Let Freedom Ring

A Sermon Delivered by The Rev. Thomas Schmidt

at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Community Memorial Service

January 17, 2008

On August 28, 1963, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. ended his now famous “I Have a Dream” speech with these words.  “When we allow freedom to ring and when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that 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 in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”  

When I was a young boy, I remember sitting in my room, most likely following an episode that caused my parent to send me there, I remember saying to myself, “I can’t wait until I am 18 and can move away from my parents.  Then I will be free.”  It is clear to me now that I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.  I believed freedom was having the ability to do whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Frankly, I was probably most free when I was young and living under my parent’s care, but you could not have told me that back then.  

This, of course, begs the question, “What is freedom?” Is freedom buying the car and house we want but can’t afford?  Is freedom doing what we want regardless of the consequences?  Or is it more than that?  Is freedom purely superficial and physical? Or is  there a spiritual quality to that which we call freedom. What is freedom?  Are you free?  If we are ever going to join hands and sing “Free at last!  Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last,” then it seems to me that we should all be very clear on what we are singing about.

A foundational principle of my own Unitarian Universalist tradition is the inherent worth and dignity of every person.  This principle, or course, is not unique to the tradition, I would argue that it is at the foundation of every religious tradition.  It is expressed in the Biblical imperative to love our neighbors as ourselves.  It is expressed in the words of Jesus, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” I recognize it in the traditional Hindu greeting, “Namaste,” which is generally recognized as implying: “The God in me greets the God in you” or “The Spirit in me meets the same Spirit in you.”  In Islam it is expressed in these words from Muhammad, “He who knows himself knows his Lord.” 

Thomas Jefferson and other founding members of this nation also recognized this fact; “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”   They recognized this fact, even if they did not have the will or strength of character to live by them. 

There exists a profound link between the ideas of inherent worth and dignity of every person and the idea of  “unalienable Rights,” the idea of freedom. If worth and dignity are our birthright, if indeed we are all children of the divine unity of all creation, if we are free to choose the path of righteousness over the path unrighteousness, then freedom must be our natural condition. 

  We enter this world in freedom, free to become the person we are called to be, to best utilize our god given gifts and talents and fully realize our fullest potential. To be free, truly and completely free, is to have the power and ability to make choices, to be in control of ones own life.   There are any number of ways the body can be punished and restricted:  slavery, imprisonment, disenfranchisement, violence, threats of violence, etc. etc., but the free will, the free mind, cannot be enslaved, imprisoned, or otherwise disempowered by another person. However, the free mind, Spiritual Freedom is lost only when we willingly choose to give it away.  

Consider these words of Henry David Thoreau:

I have paid no poll-tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood                          considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the                          iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of 

that institution which treated me as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up.  . . . I saw    

                that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb 

                or break through, before they could get to be as free as I was.  . . . In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall.  

                I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my mediations, which followed them 

                out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all what was dangerous.  As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body. . ..

As Thoreau makes clear, his jailers could punish his body but they could not restrict his freedom because they could not restrict his mind any more than the jailers in Birmingham could imprison the mind of Rev. King.  

The principle of non-violence, the great tool of the Civil Rights movement, is dependent on this same understanding of freedom. To choose nonviolence is to be free.  In the Trumpet of Conscience, Rev. King wrote, “They tried to stop us by threats and fear, the tactic that had long worked so effectively.  But nonviolence had muzzled their guns and defiance had shaken their confidence.”  It takes a free mind to resist the influence of fear in the face of such threats. It takes a free mind to resist the temptation to hate and seek the friendship of an opponent.  It takes a free mind to love your enemy enough to be unwilling to return violence with violence, hatred with hatred.. The Civil Rights movement successfully used nonviolence as a means to remove many of the legal and physical impediments to freedom, it relied on the freedom of the mind to free the body. 

However, as it was stated in Stride Toward Freedom, “nonviolence in the truest sense is not a strategy that one uses simply because it is expedient at the moment; nonviolence is ultimately a way of life that men live by because of the sheer morality of its claim.”  It sickens me when I hear our nation’s leaders and would be leaders invoke the name and legacy of Rev. King one day of the year, for their own political purposes, while the remaining 364 days in the year they actively defend and support laws that uphold the triple evils of poverty, racism and war.  

My colleague, the Rev. David Bumbaugh recently wrote, 

As one who grew up in a rigidly segregated society, I am witness to the fact 

that the world is now a different place and a better place because of Martin 

Luther King, Jr. and the struggle for civil rights. But I also know that the underlying, 

                structural changes for which he lived and died, the fundamental values he challenged 

                us to serve and advance, have not been so completely realized. The gap between the rich 

                and the poor grows with every passing day. The gap between the favored and the desperate 

                has never been so wide. The dream of a compassionate society no longer guides public policy. 

Vengeance has replaced justice in our courts and mercy is defined as weakness.

If freedom, is as I have described, if freedom is the willingness and ability to free the mind from the shackles of hatred and embrace the healing power of love. If freedom truly is the willingness and ability to adopt principles of nonviolence not only as a means to an end but as an end in itself, as a way of life and living. If freedom is a state of mind, a state of mind that comes from knowing one’s own inherent worth and dignity that is not dependent on physical limitations. If freedom is all that, then I repeat my question, are we free?  

The precursor to freedom is awareness, to fully appreciate what it means to be free, we must must be ware to what extent we are not free.  Ken Wilbur wrote the following words, which I believe to be an excellent description of the state of being we call freedom: 

The direction to finding God, which are printed on the box in which your

Heart came, are simple: relax the mind and body; with reverence and 

devotion, gaze into the Heart; feel the Love-Light radiance that permeates

your entire body, and your entire mind, and all of nature, and all nations 

everywhere.

How is possible to hear the freedom ring, when our minds are too busy, too cluttered with the latest celebrity gossip; too absorbed by the Big Screen High Definition Plasma television, to preoccupied with the accumulation of material wealth. Freedom is ringing, freedom is calling us, the dream is awaiting us. Are we going to answer the call, or will we allow it go to voice mail and answer at a more convenient time.