Creative Extremism For Justice, by Rev. Mary McKinnon Ganz Jan. 18, 2010

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Creative Extremism for Justice

Sisters and brothers, we live in extreme times.

It is instructive to go back and read the words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King. The mythology has done its best to tame him – but his words live, and they sound more like the words of an extremist now than they did when their author walked the earth among us. His words of course haven’t changed, but the nation has changed around them, and this is not good news. We give thanks for evidence that color prejudice is losing some of its power; we have an African-American in the White House, and this is surely progress. But it is also true that since Dr. King’s death in 1968, our nation has moved toward extremism, and NOT toward an extremism of justice. Is there anyone who would disagree that in the 42 years since Rev. King was with us, this country has moved toward an extremism of greed? In today’s climate, anyone who speaks for the poor the way Rev. King did is accused of fomenting class warfare. In today’s extreme climate, greed is good, and Rev. King’s dream of Beloved Community has been whitewashed so that in some circles the color of one’s skin may matter a little less, but the color of one’s money reigns supreme.

Our text today is Dr. King’s call for “creative extremists for justice,” from his “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” As a religious leader who is white, I take very seriously other words from that letter: “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice ….”

Very well then: it is clear that I am called to be immoderate in my pursuit of justice. I will need some role models – stories to equip me for the journey, stories not only of Dr. King and the beautiful soul that lives today through the words he left for us, but stories of white allies who have immoderately supported the great civil rights work of my brothers and sisters of color. I look to Lydia Maria Child, remembered mainly for pioneering ladies’ homemaker magazines, who helped to publish the writings of Harriet Jacobs in 1861, and that one book, “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” influenced a generation of northern women to the cause of abolition. I look to Theodore Parker, who was said to have written his sermons with a loaded gun in his desk drawer, which he intended to use, if needed, to defend the freedom of a human being he was protecting from slave catchers. I look to James Reeb, the Unitarian minister whose life ended on a street in Selma in 1965.

Those were extreme times too. What are we called to do today? Today we are called, as Dr. King said, to resist accommodation – to be “creatively maladjusted,” in his words, to the times in which we live, with their false gospel of radical capitalism. We are called to live the truth of Dr. King’s words about the solidarity of the human family, and to eliminate structures of economic injustice that have increased their stranglehold on us, over these years since Dr. King was taken from us. If you read his words, his beautiful words, it’s very clear: our salvation depends on this, depends on our willingness not to adjust, our ability to maintain that state of tension of creative maladjustment – as Jesus did, as Parker did, as Dr. King himself did. May we never fail to use our power in pursuit of justice. May we not falter in our extremism for love.

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