“John’s Word for Us”
John is in the wilderness preach’n up a storm. He’s in the desert. In the Bible when they tell you someone is in the desert you might as well hang a sign on the door, “Entering the danger zone.” With apologies to Kenny Loggins, the danger zone ain’t up there in the clouds, it’s right here. And the religious leaders know better than anyone not to go there. That’s why they send their temple helpers to go where they do not dare to go. But John is there. The people are there. They come from the city and the countryside and everywhere, they stream into the wilderness, into the desert, into the danger zone to hear John.
And Jesus is there with them. He’s in the desert with the people and with John. When John sees him just walk’n around with everyone, he calls him out. He tells the people, “He’s the one. That’s him. He’s the Lamb of God.” And then a strange conversation takes place. Jesus says, “What do you want?” And the people turn to Jesus and ask, “Where do you live?”
What’s your address? Where do you live? Cause that’s where I want to be. I want to be with you, Jesus. I don’t
want to live next to any superfund toxic dumpsite pump’n poison into my neighbor’s wells and fill’n their lungs with chemical dust and their bodies with cancer. I don’t want to live in a city where city officials have known about this site at least since 1994 and probably since the 1970’s, and corporate crooks have gotten away with it ‘cause for them it spells m-o-n-e-y. Where do you live, Jesus? I want to be with you.
I want to go someplace where a 15-year old boy can’t accidentally shoot his 16 year old best friend because he didn’t know the gun was loaded. Just last night I learned that we have had four homicides in the first 15 days for 2023. At this rate, that’s 8 homicides a month. Count them. Eight times twelve. That’s 96 homicides for the year. Where do you live, Jesus? ‘Cause I sure don’t want to live here.
And I want to go where children don’t bring guns to school and teachers are given death threats and rich people hide in their sacred temples behind gated walls or flee to the safety of the ‘burbs. And, tell me, Jesus, where do
you live ‘cause I ain’t been to no mountain top and I ain’t seen no Promised Land.
Did Martin have his head in the clouds? And what about you, Jesus, where do you live?
Martin didn’t have his head in the clouds. His feet were planted firmly on terra firma. He lived in this danger zone. His daddy and his momma gave him the name Michael. In Hebrew that means “Who is like God.” They called him Michael. Then papa King went to Germany where he learned about a revolutionary named Martin Luther, who shook up the whole church and changed the face of Europe. When papa King came home he changed his name, and he changed Michael’s name, and they became Martin Luther King, Sr. and Martin Luther King, Jr. It is no accident that his name is Martin Luther King, Jr.
And somewhere in the desert wilderness Martin met Howard Thurman. Dr. Thurman asked Martin this piercing question, “What does Christianity have to say to a people who stand with their backs against the wall?” And Dr. Thurman counseled Martin, “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs are people who have come alive.” So, Martin took Dr. Thurman’s book, Jesus and the Disinherited, with him and he went to the desert wilderness of Memphis to stand with sanitation workers. Where do you live, Jesus?
Martin’s head was not in the clouds. He had been taught too well by Dr. Benjamin Mays for that to happen. Mays was the president of Morehouse College. Martin went to school there. Every week Dr. Mays would hold a class teaching students how to preach, holding a Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. And when Martin spoke out against the war in Vietnam, when he said that our fight is not against the people of Vietnam, critics told him he had lost his way in the wilderness. He should go back to the temple and leave war and politics to the pros, the best and the brightest. Dr. Mays stood with Martin and encouraged him to preach his message from the mountain top.
Martin knew about life in the danger zone. His “other brother,” Bayard Rustin led him there. Rustin grew up in Quaker country. He taught Martin that nonviolence is not just an idea or an ideal or a philosophy. Nonviolence is a way of life. Violence begets violence and more violence, violence without end, until violence spills over into the streets of our cities and raises its ugly head in our school classrooms. Rustin taught Martin nonviolence is the only answer to violence.
Rustin was co-founder of the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE). Through CORE, Rustin organized the Journey for Reconciliation in 1947. That journey into the wilderness became the model for the Freedom Rides in 1961. Rustin was there to organize the March on Washington in 1963, and the march in Selma in 1965. But that’s not why he is remembered as the “Other Brother.” In his younger years Rustin flirted with the Communist Party, and the high priests of culture and potentates of power never forgave him for that. But that wasn’t the worst of it. Not by a long shot. Bayard was a gay Black man. Senator Strom Thurman and other racists swore they would tar and feather the Civil Rights Movement if this “Other Brother” was given a place of leadership.
Martin did not have his head in the clouds. He had his feet planted firmly in history. He knew what he was up against. A. Philip Randolph made sure of that. In the desert wilderness of the United States, A. Philip Randolph brought the gospel of trade unionism to Black men and Black women when he organized the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Maids in 1925. His target was the Pullman Car Company–a company too big to fail. The names of the Board of Directors read like Who’s Who in America. Pullman made the best railroad cars in the country at a time when railroads were the king of the road. Mr. Pullman created a town, Pullman, Illinois, for his employees. Then he paid them with company script so they could pay rent for the privilege of living in company houses and buying their food at the company store. The porters and maids worked on the trains. The fight took twelve years, but the union won against long odds.
Randolph helped pave the way for protest politics, and he helped overcome racial barriers in the American labor movement. Then in 1941, A. Philip Randolph started organizing a march on Washington, D.C. He would have done it, too. But Eleanor Roosevelt stepped in. She arranged a meeting between Randolph and FDR. In the end, Randolph called off the march, and FDR signed Executive Order 8802, establishing the Fair Employment and Protection Commission, prohibiting ethnic or racial discrimination in the national defense.
Randolph, who planned the march on Washington in 1941, helped plan the March on Washington in 1963.
Is it any wonder that religious leaders sent temple helpers to talk to John in the desert, or letters to Martin when he was sitting in a Birmingham jail. Slow down, they said. You’re pushing too hard. Going too fast. The time is not right. They said. From his Birmingham jail cell Martin wrote back to the well-meaning but ill-advised preachers who had forgotten to ask Jesus where he lived. He reminded them that “Human progress does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability. . . Every step requires sacrifice, suffering, and struggle, the tireless exertions and passionate commitments of dedicated individuals.” When the religious leaders told him the time was not right, he told them “the time is always ripe to do right.”
The time is always ripe, but are our hearts ready? John said we need to be baptized by the Holy Spirit, not with the numbing and seductive spirit of the status quo, but baptized with the Holy Spirit.
When the people asked Jesus, “Where do you live?” He told them: “come and see: ”the lame walk, the sick are healed, the prisoners are set free, the hungry are fed, the naked are clothed, the water is pure and the air is clean. This is what the reign of God looks like. Come and see.
Prayer: Spirit of restlessness, blow through the wilderness of these times. Stir us from placidness. Sweep through the dry desert of our imagination. Let us hear again the voices of the prophets. Help us rise on the wings of your dream of a world transformed by the power of your love. So be it. Amen. (with thanks to James K. Manley for “Spirit”)