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Jan. 14, 2024 – Christ Presbyterian Church
It was a little over 60 years ago when Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and talked about the dream he had. This is the weekend when that speech shows up in many places. I am sure many of you are familiar with it.
But I’ll bet not many of you are not familiar with Gordon Gundrum, known by his nickname “Gunny.”
I want to tell you a bit of his story because I think it can make a connection to the Gospel reading we just heard and to things we might do in our lives as we look at ways to follow Jesus.
As Dr. King walked up to the podium, Gundrum realized that the microphones were aimed too high for a person of King’s 5-feet, seven-inches height. So he reached in and lowered each of the mics as King prepared to speak.
Gunny Gundrum was 25 years old and had little familiarity with the diverse world that was now all around him.
Jonathan Eig, who just wrote an amazing biography of King, had a conversation with author David Maraniss last September at the Cap Times Idea Fest. He talked about getting to know Gundrum in his research for the book.
Eig said that Gunny “was very comfortable with the n-word.” He was from a big family from a rural community near Albany, N.Y. He told Eig he didn’t think of himself as prejudiced, but then again, he never met a Black person while he was growing up.
He learned more about prejudice in the Marines when he realized that he and his Black bunkmate could not go to the same restaurants near Paris Island in South Carolina.
And he was not exactly culturally hip. When he saw a Black man with a beard approaching the stage at the Lincoln Memorial without making eye contact, Gunny stopped him and asked him for his pass, which the man said he had left in his hotel room. It was the famous singer, Sammy Davis, Jr. Gunny had not recognized him.
Now here Gunny was, standing next to, guarding, perhaps the most famous Black man in America at the time. King began speaking, quietly in that preacherly style he had. Gunny still worried that the mics were too low. King talked on. Finally, Gunny could not stop himself. He reached in front of King and lowered the microphones one more time.
The speech took off. “I have a dream.” “Let freedom ring.” “Free at last, free at last, thank God almighty, we are free at last.”
The crowd roared as King stepped away from the podium. And Gunny stepped right in front of him as they left the stage, making his body a shield for King.
Even though he was more focused on the crowd than on the speech, it still had a big impact on Gunny. Fifty years later, he told his hometown newspaper, “I took away from that day and that speech some idea of what the world should be and what we should all strive for.”
He later became a New York State Police officer, and he told a reporter for the NBC Today Show, “Through what I learned that day, I think it made me a better policeman, a more fair policeman and I tried to practice that always.”
As Jonathan Eig thought about those moments when Gundrum wanted to make sure that King’s voice was amplified to the crowd, to the world that was watching, Eig told David Maraniss, “what I realized is that that was an act of love from Gunny, it's exactly the kind of Christian love that King talked about all the time.”
It was also the kind of love that John the Baptist and Jesus talked about.
It’s not that John sounds very cuddly at the beginning of today’s Gospel passage. “You brood of vipers,” he says to the crowd. We hardly ever say that to you here. It’s the kind of rhetoric we are more likely to hear in today’s political debates, but here it is in the Gospel.
Once John has the crowd’s attention, he goes all apocalyptic on them, describing God’s judgment in pretty vivid and unsettling terms.
The crowd’s response? “What, then, should we do?”
I can imagine that the crowd listening to Martin Luther King 50 years ago had the same question.
I imagine that many of us here today when we look at all the issues facing our world, indeed all the issues facing our own individual and family lives, have the same question.
John offers some very concrete ideas to his crowd – share what you have, don’t get greedy, don’t extort money from others or make false accusations. As those who have studied the Gospel according to Luke note, justice is a recurring theme in his writings.
The song of Mary before Jesus’ birth – what we call The Magnificat – calls for justice for the poor. After Jesus’s baptism that we heard about today, Luke tells the story of Jesus going into the desert for 40 days, then going to his home synagogue in Nazareth where he gives what amounts to his inaugural address based on the prophet Isaiah:
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to set free those who are oppressed,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
Do you hear the echoes of that in John’s message? Do you hear echoes from that in the life and words of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.?
Then our Gospel story takes a hard turn. John points toward Jesus, amplifying the message that is to come. And it costs John his life. Before Luke gets to the baptism of Jesus, the Gospel writer tells us of John’s imprisonment. It’s as if he is saying, John’s work is done, now Jesus’ work is beginning.
