If you find yourself facing a monstrous evil, there are really only two choices: either to run or to fight. Either to run or to fight. Now most of us will try a third choice; we will try to ignore the problem. But that won’t work. That won’t work. Massive, monstrous evil demands a response: flee it or fight it, but denying it won’t work. Pretending that it’s not there won’t work.
Those who have developed today’s worship have encouraged me to tell something of my own story, how I have lived through some of the history of our times, how I have encountered the issues of racism in my own life. I do so this morning, on the one hand, with fear and trembling. The task of the preacher is never to preach himself, but Christ crucified. I do not need to be the subject of the sermon. Not at all. More than that, I also understand that when I get into this matter of race, there are some who feel that because I am not black, I am out of place. I acknowledge those problems. And yet, as I have taken counsel on this point, two other things have also become clear: first, that as the pastor of the church, I have a responsibility always to declare the whole counsel of God, to bring to everything a Biblical and spiritual perspective; and, second, that my own experiences do communicate powerfully to you. And so this morning I have consented to say just a few things about my own experiences with the history that has been lived out in my lifetime, trusting that you will hear me a Biblical point of view, and trusting also that you do not for one moment doubt my love for you and my dedication to what this congregation is all about.
I
Paul says in this Roman letter, “... take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all... never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God .... Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” I say again that you can either be overwhelmed by evil or you can overcome it, but you cannot forever stand off to the side and ignore it, pretending that you are only trying to live peaceably. Whether you are overwhelmed or overcoming depends on you and how you are shaped.
I was born in and grew up in a segregated city, Louisville, Kentucky. I lived in a neighborhood that was almost all white, with the single exception of two little streets named Harvard and Yale, where some very visionary individual had, many years before, used the idea of restrictive real estate covenants to require that those houses be sold to no one other than black citizens. Since those two little streets were close to a shopping center where my great-uncle ran a store, I can remember us driving down one or the other, with my parents commenting on who lived there and saying, “Why, to look at the houses, you would never know!” They thought that was a compliment! Essentially, however, I grew up in a one-color world, and nobody did anything to challenge that.
In my segregated city and its almost segregated neighborhood, I attended segregated schools. Black children did not appear in the classrooms I knew. But I cannot pretend that this was an issue in my young mind. Oh, I was concerned about school segregation, all right, but of a different kind. My big worry was that the city of Louisville had just ended its pattern of separation by sexes in the high schools, and I had to go to a high school which had been a girls-only high school. What a humiliation! But, you see, if something doesn’t touch you directly, it’s easy to shrug it off, to ignore it, tell yourself it’s not your fight, and pretend you are just living peaceably. Nothing challenged the segregated way of life for me.
When Brown vs. Board of Education came down in 1954, I was sixteen years old, working on getting my driver’s license, absorbed with hobbies and my first job and my first love and all that good stuff, and had only one more year of high school anyway. So the court’s decision didn’t affect me; I could ignore it and pretend to live peaceably with all. Even if quite a few of the “all” were not even in my world. No challenge to the racist way of life.
II
But, quietly, unrecognized at the time, some other things had been happening in my life as well. And it’s interesting that I can remember these things. As a small child, I went downtown one day with my grandmother to shop on Fourth Street. We rode the old trolley streetcars; I saw a line drawn somewhere toward the back that separated different kinds of folks, and I remember asking about it, as a six-year-old might, very loudly, to my grandmother’s embarrassment. I felt, vaguely, that this was unfair. Something new was being born in me.
Every summer we went up into Indiana to visit my father’s family. That involved a drive across the Ohio River on what must have been the oldest, shakiest, scariest bridge in the world, the K&I Bridge. The K&I Bridge, the Kentucky and Indiana Terminal Railroad. This old bridge had rail tracks down the middle and little, narrow, automobile lanes kind of hanging off each side. God have mercy on your soul if a train was crossing at the same time you were driving on the thing! The purpose of this bridge, which was actually a very short line rail company, just the width of the Ohio River, was to effect a transition between north and south. My father pointed out that southbound trains stopped on the K&I Bridge so that folks could sort themselves out, coming from non-segregated Indiana into segregated Kentucky. I thought that was peculiar, no, I thought that was ridiculous. Something was being born in me.
One day the Freedom Train came to Louisville, and we all piled in our old Ford to go and see it. The Freedom Train was a special railroad exhibition, sponsored by the National Archives, to take some of America’s most important documents on the road where more people could see them. There in those rail cars you could see the real things: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, all the real originals were put on display. In one of those rail cars, I saw a crowd of people, hovering around one of the exhibits. They seemed to be drinking it all in. They couldn’t tear themselves away from it. I asked my father about it; what was this “Emancipation Proclamation” and why were all these people so interested in it? I could not have been older than about ten, but I have never forgotten his answer, “If your grandparents had been in slavery for generations, you too would be interested in the Emancipation Proclamation.” There was a catch in his voice and tear in his eye. Something again that day was being born in me.
Don’t ask me how I remember all these childhood incidents. I just do. God can give us the gift of recalling the things that shape us. All I know is that something was being born in me to shape me and prepare me.
