The dateline was to be Little Rock, Arkansas, September 1957. The story was to be about the vicious hatred of a city whose people were resisting justice and terrifying school children. Little Rock, Arkansas, where Governor Orval Faubus had become the symbol of massive resistance, and where an indecisive president, Eisenhower, had finally taken action to protect children and enforce justice. Little Rock, where the plan to desegregate schools had been watered down to nothing more than nine young people – nine out of thousands – six girls and three boys, to carry the banner. The Chicago Defender, an African-American newspaper, sent its reporter to cover the story. It expected to print an account of atrocities. It expected to describe monstrous people who lived only to devour young children and to ravage the dreams of hard-working families. The Chicago Defender expected from its reporter a sensational story.
But let Gwendolyn Brooks tell us what actually happened, in her poem, “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock”:
In Little Rock the people bear
Babes, and comb and part their hair
And watch the want ads, put repair
To roof and latch. While wheat toast burns
A woman waters multiferns.
Time upholds, or overturns,
The many, tight, and small concerns.
In Little Rock the people sing
Sunday hymns like anything,
Through Sunday pomp and polishing.
And after testament and tunes,
Some soften Sunday afternoons
With lemon tea and Lorna Doones.
I forecast
And I believe
Come Christmas Little Rock will cleave
To Christmas tree and trifle, weave,
From laugh and tinsel, texture fast.
In Little Rock is baseball; Barcarolle.
That hotness in July … the uniformed figures raw and implacable
And not intellectual,
Batting the hotness or clawing the suffering dust.
…
There is love, too, in Little Rock. Soft women softly
Opening themselves in kindness,
Or, pitying one’s blindness,
Awaiting one’s pleasure
In azure
…
In Little Rock they know
Not answering the telephone is a way of rejecting life,
That it is our business to be bothered, is our business
To cherish bores or boredom, be polite
To lies and love and many-faceted fuzziness.
I scratch my head, massage the hate-I-had.
I blink across my prim and pencilled pad.
The saga I was sent for is not down.
Because there is a puzzle in this town.
The biggest News I do not dare
Telegraph to the Editor’s chair:
“They are like people everywhere.”
The angry Editor would reply
In hundred harryings of Why.
And true, they are hurling spittle, rock,
Garbage and fruit in Little Rock.
And I saw coiling storm a-writhe
On bright madonnas. And a scythe
Of men harassing brownish girls.
(The bows and barrettes in the curls
And braids declined away from joy.)
I saw a bleeding brownish boy …
The lariat lynch-wish I deplored.
The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.
Monsters? The reporter for The Chicago Defender couldn’t find monsters. What he found was that the people of Little Rock, “They are like people everywhere.” The utter ordinariness of sin, the sheer everydayness of hate. Harsh oppression in a land of freedom. Death in the midst of life. The impulse to lynch, to lash out. The animal instinct for wild hatred, even where people sing hymns and hear of Jesus and sip gentle refreshment. These evildoers – they look very ordinary. They are like people everywhere. Ready to hate, ready to lynch.
But what do you make of Brooks’ closing line, “The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.”?
I
Jesus arrived at death’s dark door one day. It seemed to be too late. His friend Lazarus had been sick for quite a while, but Jesus was in no apparent hurry. It puzzled His disciples; it made His friends Mary and Martha anxious. But Jesus operated on His own timetable. He came in His own sweet time, and then was bold enough to announce, "This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory”.
When Jesus arrived at death’s dark door, He began by speaking of hope. When things looked bleak, and it felt like the battle was over and lost, Jesus insisted that the first weapon you have is hope. "This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God’s glory.” That’s hope.
Gwendolyn Brooks writes of a little girl who, despite her health challenge, kept hope alive. Her poem is called “From A Street in Bronzeville; hunchback girl: she thinks of heaven”. Imagine as you hear it a child, seriously deformed, struggling with a severe distortion in her body. When she thinks of heaven, what does this child see?
My Father, it is surely a blue place
And straight. Right. Regular. Where I shall find
No need for scholarly nonchalance or looks
A little to the left or guards upon the
Heart to halt love that runs without crookedness
Along its crooked corridors. My Father,
It is a planned place surely. Out of coils,
Unscrewed, released, no more to be marvelous,
I shall walk straightly through most proper halls
Proper myself, princess of properness.