And for Jesus to begin his work, he needs to stop and pray before he emerges from the waters of baptism and then God’s Spirit bursts on the scene: “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”
What then, are we to do?
Well, prayer is not a bad place to begin. No matter how we have tried to live out Jesus’ message in the past, taking time to pray provides an opportunity to assess and reassess whether what we have done still makes sense and whether what we might do now provides us a path forward.
I think that works both in our personal lives - and in how we choose to respond to the needs of those around us. Among the many messages Jesus gave us, stopping to pray was an action he often took.
Another thing we might do is remember that word “beloved.”
Yes, the Gospels tell of Jesus as God’s Beloved One in a very special way. But Jesus is not the only one beloved by God.
So was John the Baptist. So are the people who have followed Jesus across the centuries. So are the Jewish people who proceeded Jesus and were known as God’s Chosen People. And so are we.
That sense of know that God’s love is with us – always – can carry us through some pretty hard times.
Just look at the things that happened in the months right after Dr. King told the nation about his dream. Four little girls were killed when white supremacists bombed a church in Birmingham, Alabama. President Kennedy was assassinated. The Black leadership in the struggle for racial justice began to fracture.
Dr. King knew what it felt like to be discouraged. Yet he pressed on. He had a sense of being one of God’s beloved ones, even when he recognized his own shortcomings and faced his own discouragements.
And still, Dr. King held out the vision of what he and others called the beloved community. There’s that word “beloved” again.
One of the people who went to that March on Washington in 1963 was Francine Yaeger, a 19-year-old Black woman from Chicago who took a train to DC for the March. She got a glimpse of that beloved community. Jonathan Eig, the author of that King biography, wrote this about her:
Francine said to her best friend who had traveled to DC with her: “Florestine, this is what heaven’s gonna be like when we get there.”
But here’s another look at what the beloved community can be. It comes from Dr. Luther E. Smith Jr., a scholar of the works of Black theologian Howard Thurman, whose writings had a big influence on Dr. King. Smith spoke in 2019 at a conference on Thurman’s life and work that was held at Upper House here in Madison.
For Smith, living in the beloved community is not always such an idyllic place.
He told about visiting a place that served people without homes in North Carolina.
“So, it’s the homeless,” he said, “with all the aromas you get from people who have been living on the street. And some obvious signs of mental illness … But what I saw in that place was … an area for clothing with racks separating the clothing as if you walked into a department store. There was a place over here to help people deal with their disability benefits and other kinds of need they would have in terms of medical care.
“There was artwork that many of them had drawn and their poetry as an expression of beauty that had come through them. I go into the living room and there are tables with tablecloths and china and they are being served four and five helpings of food.”
Smith said, “I felt that I had entered the realm of God. This was for me an experience of beloved community. Were there people still there addicted to drugs? Yes. Were some of the people serving wondering, could these people be doing better than they are? Probably yes. Do some of the homeless speak rough to one another? Yes.”
He concluded, “I would say that if we found ourselves requiring an understanding of the beloved community stripped of these dimensions of life, we’re always going to be disappointed in the picture of beloved community.”
I think John the Baptist understood that but still called people to be their better selves.
I think Jesus understood that, but still asked us to do the hard things that seem to go against our nature, like forgiving without limit and loving our enemies.
I think Martin Luther King understood that, knowing that it would take hard work, sacrifices, even death to bring that dream closer to reality.
Across the centuries that people taken from Africa and sold as slaves in this country have been here, they have held out hope for freedom, for justice, for dignity. Their hopes and their persistence have been captured in a beautiful hymn that is often sung on this weekend. It’s called “Life Every Voice and Sing.”
Today, we can sing it in solidarity with all those who are God’s beloved ones who have struggled across their lives while never giving up their dreams, the dream that Dr. King held out to us as a challenge 60 years ago.
Sing a song full of the faith that the dark past has taught us.
Sing a song full of the hope that the present has brought us.
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
let us march on till victory is won.
Gunny Gundrum took a small action to help Dr. King amplify that dream. We, too, can find ways to amplify the words, the hopes, the dreams for justice of those living on the margins in our time.
So let us join together in singing this hymn. (This version is from Kirk Franklin.)
