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Let the
Trumpet Sound
A White
Cleric's Tribute to the Drum Major
by Bishop C. Joseph Sprague
Bishop Sprague was
asked to keynote the Ohio Wesleyan University and Delaware County Martin
Luther King Jr. Celebration in 2007. He delivered this speech at the William
Street United Methodist Church. It was published in The Conscious Voice Magazine, in Winter 2008.
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Bishop C. Joseph Sprague served in the episcopacy after 27
years as a pastor and seven years as an ecumenical officer. He was elected
to the episcopacy in 1996 and was assigned Bishop to the Chicago Episcopal
Area and the Northern Illinois Conference until he retired in 2004. He is known in the church and elsewhere for combining biblical
scholarship, personal piety, preaching and teaching with social justice
ministries and commitment. |
PROLOGUE:
More than a year ago, Dr. Everett Tilson extended your MLK Committee’s gracious
invitation for me to speak today. Despite vexing questions in my mind about the
appropriateness of a white person fulfilling this role, I readily accepted. I
did so out of forty-five years of profound respect for Everett. After all, he
remained the teacher and I was still the student. And, I quickly agreed to be
here, as well, because the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at a generational
distance, and a number of his colleagues in the Movement, up close and personal,
particularly the Revs. Otis Moss, Fred Shuttlesworth, James Lawson, E. O.
Thomas, and Jesse Jackson helped to shape the contours of my lifetime of
ministry. Little did we know, when Everett placed that call in customary,
well-in-advance Everett fashion, that his death would preclude his physical
presence here today.
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But, as his spirit pervades this event, what follows is
offered in memory of Dr. Everett Tilson, teacher and cajoler, friend and
irascible troubler of conscience and practice. Everett, this one is for you with
deep gratitude and abiding respect. |
Following Dr. King’s assassination on April 4th, and two subsequent urban
upheavals in Cincinnati, late in the Spring of 1968, the Rev. Dr. Otis Moss and
I were eating breakfast together at the Vernon Manor Hotel in the Queen city.
The topic of conversation was what the churches - black and white, Protestant
and Roman Catholic - and the synagogues - Orthodox, Conservative and Reformed -
could do together to address the systemic causes of the so–called riots and,
hence, help to quell the violence on Cincinnati’s streets. Dr. Joseph Link,
prominent Cincinnati physician of that era and the then relatively new owner of
the Vernon Manor Hotel, was pouring coffee in the hotel’s dining room, as had
become is custom. “Would you boys like more coffee,” Dr. Link graciously
inquired as he approached our table. We blinked and nodded affirmatively. Dr.
Link then moved a few feet to the next table. With coffee pot in tow, he asked
the four, white, male customers seated there, “Would you gentlemen like more
coffee?” I do not recall their response, but I shall never forget that of Dr.
Moss. With a grimace of perception and without a word, he summoned Dr. Link to
our table. “Sir,” Dr. Moss asked courteously, “I would like to inquire as to
what intervened in your history between our table and theirs that made them
“gentlemen” and rendered us “boys?” Shaken, incredulous even, Dr. Link was
silent for a time. Then, regaining equilibrium, he said, “That was rude and
insensitive if me. I apologize and promise you that never again shall I
call any man, “boy.” Something had indeed intervened in the life and history of
Dr. Joseph Link. But, he was not the only white person as that table, or of that
era, who was confronted and changed dramatically by the disconcerting,
reorienting spirit of the Lord mediated through that tough, yet tender, witness
of the Drum Major for Justice, his minion of lead trumpeters like Revs. Moss,
Shuttlesworth, Lawson, Jackson, Young, Abernathy, Lewis, and a host of other
black clergy and the heroic laity, especially the quite old and very young of
the historic black church, who marched with the Movement to Freedom’s undeniable
and relentless beat.
My life and ministry, like those of other white clergy privileged to have been
there in Selma, Jackson, and hosts of other places, South and North, were
changed forever by the witness of the Drum Major, his lead trumpeters in the
Movement Band, and a few white band members, like Everett Tilson, who implored
us to hear, believe and eventually integrate into the very fabric of our beings
the intervening Word of the Lord, which forever turned the tables of our lives,
as we gained equilibrium and realized that, “The Spirit of the lord has anointed
(us); . . . has sent (us) to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the
brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the
prisoner.” (Isaiah 61: 1b -2)
On this occasion, it would not be appropriate for this white cleric to presume
to detail what Dr. King and his trumpeters of justice in the Movement Band did
for and mean to black people. That story must be told from the black experience.
