Stakes [and expectations] is high: What the Church should be according to James Baldwin and MLK Jr.
Stakes is high, you know them stakes is high - De La Soul
It is a pleasure for me to be here. There are a lot of younger people here and so you may not get the reference to the title of this talk. There's a group called De La Soul. De La Soul is a hip hop group and they have one of my favorite songs called “Stakes is high” produced by the legendary J-Dilla, a producer /DJ who died very young but was innovative in his instrumentation, and it's a song about justice and about what that the stakes for Black people and people of color are high, that what they understand is that their songs are more than just about popularity, but about what the state or Black people in the US is, as Posdonous, one of the members of De La, as they are colloquially known, says:
“Let me tell you what it's all about:
A skin not considered equal
A meteor has more right than my people”
So when I was thinking of how to structure this talk, and how to combine Black History, the Church and justice, I felt the title was apropos to talk about the faith, the hope and the expectations of both James Baldwin and Martin Luther King jr. especially as those hopes relate to the Church.
Both are really important figures of the civil rights movement, and of Black thought overall and both have a lot to say to us in this regard. You may be more familiar with Martin Luther King Jr. He's much more familiar around Christian circles. Maybe not as much with James Baldwin, but James Baldwin is an important figure who actually was a preacher's son. His whole testimony is really important for the Church to consider and he has a lot of critiques and expectations of the Church.
So, to begin, let’s ground this on Matthew 25:31-45. I prefer to use the Inclusive Bible, it is gender-neutral, and helps simplify some language. Let us hear what the Spirit is saying to God’s people:
31 "At the appointed time the Promised One will come in glory, escorted by all the angels of heaven, and will sit upon the royal throne, 32 with all the nations assembled below. Then the Promised One will separate them from one another, as a shepherd divides the sheep from the goats. 33 The sheep will be placed on the right hand, the goats on the left. 34 "'The ruler will say to those on the right, 'Come, you blessed of my Abba God! Inherit the kindom prepared for you from the creation of the world!
35 For I was hungry and you fed me;
I was thirsty and you gave me drink.
I was a stranger and you welcomed me;
36 naked and you clothed me.
I was ill and you comforted me;
in prison and you came to visit me.
37 Then these just will ask, When did we see you hungry and feed you, or see you thirsty and give you drink? 38 When did we see you as a stranger and invite you in, or clothe you in your nakedness? 39 When did we see you ill or in prison and come to visit you?' 40 The ruler will answer them, 'The truth is, every time you did this for the least of my sisters or brothers, you did it for me.'
41 "Then the ruler will say to those on the left, 'Out of my sight, you accursed ones! Into that everlasting fire prepared for the Devil and the fallen angels!
42 I was hungry and you gave me no food;
I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink.
43 I was a stranger and you gave me no welcome;
naked and you gave me no clothing.
I was ill and in prison and you did not come to visit me.'
44 Then they in turn will ask, 'When did we see you hungry or thirsty, or homeless or naked, or ill or in prison, and not take care of you?' 45 The answer will come, 'The truth is, as often as you neglected to do this to one of the least of these, you neglected to do it to me.' 46 They will go off to eternal punishment, and the just will go off to eternal life."
Matthew 25 is a good text for us to ground our talk today. It's one of the most foundational texts when we talk about Christianity and justice and it's one of the texts that shows what it is that we as Christians to do. And this is a common debate within Christianity: what are Christians expected to do? What is the thing? What are the things that Jesus was talking to? The disciples about? Jesus was sharing a story about sheep and goats as a reference to what the Kindom of God should be. I use the word Kindom, instead of Kingdom, in line with Mujerista Theologian Ana Maria Isasi-Diaz, who coined the term as a way to represent a less patriarchal and more communal union that the future with God provides.
This story is sometimes referred to as the ‘parable of the sheep and the goats’. But it isn’t actually a parable, what it is actually is a way for us to have a minimal expectation of what the Church needs to do, like bare minimum. The story has an interesting feature. In the story there are people who were wretched or evil or accursed, and there were people who were just or good or right and both groups of people did not know when they were serving God, or when they were not serving God, right? Both did not know the good and similarly both did not know the bad.
I think that becomes interesting because it is a good observation one the purpose and mission of the Church, of what we are supposed to be and do. We are supposed to engage in works of justice without concern of what it might grant us but simply because that is what is what we are called to do. To serve people.
So the text points us to the first thing that we need to learn about the scripture, which is that when the Church is a Church, the Church becomes it serves the need of the most vulnerable. The purest form of Christianity and of our service is when we are serving the needs of those most vulnerable. The one thing that all of those people described in the story, not the sheep and the goats but the people, have in common is that they were all vulnerable. Someone who is hungry is very vulnerable. Thirst makes you vulnerable. Strangers, and we can exchange that for immigrants, are always ;left to the whim of people who would help them.
