November 18
Isaiah 65:17-25
Looking Ahead
As Ted
Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger tell the story in their new book BreakThrough, what we have come to
think of as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech actually followed
an “I have a Nightmare” speech – delivered just moments before the more
familiar words. The March on Washington
had gathered hundreds of thousands of people on the Washington Mall in front of
the Lincoln Memorial in August of 1963, and perhaps millions of others in front
of their television sets. But the day
found King in a low mood.
President John F. Kennedy had just returned from
Germany; against the backdrop of the Berlin Wall, he had called for freedom for
those living behind the Iron Curtain. On
his return, Kennedy asked King to call off the demonstration. “We want success in Congress,” the president
said, “not just a big show at the Capitol.”
Kennedy’s comment
tipped King into a dark mood. The worst
manifestations of human nature were on display in the South – bigotry,
beatings, cowardice, murder – and King was intent on making sure that white
America, Kennedy included, faced up to them.
And so, a few minutes before he was to speak, King leaned over to the
gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who had been traveling the country with him, and
whispered, “Before I speak I want you to sing ‘I Been ‘Buked and I Been
Scorned.’” When Jackson told her stage
manager of King’s request, he replied, “We need a song that’s a little livelier
than that!” But Jackson did as King
requested. “Dere is trouble all over dis
world, children,” she sang. “Dere is
trouble all over dis world.”
When he
rose to speak, King launched into a frustrated and angry condemnation of the
country’s treatment of African-Americans, riddled with the fear that the march wouldn’t be taken seriously by
Congress and the White House. “It would
be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment,” he warned. Those who underestimated the movement’s
power, he said, would have a “rude awakening.”
It was perhaps the darkest and most discouraged speech King ever gave.
But then something
strange and wonderful happened. A voice
rang out from the back of the dais. It
was Mahalia Jackson. “Tell them about your
dream, Martin!” She could feel that King
had dwelt too long in the dark valley – he needed to bring the crowd up to the
sunlit mountaintop. Having heard him
give riffs of the dream speech to earlier audiences, Jackson knew just what
King needed to do. “Tell them about the
dream!” she cried once more.
King seemed to address
his next line – “Let us not wallow in the valley of despair” – as much to
himself as to the crowd. He then
pattered – “I say to you today my friend” – and paused, triggering soft
applause from the tired audience and buying himself the time he needed to
reorganize his thoughts.
King then seemed to
find the words Mahalia Jackson had tossed him, and he began the new
speech. “And so even though we face the
difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream.” From there King led the hot crowd in a rapid
climb out of the valley.
When we allow freedom to
ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state
and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children
– blacks and whites, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics – will be
able to join hands and sing in the worlds of the old Negro spiritual: “Free at last! Free at last!
Thank God almighty, we are free at last!”
With the words “Thank God Almighty, we are free at
last,” racial integration suddenly felt inevitable. [1]
What
Nordhaus and Shellenberger go on to argue is that it was the “dream” speech
that made the difference; not the “nightmare.”
They would certainly agree that truth telling is essential – that the
failings of the present tense have to be named and confronted. They would vigorously affirm that nothing is
served by hiding brokenness or stifling cries or white-washing the timbers that
are too rotted to support any desirable form of community. They simply assert that while critique and
condemnation may slow and even halt our regression as a people and civilization,
it is vision that finally moves us forward. Truth with a “little ‘t’” must always find
itself in service to Truth with a “capital ‘T’”. Vision, which we might call a compelling view
of a more desirable destination; or to put it another way, creation’s holy future
reaching back to claim and redirect our present. Vision not only helps us to see where we are
going; it helps us come to clearer terms with where we are, vis-à-vis that
destination.
Years
ago, the great British Christian apologist C.S. Lewis observed that “the Christians who did most for the present
world were just those who thought most of the next. The apostles themselves, who set on foot the
conversion of the Roman Empire, the great men who built up the Middle Ages, the
English evangelicals who abolished slave trade, all left their mark on earth,
precisely because their minds were occupied with heaven. It is since Christians have largely ceased to
think of the other world, that they have become so ineffective in this. Aim at heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’; aim at earth and you will get
neither.”[2]
So what
is the vision that Isaiah places before us?
It is, indeed, a portrait of the end, but if you listen closely you will
likewise begin to discern the palimpsest of our beginning. Palimpsest – a kind of visual echo that
derives from the ancient art world in which paintings, no longer wanted or, in
some cases, no longer tolerated, were scraped or painted over so as to create a
fresh surface on which to draw – canvas, after all, being too expensive to
simply throw away, and artists, by and large, too poor. But over time, that original image begins to
ghost its way to the surface; reasserting itself, as it were, into the new
design. A palimpsest – the old and
covered over, reappearing in the midst of the new.
And
so it is that behind this portrait of God’s intended end for the world can be discerned the faint images of its beginning:
Y
a garden where neither disease nor abuse nor
neglect nor violence cut short the lives of either the old or the young, but
where all grow to live out their fullness;
Y
where joy was the spirit and delight was the song;
Y
where jealousy and greed did not corrode the
relationships between people and where diligent labor led to good reward;
Y
where prayer was not specialized ritual but conversation
as intimate and common as between a mother and child;
Y
where the security of well-being was more palpable than
the anxiety of threat and fear;
Y
where the serpents of temptation and
self-destruction consume dust instead of human integrity and divine
potential.
And
I don’t know about you, but just hearing the vision – seeing it take shape in
my mind; translating those ideals into present-day applications, I find myself,
this Thanksgiving season suddenly more grateful for all the blessings I enjoy
than distracted by the allure of all those things I thought I had to have.
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I find myself more appreciative and protective of
the lives and dreams of those within my reach, and more awed by and curious
about those I have yet to know.
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I find myself more and more impatient with our
quibbling about the mechanics of
insuring access to health care for all – quibbles that frankly seem more about
turf protection than health protection – and more determined than ever that we,
as a human community, simply insist on it.
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I find myself relishing in my heart the
satisfaction and the fruits of work well done, while at the same time lamenting
with those countless workers whose 40 hours of labor each week benefit someone,
no doubt, but not their own families, because the low wages they’ve earned
aren’t enough to elevate them above the poverty line.
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I find myself grateful for all those soldiers and
support personnel who risk their lives on battlefields and hostile borders, and
more resolute than ever about the necessity for using our ears more than our
mouths; about the importance of listening and understanding; about the value of
eliciting consent instead of coercing compliance.
God
knows it’s easy to name what is wrong, pounding like a hammer on a nail. But I believe Isaiah wants to help us
rediscover a glimpse of precisely what “right” looks like – to help us see
it with our imaginations, to help us hunger for it with our hearts, and with
the footsteps of creative action, to help us move forward in its direction.
“Tell
them about the dream,” Mahalia Jackson urged Dr. King – and perhaps in our own
place and time, urges us. “Tell the
world about the dream.” A new heaven, to
be sure, but just as C.S. Lewis foretold, a new
earth thrown in – for it is the vision that moves us forward.
That
wouldn’t be a bad vocation, you know:
reminding each other, when the nightmares seem far more preoccupying, to
tell about the dream; to help ourselves, each other, and indeed the world
around us
…to see
it;
…to feel it,
…and to reach toward it
…with the same sense of sacred
inevitability that animated those marchers in August of 1963; to look ahead and
voice thanksgiving:
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for the blessing that is,
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and the grace that is to be.
Thanks be to God.