That’s hope – that a little girl, misshapen, might expect a straight taut body. Friends, there are many things that are wrong with this world. The list of woes and wrongs would stretch from here to there and back again. But if we are to defeat injustice, we have to start with hope. If we are to have victory over evil, we must start with hope. It was hope that led Rosa Parks to disobey Montgomery’s transit seating laws. It was hope that took civil rights workers to Mississippi, even though death was the result. It was hope that sounded in Dr. King’s voice on that last night, as he spoke of just wanting to do God’s will. Unless we keep hope alive, we are lost. But with hope, all things are possible.
No one can say it better than Jesus Himself, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?" Wherever there is wrong, you begin to put it right with hope.
II
Even so, hope sometimes gives way to frustration and to despair. We expect everything to be done for us. We want God to take over and do it all. We think we have done our part in calling on God, and then we assume that it’s all up to Him. In fact, though we’d never say it out loud, we are like Martha, complaining, "Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” In this nation, where it is still possible to denied opportunity because of the color of your skin; in this city, where if you don’t look right, the drugstore clerk will snub you; in this world, still so full of lingering rancor, we’d like to think that God would just wave His hand and get rid of all the mess. What it has taken us centuries to tangle up, we’d like to see God untangle in the twinkling of an eye. “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” Lord, if you had been at Little Rock, these children would not have suffered. Lord, if you had been in the Delta, those bodies would not have been buried in the dike. Lord, if you had been in Memphis, that rifle shot would not have been aimed at Martin. Lord, if you had been here …
In one of her most delightful poems Gwendolyn Brooks urges us to think about what God must feel like when we just keep dumping on Him. The poem is called, “the preacher: ruminates behind the sermon”
I think it must be lonely to be God.
Nobody loves a master, No. Despite
The bright hosannas, bright dear-Lords, and bright
Determined reverence of Sunday eyes.
Picture Jehovah striding through the hall
Of His importance, creatures running out
From servant-corners to acclaim, to shout
Appreciation of His merit’s glare.
But who walks with Him? -- dares to take His arm,
To slap Him on the shoulder, tweak His ear,
Buy Him a Coca-Cola or a beer,
Pooh-pooh His politics, call Him a fool?
Perhaps – who knows? – He tires of looking down.
Those eyes are never lifted. Never straight.
Perhaps sometimes he tires of being great
In solitude. Without a hand to hold.
Did you ever think that God might be lonely in His work for justice? That God needs our hands, our hearts, our energies to get it right? We want God to jump right in and fix our mess. But what does Jesus say to that? What is His response? "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?"
III
The truth is that often we are the most ready answer to our own prayers. Most of the time God is waiting to use us. God is waiting for us to be available. Being available to God is not simply sitting back and saying, “Now, Lord, you fix it.” Being available to God is using what we have, trusting Him, confident that He will do through us all He wants to do. Being available to God is seeing that He indeed wants to work for justice, but you and I must reach out and do something to cooperate with God in this work.
Lazarus’ grave had been sealed. A great stone had been placed in front of the entrance, for no one ever needed or wanted to go in there again. This was one of those things that isn’t going to change. But Jesus said, “Take away the stone”. Well, now, why? Why would you do that? Isn’t everything signed, sealed, and delivered? Isn’t everything nailed down tight? So Martha, ever the intellectual, ever the questioner, objected, “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Why disturb what you can’t change?
Jesus urged them to take away the stone. To do what had to be done, distasteful though it might be. For raising a stink is not so bad. Sometimes raising a stink is what you have to do to make things happen! “Take away the stone.” Reach out and do what you have to do, under God. Make a stink for justice, smell up the place for life! Reach out!
Gwendolyn Brooks stabs us awake about this in her poem, “the children of the poor”, from the collection, “The Womanhood”.
Life for my child is simple, and is good.
He knows his wish. Yes, but that is not all.
Because I know mine too.
And we both want joy of undeep and unabiding things,
Like kicking over a chair or throwing blocks out of a window
Or tipping over an icebox pan
Or snatching down curtains or fingering an electric outlet
Or a journey or a friend or an illegal kiss.
No. There is more to it than that.
It is that he has never been afraid.
Rather, he reaches out and lo the chair falls with a beautiful crash,
And the blocks fall, down on the people’s heads,
And the water comes slooshing sloppily out across the floor.
And so forth.
Not that success for him is sure, infallible.
But never has he been afraid to reach.
His lesions are legion.
But reaching is his rule.
“Reaching is his rule.” Reaching out and trying things, that’s what children do. “His lesions are legion” Kids get bruised in the process. But they learn. They grow. They make change happen. “Reaching is his rule.”