I am an immigrant, I arrived in the country in 1993, and it was very different to come to this country for my parents. It's not easy to just come into a new place that you don't know and just declare “I'm gonna make a life here for me and my family.” That's really difficult.
All of these folks have a vulnerability and when we do the will of God as we are supposed to we serve the need of the most vulnerable, and that is Jesus's expectation. Jesus expected that the Church was always going to be serving the most vulnerable.
And why is it important for us to reflect on that? Because as we think about what Black History Month means, as we think about our faith and what we listen to in our congregations, we have to start to think, and to ask ourselves “How is what we're doing, helping me to have an eye, have a heart, have a mind for people who are vulnerable?”
So this becomes the question that leads both James Baldwin and Martin Luther King Jr. to have high expectations for the Church. They have these high expectations of what it means to be Christian, what it means to be a faith because they expect the Church to fulfill that mission. James Baldwin uses Matthew 25 and one of his letters called “Open Letter to the Born Again”, which is a short letter where he is criticizing Christians who are criticizing other Christians for being a part of an anti-war movement. In the he is critiquing the opinion that a Christian man, who bases his life on Matthew 25, can be criticized for trying to bring about peace in the world. His most damning lines to Christians in that text :
“The people who call themselves “born again” today have simply become members of the richest, most exclusive private club in the world, a club that the man from Galilee could not possibly hope—or wish—to enter.”
Intro to King and Baldwin
I'm assuming that you probably don't know this, MLK Jr. was born Michael King. MLK’s dad was a minister who went to Germany to study Martin Luther and, as the story goes, he was so excited about what he learned about Martin Luther that when he arrived in this country he changed his name and his son’s name. For those who know Church history know that Martin Luther is a conflicted figure. Sure, he was important for the reformation, but towards the end of his life, he literally called for the killing of Jews and wrote book which the Nazis used during their time to support some of their things that they were doing.
Martin Luther King Jr. tried to kill himself a few times. He went through depression, went through a difficult time when he was young. He had a really difficult childhood because of the death of his grandparents but eventually he rebounded.
James Baldwin is one of the best writers in the history of the English language. He’s not just a writer, he's a really good writer. He grew up though, as a preacher. James Baldwin grew up in a Pentecostal household with a very strict Pentecostal Father. And if you read any of James Baltimore writings, and you go to Church or grew up in a christian household, you immediately identify with him. I identify with James Baldwin because I became a minister at 16 and started preaching even before that and just like Baldwin, preaching that early was a privilege and a burden. A revelation of what the Church was formational, because of what the Church can be.
His reflections on his preaching life. He left the Church officially when he was young mainly because of what the Church was doing, because the Church wasn't fulfilling the expectations of what the Church should be according to what he read in the gospels.
And we do do that, as Christian we often don't hold or meet the expectations of what the Church should be doing or is. We oftentimes derail from the mission because of our actions, but for James Baldwin and for Martin Luther King Jr. the Church had certain responsibilities that it had to meet.
In order to see what they both wanted the Church to be, and what they hoped it would become, I will be using two texts that they wrote, two epistles as we may consider them for this teaching. From James Baldwin, it's a document called “Letter from a Region in My Mind” which is a piece of writing he did for the New Yorker where he describes most of his religious upbringing and reflects on his learnings of the Church. Sidebar, I find interesting that throughout his life many of his texts have titles that allude to the Bible, “the cross or redemption”, “The fire next time”, “the blood of the lamb”, “go tell it on the mountain”
For Martin Luther King Jr. I will be using a piece he wrote called “Paul's letter to American Christians”, where he writes a letter in the style of St. Paul to the church in the United States, and I think it's great because it's a really good critique and a really good analysis of the Church.
Baldwin and King actually knew each other, they were very close and respected each other. They had high expectations of the Church, because they had fond memories of their time in the Church. They remembered the visceral feelings that being connected to the people in congregations gave them.
James Baldwin describes this beautifully in “Letter from a Region in My Mind.” He's such a great writer, his mastery of the English language is unique, and the way he writes is just so rich and profound and he is able to write in a way that evokes the feelings he experienced. He describes his excitement of the Church as follows:
The Church was very exciting. It took a long time for me to disengage myself from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will. There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multicolored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord.
…
Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, “the Word”—when the Church and I were one. Their pain and their joy were mine, and mine were theirs—they surrendered their pain and joy to me, I surrendered mine to them-and their cries of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” and “Yes, Lord’ ” and “Praise His name!” and “Preach it, brother!” sustained and whipped on my solos until we all became equal, wringing wet, singing and dancing, in anguish and rejoicing, at the foot of the altar.
