Rev. Dudley Rose of Medford (UCC)

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Sermon, titled "From Preacher to Preached," by the Rev. Dudley C. Rose, senior minister of North Prospect Union United Church of Christ in Medford:

From preacher to preached. Or as the well known Frontline television program said it, “From Jesus to Christ.” It begins with preaching a message, and then, as time goes on, the person becomes the message. Jesus becomes the Christ, and as Paul says, we preach Christ, crucified and risen.

In the beginning, like John before him, Jesus came preaching a message. John preached
a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus preached the Good News of the
kingdom of God. This morning’s passage from Luke gives us the kernel of that Good News.
Jesus preaches that God is merciful, even to those who do not deserve it. God loves everyone,
including you and me, even if we don’t deserve it, and who among is perfect? Who among us
deserves all the love we get from God? We get more than we deserve, and that is Good News,
indeed. That’s half the Gospel, half the Good News, that Jesus preached. The other half is that
Jesus tells us to do the same thing. That’s the other part of what he preached. Jesus says it’s
easy to love your friends, but he says, Love your enemies. He says it’s easy to lend money to
someone when you know you’ll get it back, but he says, Help others with no expectation of
being paid back. He says, Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Jesus says that in acting in this way, we can help the kingdom of God become a living reality, we can help
replace the harsh ways of the world’s principalities and powers with the ways of God’s kingdom.

This message that Jesus preached caught fire. People came out of the villages and towns
of the Galilee to hear him talk about it. They came to listen by the hundreds. In one story they
became so enthralled with his preaching that time got away from them, and before they knew it,
it was time for supper, and they were miles from home with nothing to eat. And his legend only
grew when they were all fed by a small basket of loaves and fishes.

His message also caught fire with, or should we say it inflamed other groups as well.
There were those who thought the present kingdoms were working just fine, thank you very
much. There were people who benefitted by the harsh ways of the world. There were those who
would lose their privileges and their power and their riches in this new kind of kingdom Jesus
preached, the kingdom of God. These sought to destroy him, and it appeared that they were
successful.

But this preacher and his message were so compelling that neither would die. And in the
years and decades that followed, his followers began to preach about the preacher from Galilee,
about the preacher himself, as much, sometimes more, than about what he had preached.

Soon they preached about his divine nature. They preached Christ crucified and risen.
They preached about how his death was a sacrifice for us; he died for us, some of them said.
There were many conflicts over just how he saved us and how he was both human and God. But
through it all, he became more and more the object of the preaching. Some began to say that you had to believe in him to have eternal life. They said that you had to say, Jesus is Lord, or else you couldn’t be saved. And soon enough his birthday and the days of his death and resurrection became holidays.

Now, these developments were not necessarily bad things in themselves. Theology is
rightly alive. It is a conversation between God and humanity that should be alive in every
generation. The only quibble I would have is message that Jesus preached should be kept alive
in the preaching about him. That is, what we preach about Christ is always answerable to what
Jesus himself preached. If it begins to get hard to recognize Jesus in the preaching about Christ, it’s a pretty sure bet that something’s gotten off-track. When Fred Phelps and James Dobson tells us that God hates fags, for example, they are talking about a very different kingdom of God from the one that Jesus preached. But I digress. For my point today is simply this. Sometimes when the preacher becomes famous and grows larger than life itself, we can get distracted from the message that they themselves actually preached. Martin Luther King, Jr., whom we celebrate this weekend, is a case in point. King preached a compelling message in the middle of the last century. So compelling was it that many would say, quite rightly I think, that he and other men and women in the civil rights movement of that era paved the way for the inauguration in two days of the first African American president in our country’s history. 146 years ago, when Abraham Lincoln signed the emancipation proclamation, could he have imagined that a black man would be president of the United States less than 150 years later? Even closer, when Martin Luther King was assassinated 40 years ago last April 4, could any of us have imagined that Barak Obama would be following Lincoln’s whistle-stop route from Philadelphia to Washington DC to become our 44th president?

