The Table of Brotherhood

(January 24, 2008)

Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday is one of those holidays that makes me a bit uncomfortable. Like Veterans Day and Memorial Day, I feel a bit guilty I am not doing what those days demand. It’s a “free day” to run errands and catch up on tasks. So this year, I decided to re-read Dr. King’s epic “I have a Dream” speech.

Dr. King said, “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” I am quite sure some of my ancestors were slave owners.

Making no claim to being a civil rights pioneer, I recall two incidents where my life moved toward “the table of brotherhood”.

In 1969, merely a year after Dr. King’s death, Delta State University asked me to do my required student teaching by becoming the first (and only) white person (student or faculty) at Rosedale High School in the Mississippi Delta. I accepted. That challenge changed my perceptions. My life was threatened, and I found many African-Americans were as uncomfortable with me being in their school as I initially was. But by semester’s end, I had survived, matured, and forged many lasting friendships.

A few years later, some African-American students from a nearby college accepted my invitation to attend worship. (I met them at a Christian student fellowship.) They asked if they could come hear me preach. Much to my surprise, they accepted. My church board met me on my way to the pulpit, requesting that I “do something” or else we would lose two families who protested the “integration” of “their” church. So, I offered my resignation “on the spot” if they ask the students to leave or in any way made them feel un-welcomed. To their credit, the board stood with me; but as I stood in the pulpit, two prominent families got up and walked out of the church, never to return.

As I reflect on the King Holiday, with fading memories of the era of segregation, and a renewed commitment to BE and to DO justice, the thing I am most proud is that at Christ United Methodist Church, we are living Dr. King’s dream. Grandsons and great-grandsons of both slave owners and slaves in Christ UMC, Exodus Baptist Church and Be Encouraged Ministries, along with our Hispanic congregations, are “sitting down together at the table of brotherhood.”

From the Quote Garden
“Past the seeker as he prayed came the crippled and the beggar and the beaten. And seeing them... he cried, "Great God, how is it that a loving creator can see such things and yet do nothing about them?" God said, "I did do something. I made you."
~ Author Unknown