When I was the ministerial intern here at First Parish Church, I lived in Dorchester. I rented the second floor flat of a triple-decker in Fields Corner with a fellow employee of the Unitarian Universalist Association on Beacon Hill. I most often took public transit to get from home to my very part time internship site, travelling a trajectory that took me under Boston and Cambridge and out onto a commuter train through leafy suburbs to Weston.

For somebody raised in a good social democracy like Canada, the trip from Fields Corner to Kendal Green was one that frequently gave me pause. To compare median income between Dorchester and Weston, to compare access to health care, standards of public schools, ethnic diversity, even voter registration and turnout was to compare some of the deepest social disparities I had ever encountered. In Canada, a country not without its own class divisions, even the most down and out citizen had full access to health care.

On the train from Weston back into Boston, or from Dorchester out to the suburbs, I saw both places in the light of the other. What, I frequently wondered, would it take to balance things out? Is such equity even desirable? I frequently concluded that it would take divine intervention, a saviour or a powerful prophet, to put this out of balance world to rights. The prophets and sages I turned to for guidance and reflection included the Hebrew prophets and Jesus of Nazareth, Francis of Assisi, Walter Rauschenbusch, Dorothy Day, Mahatma Gandhi, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon and Desmond Tutu, and Martin Luther King, Jr., whose memory we honour this weekend.

In the last months of his life, Martin Luther King publicly connected the dots between racism, poverty, and war. In the months leading up to his assassination in April 1968, Dr King was increasingly critical of the war in Viet Nam, speaking publicly against the war for the first time in 1967. He was moving steadily toward a more radical critique in the truest sense of the word: getting to the root of social evils, which King began to see as unequal economic power.

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation invited Dr King to give the annual Massey Lectures, which were broadcast in November and December 1967. In his lectures, King explained his newfound outspokenness against the war; he saw funding for anti-poverty programs being diverted to a military build-up in Viet Nam. He said: “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continues to draw men and skills and money like some demoniacal destructive suction tube.” Dr King continued: “And so I was increasingly compelled to see the war not only as a moral outrage but also as an enemy of the poor, and to attack it as such.” The war in Viet Nam, King went on to say, “was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and die in extraordinarily higher proportions relative to the rest of the population… I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor.”

“The dispossessed of this nation—the poor, both white and Negro—live in a cruelly unjust society. They must organize a revolution against that injustice, not against the lives of the persons who are their fellow citizens, but against the structures through which the society is refusing to take means which have been called for, and which are at hand, to lift the load of poverty.”

Dr King concluded the CBC broadcast by describing what was to become the Poor People’s Campaign, an undertaking of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. The Poor People’s Campaign was envisioned as being the largest, most extensive civil disobedience operation yet seen. King referred to this anti-poverty movement as the second phase of the civil rights movement. Using the non-violent direct action tactics that characterized the first phase, Dr King wanted to focus the nation’s attention on economic inequality and poverty. In the same way that the movement had drawn attention to racial injustice and forced the hand of legislators and politicians, King sought to evoke a citizen’s movement for an economic bill of rights, which included a thirty million dollar anti-poverty package, a commitment to full employment, and increased construction of low-cost housing.

The Poor People’s Campaign was going to bring a “multiracial army of poor people” to Washington DC to build shantytowns on the Mall and paralyze the nation’s capital with acts of civil disobedience until the federal government redirected funds from the war in Viet Nam to this effort to abolish poverty. To his fellow members of the SCLC, King described this upcoming movement as a “question of restructuring the whole of the American economy.” He called for the nationalization of certain industries. “It didn’t cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters,” King said in a trip to Mississippi in February 1968, “but now we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars and undergoing a radical redistribution of economic power.”

This deliberately cross-cultural coalition would bring together not only poor people of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, but all of those citizens who were dreaming of a new society, all Americans who envisioned a more just and equitable social order. It would be the culmination and fulfillment of the social change that the civil rights movement, the first phase, had begun.

Dr King was of course assassinated in April 1968, while helping to lead a strike of sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee. He didn’t live to see the Poor People’s Campaign, which went ahead despite his murder. Demonstrators arrived in Washington DC in May 1968 and were housed in tents and shacks which they called Resurrection City. Without King’s charismatic leadership, however, and because so many legislators were and indeed President Johnson was so alienated by King’s criticism of the war, and because it was suddenly overshadowed by the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the Poor People’s Campaign packed up in June 1968 without much success.

It was more comfortable, for most Americans, to decry injustices in the Southern states. Looking more closely at poverty and economic justice in their own backyard was more difficult, more demanding, more costly and most would rather look the other way. Dr King’s anti-poverty campaign did not galvanize them in the same way. King increasingly came under fire from former allies as well as critics for his outspokenness against the war, for going beyond civil rights to create more far reaching social change.

The Poor People’s Campaign has largely faded from the historical memory and is the most overlooked aspect of Dr King’s legacy. While we celebrate a national holiday in his honour, we remember the lunch counter sit-ins, the marches and boycotts and the speeches that ushered in civil and political rights for African Americans. We remember the shameful legacy of racial segregation and disenfranchisement and the movement Dr King led to bring these to an end. We remember the dream Dr King articulated for a multicultural America. We remember that dream as the nation prepares to inaugurate its first African American president. In the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial where Dr King gave his “I Have A Dream” speech, Barak Obama will take the oath of the highest elected office in the land. And we will be satisfied with the progress that has been made, from the time when Africans in America were not considered human, let alone citizens, to the end of slavery, from the time African Americans were prevented from voting to an African American being voted in as president of the United States of America. We will remember the dream and the sacrifices of so many who brought those changes about.

