Welcome to UUism! (MLK’s Legacy)

Living the Dream: Unified in Purpose, Committed to Change
Dr. King’s Dream

The UU Congregation of Lake County, our sibling congregation, hosted an ecumenical service celebrating the Rev. Dr. King, Jr. and linking his legacy to the importance of DEI today. Many weren’t able to attend, so I thought I’d share my remarks here.:

It is possible, if not likely, that many of you here today who are not my congregants had not heard of Unitarian Universalism before coming here and do not know who we are as a faith. We come from two Christian denominations, the Unitarians and the Universalists, who came together in 1961 to form a new faith. Though we come from these two traditions, we are no longer bound by them, and we welcome people from a variety of faith and no faith backgrounds and beliefs into our congregations. The Love we believe in is large enough for all of us.

Our national organization, the Unitarian Universalist Association, is headquartered in Boston, as our deepest theological roots are there, and trace back to the Pilgrims and the Puritans establishing communities in the area.

This is relevant to today’s service because though we aren’t well known, Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr counted Unitarians and Universalists among his colleagues and friends, perhaps from his time at Boston University. We were among those on whom he could count when he called for clergy and people of faith to respond to his actions.

King said often that, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice,” and President Obama added the caveat that the arc does not bend of its own accord, but because we do the work of bending it.

They are familiar words, and they were adapted from one of our ancestors, the Unitarian pastor and abolitionist Rev. Theodore Parker, who preached with a loaded gun in his pulpit as he spoke the heresy of abolition and who said, “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one. My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”

Unitarian Universalism in its former iterations was a faith that helped shape King and his views for a better world and how to get there. 10 percent of our clergy initially showed up when he called us to Selma, and ended up with a quarter of our clergy there, along with many lay people.

And it was the murder of our own Rev. James Reeb, a white pastor, in the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965 that was the final necessary impetus for Johnson to sign the Voting Rights Act. King gave the eulogy at his memorial. King said that Reeb, “symbolizes the forces of goodwill in our nation. He demonstrated the conscience of the nation. He was an attorney for the defense of the innocent in the court of world opinion. He was a witness to the truth that men of different races and classes might live, eat, and work together as brothers.”

So it is in our legacy to take seriously King’s calls for justice for all people. King charged us – we UUs – not to sleep through the Revolution. (Ware Lecture, 1966) Although we have done well at showing up, I’ll be honest. We haven’t always really understood the assignment beyond this. We have failed many times in our efforts. But as I always say, we at least usually try, and we dust off and try again.

I know we didn’t come here for a UU history lesson, but I think our journey is important to consider today. Our journey has been similar to that of our society on the whole. It’s the context for King’s vision. We have so much work still to do.

King’s life and legacy were devoted to racial justice. Born into the Jim Crow era, the reincarnation of enslavement that followed Reconstruction, King knew the hardships of his Black kin and their communities. It was never just segregation, but the violence of words and actions that shaped their lives from cradle to grave, and, if we’re honest, from conception through burial.

It was devastating. And so King committed himself, his life, his work to advocating for another world. A world that he dreamed that “that [his] four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” that “one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.”

King knew he would not live long enough to see his dream fulfilled, and despite the Black excellence, Black brilliance, Black resilience, and Black diligence we continue to witness to today, we might agree that progress has stagnated, and more recently, reversed.

We here in Florida and across this country have seen how legislation and policies that once promoted Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in all parts of society have been rolled back, and our practices with them. The government no longer supports this vision, removing books from shelves and pages from websites and funding from organizations and agencies whose work was once to balance out the odds stacked against the oppressed and marginalized.

In doing so, we are failing our present and our future while denying our past. We are destroying the legacy King so carefully crafted for us to follow.

At an interfaith gathering once, an imam quoted from the Qu’ran, Surah 49:13, “O humanity! Indeed, We created you from a male and a female, and made you into peoples and tribes so that you may ˹get to˺ know one another.”

For if we, for the theists among us, are all made in the likeness and image of G-d, the only way we can begin to hope to understand G-d in their fullness and greatness is by knowing each other. Our differences show us that we have much to learn not only in being together but appreciating G-d’s breadth and depth, not to speak of their Love for us. Our human minds can only begin to conceive of G-d if we hold all of us together in our minds.

Our diversity is humanity’s greatest blessing. When we turn away from it, when we stamp out diversity, equity, and inclusion, we do so at our peril. In King’s words, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

May we work together to make the most beautiful garment possible. King said, “Our goal for America is freedom.” Let’s find inspiration to return to the work. It is our duty.