For Baldwin the Church is this place, that when he remembers it and thinks about it, is incomparable. It is a place that brings healing, where pain is shared, where rejoicing is shared and where people are made whole. I like how he mentions music, right? There's no music quite like it. There is a uniqueness to Christian music like he says there a pathos, there's an emotion, there's the Holy Spirit that creates such a rich and visceral experience.
One of the things that Baldwin is saying here and that I know, for sure that King said in many places, is that when the Church is the Church, it is a place of healing and restoration, right? In those excerpts he says
He says, I remember when “Their pain and their joy were mine, and mine were theirs—they surrendered their pain and joy to me, I surrendered mine to them” but we were rejoicing in the Lord.
Having good memories of our Church is a good reference point for the Church. Just because we like something, does not mean that we can also critique it. Baldwin remembered fondly of his time in the Church, but that actually allows him to have a clearer view, a clearer expectation of what the Church should be. Because he remembered the emotions, he is able to hold the Church to a standard where what he felt is provided to everyone.
I think one of the things that is important to realize about what both of them were doing, but really what our responsibility as Christians is, is that we have to be able to know when the Church is veering away from its mission. When it is no longer meeting the needs of those in need.
King exemplifies this really well in these excerpts from his “Paul’s Letter to American Christians”:
I am impelled to write you concerning the responsibilities laid upon you to live as Christians in the midst of an unchristian world. That is what I had to do. That is what every Christian has to do. But I understand that there are many Christians in America who give their ultimate allegiance to man-made systems and customs. They are afraid to be different. Their great concern is to be accepted socially. They live by some such principle as this: ‘everybody is doing it, so it must be alright.’ For so many of you Morality is merely group consensus.
…
This means that although you live in the colony of time, your ultimate allegiance is to the empire of eternity. You have a dual citizenry. You live both in time and eternity; both in heaven and earth. Therefore, your ultimate allegiance is not to the government, not to the state, not to nation, not to any man-made institution. The Christian owes his ultimate allegiance to God, and if any earthly institution conflicts with God’s will it is your Christian duty to take a stand against it. You must never allow the transitory evanescent demands of man-made institutions to take precedence over the eternal demands of the Almighty God.
King writes this letter to compel Christians to be better. He wanted to make sure to point out to Christians that we are missing the mark. That somehow, in how we have practiced this faith in the United States, we have veered away from its intended purpose. He does this because he loves the Church. We only critique those things that we love. Valerie Kaur, writer of See No Stranger, says “the opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference.” When we don't care about something, we don't care if it improves or not, we ignore it, well maybe. But it is when we care, when we want something to be better that we critique it.
I want to challenge us here, because I think that that is really a good place for us to be. It's a place where we can be critical. Look at ourselves within the institution of the Church, the Church's message and be like, are we doing the right things? What are we doing? How are we serving people, right? If the reference point is Matthew 25, are meeting those expectations. We, as faithful Christians should be able to notice things that are wrong with the Church, and things that the Church needs to improve. We shouldn't be like those who pretend that the Church is perfect at all times because that's untrue.
The Church has had many errors. I am writing a piece on AfroLatinidad and Christianity and theology and one of the things that I write in the piece is that I have to reconcile that although I am devout and I believe in this faith, the history of Christianity includes slave ships that were named after the Holy Spirit that were named after Jesus Christ that did atrocities to people of Color all over the world.
There's a certain responsibility for us, maybe even a calling, to hold the Church to certain standards, to have expectations for the Church. Because, like De La Soul say, “the stakes is high.” What the Church does and how the Church acts is critical for the betterment of the world. I think, based on what we read from King, that it is up to us to hold the Church up to those expectations. And by holding the Church accountable, we're holding ourselves accountable, we hold one another to the same expectations. Because it's easy to externalize criticisms and say “the Church should do this” or “the Church fails to do that”. That's easy to do. It's more difficult for us to see how we participate in those “errors” of the Church.
This happened to me two years ago on Good Friday. Over the past two years, of course because of the pandemic, I lead a midday meditation during Good Friday. It’s a form of the Stations of the Cross with a justice component where during each station we pray for something specific. Anyway, so I finish the meditation, people are like “wow so good” etc. and I step out of my house, to buy something, and there's this guy, probably without a home, like on the street and I immediately ignore that guy and move out of his way because he was “inconveniently there”. It was so hypocritical. I had just led this meditation on Jesus being a neighboring God and us seeing people like Jesus did. And in an instant I proved that the teachings I had just shared had not been inculcated within me. If this was a test, I know that I failed.