But, what is appropriate this afternoon is for me to “Let the Trumpet Sound,” as
I express, explicitly and implicitly, "A White Cleric’s Gratitude for the Drum
Major" - - his lead trumpeters and at least one white fellow traveler, who
marching stride for stride, side by side, proclaimed the year of the Lord’s
favor. S
e
I. WAR AND PEACE
Visiting Afghanistan in 2002, an part of an interfaith delegations of Jews,
Muslims, and Christians, I watched Halo Trust, that nonprofit, land–mines
sweeping entity, popularized by Princess Diana, detonate the one millionth land
mine it had swept worldwide, 750,000 in Afghanistan alone! Our delegation walked
live mine fields, saw the remains of a few of the 12,000 obliterated villages,
witnessed the absence of a functional, national infrastructure, spent
considerable time in Afghan homes and heard innumerable stories from children
about their personal experiences with the horror of war. In my study hangs the
crude, but eloquent, crayon drawing of a 10-year old Afghan boy. The drawing
depicts my young friend’s recollection of watching the US bomb fall onto his
small farm home, killing his parents, siblings, and farm animals. The words of
another 10-year old, a precocious student, who was maimed while playing with a
US cluster bomb he mistook for a toy, reverberate in my soul: “Some day,” he
told us, “I’m going to help turn my country back into gold." Sights of hundreds
of orphans, mangled by land mines and other killing devices, are wedged
indelibly in my psyche.
So it was that in the early summer of 2002, I returned to Chicago from Kabul
City, while the war drums in Washington were beating for a preemptive strike
against Iraq. I was convinced that our antiwar movement needed to gain
significant momentum. And it did, as 10,000 of us turned out to question the
morality of the first strike, preemptive war making. As Christians and Muslims,
we questioned the morality of a war based on the supposed ties between El Quaeda
and Iraq and the unverified assertion by the Bush administration that Iraq
harbored weapons of mass destruction. We said that such a senseless war would
only drive countless moderate and even liberal Muslims into the arms of Islamist
fanatics. But, like thousands of other protesters across the country, and
millions around the globe, we were dismissed as a mere focus group, while the
fourth estate, which was but an extension of the Bush Estate, barely reported
our informed protestations.
Arrested in Washington D.C., literally between two female Noble Peace Prize
laureates, and wondering what a nice guy like me – and a bishop at that - was
doing in jail, I saw in my mind’s eye, Dr. King’s words, long ago framed and
hung in a conspicuous place in our home, “Returning violence for violence
multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive
out hate; only love can do that.”
It is easy on such occasions as this to gloss over the historic reality that,
when Dr. King forthrightly denounced the War in Viet Nam, he was widely
criticized within the black community and across the liberal white community.
Needless to say, he was skewered in other circles. His antiwar stand was far
from popular, only right. It was consistent with who he was and emblematic of
all for which he stood. He had seen, long before it became obvious, that war,
poverty, and racism were/are siamese triplets, joined at the hip, thus crippling
Freedom’s march and sapping to very life blood from the American soul. And so he
said,
"It is time for all people of conscience to call upon America to return to her
true home… of peaceful pursuits. We cannot remain silent as our nation engages
in one of history’s most cruel and senseless wars. During these days of human
travail we must encourage creative dissenters. We need them because the thunder
of their fearless voices will be the only sound stronger than the blasts of
bombs and the clamor of war hysteria."
The Drum major called me, and a host of other, black and white, brown, red, and
yellow, to turn the tables on our comfortable lives and arise from compliant
silence in order to embrace engaged and informed protest. This, many of us did
back then. But, the question before us, now, is weather instead of merely
venerating the King on such occasions as this – which is idolatry - we will dare
to march with the Drum Major to the beat of nonviolent, engaged and informed
opposition to senseless war making, Who me? Who you? As Everett would say,
To ask the question is to answer it.
***A White Cleric's Tribute continued: POVERTY >>
ptember 3, 2015
at 6 PM at the
Siegel Center, Richmond, VA
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