Advent 2

The First Tuesday of Advent, December 2, 2008

Isaiah 1:21-31

How the faithful city has played the whore, once the home of justice where righteousness dwelt—but now murderers!  Your silver has turned into base metal and your liquor is diluted with water.  Your very rulers are rebels, confederate with thieves; every man of them loves a bribe and itches for a gift; they do not give the orphan his rights, and the widow’s cause never comes before them. 

In the 1830’s Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville came to America to see how the upstart democracy was working.  He was amazed to see that the common man was able to govern himself, that representative government worked.  He wrote Democracy in America when he returned to France, and America became a beacon of hope for Europe.  All was not perfect, however. 

About one hundred years later, Martin Luther King, Jr., almost by accident, became the leader of the American civil rights movement.  He was a young pastor, new to Montgomery, Alabama, when Rosa Parks refused to give up her bus seat to a white person. Black pastors in Montgomery were afraid to speak out on behalf of Ms. Parks, so they turned to the young, naïve newcomer, with a gift for preaching.  With his powerful oratory, and with his eyes firmly fixed on justice and Yahweh, King moved a disenfranchised people to heights of courage and self-sacrifice nearly impossible to imagine.   

When, a few years later, America went to war in Vietnam, allegedly fighting for freedom for the Vietnamese people, King protested, in spite of almost universal criticism from his co-workers in the movement.  It made no sense, he replied to critics, to take blacks, who were not free to vote or go to school with whites, and send them overseas in order to win freedom for Asians.  Why was America fighting for freedom in Vietnam when blacks in America still were not free? 

Why? Partly because elected officials wanted to be seen as tough on Communism.  It was the best way to ensure re-election, and from the day they took office in Congress and in the White House, government leaders looked to re-election, not righteousness.  Civil rights for America’s blacks was no more important than the widows’ and orphans’ rights were in ancient Israel’s time. It was re-election that mattered.  

That was over fifty years ago.  Times have changed, haven’t they?  Do Isaiah’s words have anything to tell us?  Dare we listen?