And then there was church. Yes, church was all white, except for one Chinese member. Church was all white, but I tell you, it was a subversive place! What a subversive place church was and is! In church some things were born in me. In church I learned Bible verses like “In Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek, male or female, bond or free, for we are all one in Christ Jesus.” In church I learned to sing songs like “Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in His sight.” In church we talked about missions, we talked about a God who loved the whole world enough to send His son to die for it. Church was a subversive place; church taught me things that I would some day challenge my world. Something very definite was being born in me.
III
But still, I confess, until my college days the issue was out there, somebody else’s, not mine, and I ignored it. I thought that evil could be dealt with by turning away from it, leaving it alone. I didn’t know that when you face real evil, powerful evil, either it is overwhelming or you overcome it. Either you flee from it or you fight it. I thought you could just say, “Not my problem” and be done with it. How wrong I was!
In my college days, however, the something that was being born in me began to mature a little. I made my first lasting friendship with an African-American person. In fact, Emmanuel McCall will be here in Washington shortly to speak to a Baptist meeting. I began to know people, not just images.
In my college days, I heard that our Baptist Hospital had turned away the wife of a Nigerian student at the seminary, refusing to let her baby be born there. Our pastor said we ought to protest that. I agreed; I began to feel some pain and some anger at that, and wrote a letter of protest. Not much, but something.
In college, in the process of discovering that God wanted me as a minister rather than as a chemical engineer, I went off for three months’ work in the Dupont plant in Kinston, North Carolina. I was supposed to help solve problems in the production of Dacron, but I confess I didn’t do much engineering. Instead I did a lot of social and spiritual observing. In my youthful naiveté, I pointed out to the management that the only black folks working in the plant were sweeping the floors or handling the food. Turns out they did not need me to point that out to them. That was the plan! It was not an accident. And my supervisor took me aside to inform me that the function of the plant was to make money for the stockholders and not to engage in social change. But something was happening. I was not quite as confident that I knew any longer what it meant to live peaceably with all. I was beginning to see that the only choices were either to be overwhelmed by evil or to overcome it. I could not ignore it any longer.
I came back to Louisville and began to prepare seriously for the ministry. The very first person outside my own church who trusted me to preach was an elevator operator in the building where I worked; he took me to some of those afternoon services in an African Methodist Episcopal Church, one of those occasions where they have seven different preachers, each one trying to outdo the others. Believe me, I got outdone! But I learned a lot. And somebody trusted me to preach. Somebody very different from me trusted a twenty-year-old white bread kid, whose father went with him to make sure he would be “safe”. Something was really happening now, and I knew that living peaceably with all did not mean just sitting by while the great issues of the day were being debated. Either you overcome evil or you are overwhelmed by it, and, as for living peaceably, well, Paul says it: it depends on you!
I must pass quickly through my seminary days, pausing only long enough to reminisce about being a part of the group of students who defended our president when he took a lot of criticism for inviting Martin Luther King to speak in chapel. I must pass quickly through my first years in campus ministry, pausing only long enough to thank God for giving me students named Howard Johnson and Sandra Hill, the first black college students to take leadership in the Baptist Student Unions in Kentucky. I must pass very quickly through the days when we moved to Washington, when our Kentucky friends looked at us as though we had holes in our heads and warned us that “they” were awfully numerous up here and that ”they” ran things in Washington. Incidentally, Margaret and I took great delight in telling our friends back home that the first and only people to help us when our car broke down on our house-hunting trip were some of the “they”! I must pass rapidly through all of that and everything else in the last twenty five years in order to get to my real thrust, in order to proclaim the Gospel.
IV
For the Gospel is that there is a way to overcome evil with good. There is a way not to be overwhelmed with evil, but to overcome evil with good. And that is the way of the cross. That is the way of joining Christ in what He is doing. The cross.
For the greatest overcomer who ever lived was Jesus Christ. Despised and rejected of men, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; attacked by religious people, crucified by the Roman authorities, spat upon and scorned by those He loved. Put upon a cross and left to hover out under a leaden sky! Not right, not fair, unjust! At first it looks like He was overwhelmed by evil.
And yet, listen to Him. “Father, forgive, for they know not what they do.” In the place of evil, unsullied good. Watch Him; to the repentant thief, “Today you will be with me in Paradise.” In the presence of evil-doers, all compassion. The cross overcomes evil with good. The cross is overcoming. Triumph.
Christ Jesus did not stand idly by in the face of all of the world’s sin. It gathered around Him. But He overcame! Christ Jesus took on the evil of the world, and overcame it. Christ Jesus faced the evil, the hate, the sin, the terrors of this world, but faced them down with His cross. Do not think of the cross as yet another pillory on which evil wins the day. Think of the cross as the power of overcoming! Do not imagine that the Christ of the cross is just another lynching victim. The Christ of the cross is on a throne of victory!
And so in Christ Jesus, because of Him, because of His cross, I am given wholly and without reservation to the proposition that whatever evil there may be, though it be racism or violence in the streets, though it be dishonesty in government or faithlessness in the church .. I am given wholly and without reservation to the proposition that we may partner with Christ and overcome every last scrap of evil. Does He not say, “Be of good cheer, I have overcome the world?”
I give thanks for having lived through the most dynamic era in human racial history. And I give thanks to know that if I trust Christ and His redemptive work, I will be not overcome by evil, but will receive power to overcome evil with good .. and it will be possible, as it does depend on me, to live peaceably with all. Not on the sidelines, but on the front lines. We shall not be overwhelmed, but we shall overcome, some day. Good news! Good news! Good news!
