban Illinois parish. Once, while he was making hospital rounds, the nurses told him that there was a man on their ward who was a “lapsed Catholic” (aren’t we all?) and was asking to see a priest. Father Weber, newly ordained and ready for anything, went immediately to the man’s room. As their conversation deepened, Sam realized that the guy was struggling with the onset of dementia. Finally, the fellow blurted out: “Father, what can I do to get back into the church?” Sam replied that he would have to make his confession, receive absolution and then he then he could receive the Eucharist. “Begin by confessing your sins,” Sam said, “and we’ll go on from there.” “Hell, Father,” the man replied, “I’m in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, I can’t remember all my sins.” “That’s all right,” Sammy answered, “I’ll sit here and listen. Just do the best you can.” So, blessed ones, as you are going, keep asking and acting on this immediate and eternal question: “Has everyone been served?” Work for justice, reconciliation, and compassion in God’s world. And, when you forget to do that from time to time, confess the sins you remember, and do the best you can. Amen. Commencement 2007May 21, 2007 And As You are Going.... "Yet again it is demonstrated that monotheistic religion is a plagiarism of a plagiarism of hearsay of a hearsay, of an illusion of an illusion, extending all the way back to a fabrication of a few nonevents. 1 I thought you should hear that sentence from Christopher Hitchens' new book, God is not Good, How Religion Poisons Everything, on the day you received a Master of Divinity degree. After all this work and all those papers, many related to "monotheistic religion," it is probably important to acknowledge that some folks - out there - don't think religion is much help at all. You need to know that, I think, "as you are going." In fact, these brief remarks are a reminder that as you go, I hope you keep reading, keep confronting and responding to the uncomfortable ideas and issues around us. Consider reading Hitchens' book on your way out, or that other best seller with similar rebuke - Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion. Dawkins' echoes Hitchens, and quotes yet another critic of organized religion, Sam Harris, who unashamedly declares in HIS book, The End of Faith: "We have names for people who have many beliefs for which there is no rational justification. When their beliefs are extremely common we call them 'religious'; otherwise, they are likely to be called 'mad', 'psychotic' or 'delusional'. . . Clearly there is sanity in numbers." 2These guys are out to get us, or at least our religions, sick and tired, they say, of the way in which religion excuses the worst human behaviors in the name of God. As graduates of the WFU Divinity School, you will surely know how to read these and similar texts, acknowledge their often telling critique of organized religion and offer your own responses with critical analysis and insight. And, if we've done you any good at all, you will also listen to these critics to discern what many folks think of religion in general and "our kind of religion" in particular. All three are best-sellers. Keep reading, as you depart, even, no especially, the books that challenge the center of your being and the heart of your faith. And while you are at it read David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest, that once controversial, now classic assessment of the U. S. and its Vietnam incursion. Halberstam, who died last month in a car accident at age 73, graduated Harvard College in 1955 and began his journalism career in West Point, Mississippi, the summer that two white men went on trial in that state for the murder of a young African American named Emmett Till, killed for whistling at a Southern woman. Halberstam came of age covering that trial and then went off to write about a new war breaking out in Southeast Asia . His reports were so distressing and so early in the war that President John F. Kennedy wanted the New York Times to tone down their twenty-something reporter. Years later Halberstam wrote to young journalists, and perhaps to some of you: "If you get information that is going to jar the Government of the United States and jar the people of the United States, that's what you get paid for. Don't expect to be popular. The better you do the job, the more likely you are to go against conventional wisdom, and people don't like to hear bad news. So you are not going to be popular." Those words may be worth remembering down the road, in some church or non-profit or simply in community with other human beings when you can no longer be silent about the justice or injustice that lies ahead. Prophets, you know, can show up in the ancient or contemporary Middle East, in Mississippi or the Mekong Delta. And today, for the fifth graduation in a row, we confess that we engaged in yet another war, and that this very day names will be called, not as graduates, but as casualties of that war. In a speech given two days before his death, David Halberstam spoke of Vietnam and its impact on his/my generation: "The Best and the Brightest reminds me of moments when John Kennedy was a young man running for the presidency, and a young woman asked him how he became a war hero and he said it was 'entirely involuntary' - that the Japanese had sunk his ship, and in a way, that's what happened to me. I went out to cover a war and then it didn't work. In the sadness of it, in the wreckage of that war, I had a need for better answers than I had come up with. And that's what involuntarily turned me into a historian." 3 When some of you came here three years ago, you confessed (perhaps you still do) that things had occurred in your life - moments of both light and darkness - that 'involuntarily' turned you toward some kind of ministry. What will your own "need for better answers" and the "wreckage" of yet another war turn you into now? Read David Halberstam, as you are going, while we are still at war. And, while you are at it, read Albert Camus, and his essay called "The Myth of Sisyphus." Camus recounts the ancient story this way: "The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor. . . But all Sisyphus' silent joy is contained therein. His fate belonged to him." And then Camus concludes with something very powerful and wonderful as he writes: "There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night." 4 "It is essential to know the night." Those words remind me of the summer of 2001, our second year as a divinity school, when James and Marilyn Dunn and I took a group of students to Oxford, England for a summer school course. Early into the trip, I was awakened around one a.m. with the news that one of our students was deathly ill and had to be taken to the hospital immediately. James and I ran to the city center and commandeered a taxi driver to take the student and us to the John Radcliff Hospital . The cabbie agreed but insisted: "Keep her head out the window in case she throws up. This is a brand new cab." Keep her head out the window??? "O God," I prayed silently as we sped through the empty streets of Oxford , "please keep her safe tonight." And then I added: "And by the way, O God, she is a first year student in the Wake Forest University Divinity School ! In Jesus' name, Amen." (At one in the morning on the way to the emergency room you have to get it all on the table!) It was a long ordeal, with hours in the emergency room, but finally she was taken to a ward for overnight observation. She would be fine, they said, in the morning. And as long as memory serves me, I will remember standing with James Dunn in front of the John Radcliff hospital waiting on another taxi to take us back to Oxford, as the first rays of sunrise appeared in the east. Camus was right, then and now, "There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night." That's a good thing to remember, I suppose, when starting a new divinity school, or graduating from one. Camus' "Myth of Sisyphus" strengthens us when we are mundanely pushing the stones up the hills or when they fall on us. Read it sometime. And as you are going there is another book you should consider. Entitled Poems, it is the work of Maya Angelou, poet, actress, singer, raconteur, writer, and professor at WFU. At the request of some of you I wrote to Dr. Angelou, inviting her to give the "call to Justice" at the hooding last Saturday night. She received the letter and responded personally and immediately to say that she regretted not being able to join us since she is in Washington, DC participating in events at a school that bears her name. But she promised to join us next fall, if possible, for a day's lectures and, as she said, "direct conversation" with students. She concluded our chat by reminding me that "the call to justice knows no end time," and although she could not speak to us about it now, she would join us later in the year. So as you are going, read Professor Maya Angelou and reflect on her many calls for justice, evidenced in these words that send you on your way: When you see them Take time out. When you see him Take time out. Use a minute If you know that youth Take time out. 5 You see, the distance from Christopher Hitchens and David Halberstam, from Albert Camus and Maya Angelou, from Ho Chi Minh City and Baghdad to all the rest of us isn't all that far. Faith, hope and love walk a thin line in us and in the world. I hope we told you that during the last three years, and reflected sufficiently on some strategies for discovering joy and justice wherever you go and whatever you read. In Jesus' name, amen. The Benediction Go in peace 1 Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Good: How Religion Poisons Everything ( New York : Twelve, 2007), 280.
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