I preached this sermon at St. Lydia's on Sunday, January 2, 2010. The text is Luke 2:8-20; read it here.
I spent Christmas this year with my parents and family in Memphis, and though I’ve traveled to Memphis a few times in my life, I had never been to the Civil Rights Museum. The museum is located in the Lorraine Hotel where Martin Lutheran King was assassinated in April of 1968.
King had launched what he called the “second phase” of the Civil Rights movement only a year earlier. With a movement he called The Poor People’s Campaign, he had turned his focus to the problem of poverty. He was in the midst of motivating leaders from the desegregation movement as well as other, non-black communities affected by poverty, to press Washington to respond to the problem of poverty in the United States.
King went to Memphis in April of 1968 to participate in the Sanitation Worker’s Strike that had begun just a few months earlier. Black garbage men in Memphis were paid less than white garbage men, and though they worked full time jobs, they were paid so little they actually lived below the poverty line. Forty percent of them were eligible for welfare. Earlier in the year, two black workers had been killed by a malfunctioning trash compacter and a spontaneous walk out occurred, leaving the streets of Memphis littered in garbage.
King flew down to join the effort, saying that the plight of the sanitation workers was what The Poor People’s Campaign was all about. When he arrived to march in Memphis, the workers had printed up signs to wear. The signs said simply, I am a Man.
Imagine if you will,
Joseph and Mary arriving at a motel on the bad side of Memphis.
They are nothing but two kids from the country,
and Mary’s just about to have a baby.
Then the sky opens up, and angels appear,
not to the white people in the fancy houses in Germantown,
but to the black Sanitation Workers who live out near the airport.
Do not be afraid, the angel says,
for see—I am bringing you good news of great joy for all the people:
to you is born this day a Savior,
who is the Messiah, the Lord.
In Jesus’ time, shepherds were the lowest step on the social ladder. They lived in the fields with their sheep and slept on the ground. They were poor and dirty, and they fit in no one’s society. It’s them God chooses to tell first of the Messiah’s birth.
The message is for them:
God is born among you. Go and find him, go and seek him out.
He is the savior, he brings hope for all people.
He brings hope for you.
The message that those angles bring changes everything.
The message:
that God is born among us,
has come to us in human form,
to be with us wherever we are, or whoever we might be.
It’s the garbage men of Memphis who hear this message first.
Hear that indeed,
their bold statement,
I am a Man,
is the Good News of the Gospel.
I am a Man,
beloved by God,
fearfully and wonderfully made.
Each of us in this room is human.
Each of us in this room is divine.
Christmas is a time when we think a lot about giving,
but perhaps less about changing.
It’s a time when we might think about those
who have less than we do,
but the question remains:
how do commit ourselves to change
and not just to charity?
How do we address the very systems that are in place
that keep a lot of folks at the bottom for the benefit of the few at the top?
As King began the Poor People’s Campaign, the threats on his life intensified. A space at a lunch counter was one thing; overhauling the nation’s economy was quite another. King wanted to turn everything upside down.
To fill the hungry with good things
and send the rich away empty.
So how do we begin?
What do we do?
How do we dedicate ourselves not to charity but to change?
King thought it was about relationships.
His friend Marian Wright Edelman, at that time a young civil rights lawyer, had told him of a trip she had planned for Senator Robert F. Kennedy to the poverty stricken areas of Mississippi, to meet some of the nation’s poorest face to face. The trip had a deep impact in Kennedy, and so she and King planned the Poor People’s March on Washington to bring those living in poverty right to the steps of the capitol. They would live in a shanty town called Resurrection City, and the government and the poor would meet face to face.
It’s always about what happens face to face.
As we look into the eyes of another
and see Christ’s eyes looking back at us,
we acknowledge the common humanity and divinity
that each of us shares:
I am a man.
Tension gives way to respect, respect to love, love to healing, healing to justice.
The creche we arrange at Christmas time
pictures Mary and Joseph and Jesus
in a manger.
Shepherds worship there,
and kings worship there too.
Garbage men and seamstresses worship there.
And senators and presidents.
All of them huddle together
to see the light that enlightens the world.
The word made flesh, that lives among us.
Christ is born in a in a motel in Memphis,
born to die for the whole world.
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