How could I, after leading a meditation on justice and the sacrifice of Jesus, not do what I said God calls us to do. I am sure God was like “all right homie, let's test your theories. You say these things that were good, let’s put them to the test” and I went out and failed that test. I did not inquire whether the gentleman was ok, or how I could help him. I should have asked him “are you okay? Can I help you?” Not only because I am a Christian, but because it is the right thing to do. I was unable to meet those expectations. I felt terrible after, but made sure that after I wouldn't ignore another person in my path. I think that we have to have moments when we ask ourselves: are we holding ourselves to the same expectations that we hold the Church to? Are we helping people who are poor, or are we ignoring them?
If we expect the Church to be this inclusive, place that welcomes everyone. That helps everyone, that listens to the needs of those who need it the most. Then we also need to be inclusive people that welcome everyone. Odin in Thor: Ragnarok, yeah the Marvel movie, says “Asgard is not a place, it's a people” and we as Christians have known this, “The Church is not a place, the Church is a people.” And if we start to realize that, then we start to be like, okay we could criticize the institution, but we also need to hold ourselves accountable.
For both King and Baldwin, the Church has certain responsibilities. Certain expectations that the institution and Christians are supposed to meet, because we're supposed to be showing the world a different way to live a different way to be.
Baldwin was saddened when he learned that the way we say to love everyone doesn't mean to actually love everyone. He says:
“Perhaps I might have been able to reconcile myself even to [the teachings of the Church I was sharing] if I had been able to believe that there was any loving-kindness to be found in the haven I represented… I really mean that there was no love in the Church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the Church door. When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that that meant everybody. But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did.”
Baldwin believes that if the tenets of Christianity are to remain true and good and honest, they must apply to all people. King similarly holds a mirror up to the Church in questioning where true intentions lie:
“I still contend that [the love of] money can be the root of all evil. It can cause one to live a life of gross materialism. I am afraid that many among you are more concerned about making a living than making a life. You are prone to judge the success of your profession by the index of your salary and the, size of the wheelbase on your automobile, rather than the quality of your service to humanity.”
There are times when we as Christians are more focused on some of those things that he's talking about , which really point to greed. The love of money is the root of all evil, right? And there are times when we've noticed that. When Churches have done things because of the love of money instead of the service of humanity, as he says.
By critiquing the Church we exercise our faith. We are able to be faithful to the message of the Gospel, rather than to be thrown asunder by the failings of the Church. There are some hopes that both Kin and Baldwin had of the Church. Baldwin points three things in his Letter:
People, I felt, ought to love the Lord because they loved Him, and not because they were afraid of going to Hell.
I would love to believe that the principles were Faith, Hope, and Charity, but this is clearly not so for most Christians, or for what we call the Christian world.
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving.
King also has some hopes in his letter:
God intends for all of his children to have the basic necessities of life, and he has left in this universe “enough and to spare” for that purpose. So I call upon you to bridge the gulf between abject poverty and superfluous wealth.
So when the Church is true to its nature it knows neither division nor disunity.
The underlying philosophy of Christianity is diametrically opposed to the underlying philosophy of segregation, and all the dialectics of the logicians cannot make them lie down together.
Both King and Baldwin, in their letters, in these epistles, expect the Church to be a place that does, amongst all of the things, the following:
Love people
Be welcoming
Tend to the needs to the vulnerable, rather than the needs of power
Be allies
For Baldwin and King, The Church is supposed to be a space and a place where people feel loved, where people feel joy, where people feel welcome. The Church needs to be a place where love is the foundation. As King says “Without love benevolence becomes egotism, and martyrdom becomes spiritual pride.” The Church also needs to be a place where pain can go away, where the pains of judgment, of hatred, of not feeling included, of rejection can be transformed. Like Baldwin and King, we should expect a lot of the Church. We should expect the Church to be a place that's welcoming. That goes alongside people who are suffering and not alongside power structures. That is allied with, like Jesus did in his day, those who need hope the most, and not with those who feel entitled to it.
To close, I will read a prayer adapted from Praying with James Baldwin in an age of #BlackLivesMatter, which is a 30-day prayer project by two African-American theologians, born out of the sadness and anger caused by the deaths of Tamir Rice, Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and far too many more Black men who were killed extrajudicially… These prayers are beautiful and contain the same hope and expectations that King and Baldwin had for the church to be a place of healing of unity and of compassion. Let us pray:
God, teach us to look back, learning from history.
God, teach us to look out, facing the beautiful and terrible realities of contemporary life.
God, teach us to look forward, as Baldwin and MLK Jr. did, imagining a better future forged in honesty, laughter, and love.
Stir our spirits toward your righteousness.
Move our feet along the road of justice.
Open our hearts to love as you have loved us.
In the name of the triune God, God the father, God the Son, and God Mothering Spirit, we pray. Amen and Ase.