We live in a time in which it must feel to many as though there is nothing to do. I’m sure there are plenty of young people who understand very little about the history of slavery, know nothing of segregation, do not sense discrimination. It all seems like a long-ago, far-away, irrelevant fairy tale. But I assure you, it is not. The end has not yet come. Not as long as the children of this very city underperform academically. Not as long as homeless people walk our streets. Not as long as even in the nicest of neighborhoods and in the most enlightened of minds, there lingers an ounce of snobbishness, one iota of superiority. Not as long as the terrible ordinariness of prejudice is still with us. There is plenty to do. The issue is whether there are those who will do it. The issue is whether there are those who will reach out and take away the stones and raise the stinks in the name of justice. The issue is whether there are still those who hear this Jesus, this confident Jesus, "Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?"
IV
So the fundamental issue remains the same in every generation. The fundamental issue remains the same. It is not just racism, though that ugly name belongs in our vocabulary, and we must name it wherever it appears. It is not just prejudice, though that shameful slander is going to slip from many tongues. It’s more than that. It’s sin. Deep sin. Awesome sin. That’s the human condition. That’s the need of the human heart. Not for only a few but for all. Remember how Gwendolyn Brooks said of the racists of Little Rock, “They are like people everywhere.” Remember what the Bible says, “All have sinned and come short of the glory of God.” The issue is the profound sin of the human heart.
Oh, I should like to think that my little one-week old granddaughter, bred from the banks of the Thames and of the Congo, washed by the waters of the Nile and of the Ohio, I should like to think that her infant heart will never hear the words of slight and slander. But I know better. I know that it is not just an issue of racism, of prejudice. It is not against flesh and blood that we wrestle, but against principalities and powers, against spiritual wickedness in high places. It is, I say, against sin. Against sin, that old enemy, that we wrestle.
Gwendolyn Brooks’ most clearly Christian poem is one titled, ”In Emanuel’s Nightmare: Another Coming of Christ”:
Out of that heaven a most beautiful Man
Came down. But now is coming quite the word?
It wasn’t coming. I’d say it was – a Birth.
The man was born out of the heaven, in truth.
Yet no parturient creature ever knew
That naturalness, that hurtlessness, that ease.
How He was tall and strong!
How He was cold-browed! How He mildly smiled!
How the voice played out on the heavy hope of air
And loved our hearts out!
Why, it was such a voice as gave me eyes
To see my Fellow Man of all the world,
There with me, listening.
He had come down, He said, to clean the earth
Of the dirtiness of war.
Now tell of why His power failed Him there?
His power did not fail. It was that, simply,
He found how much the people wanted war.
…
The people wanted war. War’s in their hearts.
…
God’s Son went home. Among us it is whispered
He cried the tears of men.
Everybody who has ever tried to memorize Bible verses knows that John 11:35 is the shortest verse in the Bible, “Jesus wept.” Indeed, Jesus wept. When Jesus saw Lazarus dead, He wept. Jesus wept not only for the pain of this friend, but also for the faithlessness of the other friends. He wept for the sickness, the dying, the pain, the faithlessness, the hurt of all humanity. He “cried the tears of men” because we persist in believing the worst, we insist on making hatred the solution to everything, we take pride in putting distance between ourselves and others who are not like us. Jesus “cried the tears of men” because “the people wanted war. War’s in their hearts.”
And so Jesus, this weeping Jesus, made Himself of no reputation and took upon Himself the form of a servant. This Jesus, this weeping Jesus, became the object of our scorn, the butt of our scathing slander. This Jesus,
“He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not.”
We esteemed him not. When we let hate take us over and drive us to racism and death-wishing, we esteemed him not. When we took him to the cross and left Him there to die, we esteemed him not. When we took him to the nearest tree and strung him up as a lesson for others, we esteemed him not.
Oh, but men and women, listen to this. Hear this. It is for you. It is for me. It is for all who have war in their hearts. It is for all who are just like everybody else. Listen: His cross is for us. His cross is for us.
Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows: yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed.
Says Gwendolyn Brooks, “The loveliest lynchee is our Lord.” He is the way, the truth, and the life. If anyone follows Him, though He were dead, yet shall he live. The loveliest lynchee is our Lord.
Injustice has done its worst, hatred has worked its way, evil has done what evil does. “They are like everybody else.” But He is the resurrection and the life. The loveliest lynchee is our Lord. “ Jesus said to her, ‘Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?’"