King’s message has a lot to do with the fact that we are here. So, it is understandable and
right that he has become a heroic figure. It is good and right that he has an American Holiday in
his honor. It is good and right that we remember him. But today I want us to remember what the
preacher preached as much as we remember the preacher, for these words sound very like the
words that Jesus preached. They remind us that this message, whoever preaches it, is the
message of the kingdom of God. It is a message that can transform the world. It is a message
that can bring a balm to Gilead. It is a message that can reorder our being and show us the fault
lines in the worldly reality we take for granted. It is a message for all time. So, let us now hear
the words the preacher preached.

All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality.

Faith is taking the first step, even when you don't see the whole staircase.
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens
life; love illuminates it.

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is
why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who
willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the
community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for the law.

In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me,
and I think that's pretty important.

Let no man pull you low enough to hate him.

Hate destroys a man's sense of values and his objectivity. It causes him to describe the beautiful as ugly and the ugly as beautiful, and to confuse the true with the false and the false with the true.

Man must evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and
retaliation. The foundation of such a method is love.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.

Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already
devoid of stars... Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.

Ten thousand fools proclaim themselves into obscurity, while one wise man forgets himself into
immortality.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

When you are right you cannot be too radical; when you are wrong, you cannot be too
conservative.

The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists who are dedicated to
justice, peace and brotherhood.

All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another
problem.

The good neighbor looks beyond the external accidents and discerns those inner qualities that
make all men human and, therefore, brothers.

Nonviolence is the answer to the crucial political and moral questions of our time; the need for
mankind to overcome oppression and violence without resorting to oppression and violence.

Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.

The church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular
opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.

I submit to you that if a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided
men.

The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience,
but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.

A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on
programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.

A right delayed is a right denied.

Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better.

An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his
individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

At the center of non-violence stands the principle of love.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness
of destructive selfishness.

Have we not come to such an impasse in the modern world that we must love our enemies - or
else? The chain reaction of evil - hate begetting hate, wars producing more wars - must be
broken, or else we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the
strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.

It is not enough to say we must not wage war. It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it.

Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'

Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into friend.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

Never succumb to the temptation of bitterness.

Nonviolence is a powerful and just weapon. which cuts without wounding and ennobles the man
who wields it. It is a sword that heals.

Nonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of
spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

Philanthropy is commendable, but it must not cause the philanthropist to overlook the
circumstances of economic injustice which make philanthropy necessary.

Pity may represent little more than the impersonal concern which prompts the mailing of a
check, but true sympathy is the personal concern which demands the giving of one's soul.

Rarely do we find men who willingly engage in hard, solid thinking. There is an almost universal
quest for easy answers and half-baked solutions. Nothing pains some people more than having to think.

The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has just done you a small favor wish that he might have done you a greater one.

The first question which the priest and the Levite asked was: "If I stop to help this man, what
will happen to me?" But... the good Samaritan reversed the question: "If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?"

The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral
conflict.

The moral arc of the universe bends at the elbow of justice.

The past is prophetic in that it asserts loudly that wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful
tomorrows.

The quality, not the longevity, of one's life is what is important.

We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

We must build dikes of courage to hold back the flood of fear.

We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive
is devoid of the power to love. There is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of
us. When we discover this, we are less prone to hate our enemies.

Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you
are what you ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality.

We must combine the toughness of the serpent and the softness of the dove, a tough mind and a tender heart.

The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the
conscience of the state. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an
irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.

True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.

There is little hope for us until we become toughminded enough to break loose from the shackles of prejudice, half-truths, and downright ignorance.

Don't let anybody make you think God chose America as his divine messianic force to be a sort
of policeman of the whole world.

It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or
nonexistence.

Everybody can be great, because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

I have a dream that my 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.

We will speed the day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles,
Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing... Free at last, free at last, thank
God Almighty, I'm free at last.

Amen.