Will we remember what Dr King considered to be the next phase of the civil rights movement? Will we remember his call for economic justice? Will we remember his invitation to create a multicultural movement to end poverty?

It is worth reminding ourselves that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Junior was both a Christian and an ordained minister, a religious leader, and not simply a political leader with a political agenda. King’s program was informed by his Christian faith, his vision formed by the biblical witness. His ideas late in life seem (to most Americans) to ring with the sound of socialism, to be pages taken from the Communist Manifesto and not the Jewish and Christian scriptures. In his biography of King, To the Mountaintop, the historian Stewart Burns describes King as being motivated by his deeply held biblical faith, how his commitment to Christian faith deepened in his last years. Dr King was not adopting far left political philosophies, but entering more profoundly into the social witness of the gospel.

The Bible is expressly concerned with issues of fairness, justice, poverty, and affluence. The biblical ideal is consistent from book to book, from author to author. In Leviticus and Deuteronomy and other parts of the Torah, we find a blueprint for a society based on justice, on a periodic levelling in which slaves are freed, debts are cancelled, land is redistributed to its original owners. “Count off seven sabbath years—seven times seven years—so that the seven sabbath years amount to a period of forty-nine years,” we read in Leviticus 25. “Consecrate the fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout the land to all its inhabitants. It shall be a jubilee for you.” (8-10) This “jubilee year” is meant to ensure that no one family or tribe or group or class continues to benefit financially to the detriment of others, that nobody should accumulate wealth out of proportion with everybody else. “Do not take advantage of each other,” we are warned, “but fear your God. I am the LORD your God.” (17) The Psalms repeatedly refer to God as the protector and liberator of the poor and exploited. “Defend the weak and the fatherless,” we read in Psalm 82, “uphold the cause of the poor and the oppressed.” The Hebrew prophets speak out on how their society treats its weakest members—orphans, widows, immigrants and strangers, the poor. The prophets are primarily concerned with reminding the nation of its covenant with God that included justice for the most marginal. Speaking through the prophets, God is repeatedly saying that he desires works of mercy, justice, and righteousness rather than sacrifices and worshipful adoration. “The Spirit of the Sovereign LORD is on me,” the prophet Isaiah says, “because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor.” This, of course, is quoted by Jesus as he sets out on his public mission, preaching on Isaiah’s vision of the Jubilee year, a time of universal abundance and peace. In the New Testament, we hear repeated calls for the tables to be turned on the rich and powerful, from Mary’s Magnificat (“He has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly; he has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich empty away.” Luke 1:53) to Jesus’ constant promise that the first will be last and the last first. There are repeated warnings on the ostentatious accumulation of wealth, on hoarding material goods, how the inordinate love of money is the root of all evil, how one cannot serve both God and wealth. There are repeated warnings on becoming wealthy by treating others unfairly. “Look!” says James in his epistle, “The wages you failed to pay the workers who mowed your fields are crying out against you.” (5:4)

The biblical ideal is one of balance. This is the meaning of the biblical ideals of justice and righteousness. The word righteousness has a sort of negative ring to it for most of us. We seem to automatically equate it with self-righteousness. Righteous and just are interchangeable words in the Bible. Think about one of our most common images of justice, the scales. Justice is depicted as the scales being balanced. When they line up, they are just, they are right. Our English word for justice comes from the Latin, the word for right. And one of the meanings of the word right is straight or level. Rightness, a levelling, is just.

Relations between people, when they are equitable and fair, when they are level and balanced, are right. This right-relations is the biblical ideal of justice. Righteousness is a way of being in balance with God and with others, of being right with God and right with others.

As people of faith, we are called to be in right relations and to make things right in this world. If, for us, our religion is simply a private matter, we are negating our vocation as people of faith, we are turning our backs on the biblical witness that invites us to live equitably and peaceably with others, and to transform relationships where equity, peace and justice are absent, whether those relationships be personal, social, national, or ecological. If, for us, our religion simply induces us to guilt-ridden acts of charity, we are negating our vocation as people of faith. We are called upon to see, as Dr King did, structures and not simply individuals. The vision found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy and the Prophets and elsewhere in the Bible is social, calling for a wholeness and balance in the social order, and not merely individual acts of charity and kindness. We are called upon to use the gifts we have been given to make, with God’s help, that vision a reality. We are called upon to use the talents we have been given to create, with God’s help, the world God is dreaming of.

This nation and indeed the world is standing at the threshold. Bankruptcies, foreclosures, layoffs litter the grim economic landscape. The stain of greed and unfair practices are clearly visible. Hunger and homelessness and poverty and unemployment grasp with their dark tentacles more individuals and families and communities. Will we take this opportunity to forge a social order where poor and working people are not discarded and abused? Will we take this opportunity to forge policies in which the dreams of poor and working people—to go to college, to own their own home—are realized and not cast aside or exploited? Will we look at our social order—education, healthcare, employment, finances, trade, industry, housing, transportation—with the eyes of biblical faith? Will we look at our social order with eyes that see opportunities to be witnesses for the God who loves justice? As people of conscience and people of faith, we have an opportunity now to express in the public square our values—inclusion, diversity, fairness, equity, generosity. Right relations and justice are the marks of our faith; let them be also the marks by which our voices are recognized in civic and political discourse.

May we follow the lead of Martin Luther King and work for a social order marked by fairness and prosperity. May we follow the lead of the Hebrew prophets and call to mind the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society. May we follow the lead of Jesus, who would have us express our love of God and love of neighbour in hands-on acts of care and concern, in prophetic acts of protest and healing. May we follow the lead of conscience and not remain silent in the face of injustice. May we do so with grace and patience and love and strength.

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