 Hello, and welcome to this service honoring the life and dream of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. My name is Kelly Asputh Jackson, and I am one of the co-senior ministers of the First Unitarian Society of Madison. It is our great honor to be host to this service this year. I wish to thank the speakers that you will hear today. Cantor Jacob Niemi of Temple Bethel, Adam Clawson, Senior Leader of Life Center Madison, Rabbi Bonnie Margulis, Executive Director of Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice, Annie Weatherby Flowers of the King Coalition, and Kooji Chakalia Madison, Reverend Karen Armina of James Reeb Unitarian Universalist Congregation. Thanks as well to our musicians, Leota and Tamara Stanley, Radhike Damore, and the MLK Virtual Choir, as well as to our technical team of Drew Collins and Daniel Carnes for making it possible for the service to be seen and heard. Additionally, of course, I want to thank the King Coalition itself for organizing us and allowing us to be host for this service this year. As part of honoring Dr. King and experiencing his words and wisdom today, you will hear a number of readers offering prayers that he authored during his lifetime. As Dr. King was a Christian minister, he prayed out of and was sustained by the specificity of his own tradition, and we have remained faithful to his wording, knowing that we have also a wide variety of faiths reflected amongst all of you, just as Dr. King made friendships and alliances across religious boundaries. I invite you to open yourself as fully as possible to the words of his heart. If there are places where you find he is not speaking for you in your own religious language, I hope you will remain receptive to those places where he is speaking to you, to all of us in our present moment and predicament. Once again, welcome and thank you for being with us for this service. This week marks an interesting and really beautiful coincidence in the calendar for American Jews, as we honor the legacy of Dr. King and his tireless work in the fight for equality. This also marks the Sabbath when Jews around the world read from a portion in the book of Exodus that depicts the moment when the Israelites finally escaped Egypt and when they sang what would become known as the Song of the Sea. That moment when the Israelites reached the opposite shores of the Red Sea evokes some of the dreams expressed by Dr. King and the goals that he worked and prayed and fought for his entire life, even if he never saw them realized in their totality. In the second verse of the Song of the Sea, Moses and the Israelites proclaimed. The eternal God is my strength and song and has become my deliverance. This is my God whom I glorify, my ancestral God whom I exalt. And we know that Dr. King regarded both strength and song as gifts from God, which was evident in his esteem for singers like Mahalia Jackson and for songs like the Gospel tune that was known to be his favorite. Take my hand, precious Lord. So even as we learn from Dr. King's example in the ongoing fight for equality and dignity for the marginalized, we can also take his lead in those moments when we find ourselves in need of strength. And perhaps, like Dr. King, we can find some strength in the song itself. We thank you for the fact that you have inspired men and women in all nations and in all cultures. We call you different names. Some call you Allah, some call you Elohim, some call you Jehovah, some call you Brahma, some call you the Unmoved Mover. But we know that these are all names for one and the same God. Grant that we will follow you and become so committed to your way and your kingdom that we will be able to establish in our lives and in this world a brother and sisterhood, that we will be able to establish here a kingdom of understanding where men and women will live together as brothers and sisters and respect the dignity and worth of every human being. In the name and spirit of Jesus, amen. Good evening. My name is Adam Klossom. I'm the senior leader of Life Center Madison. And first to Mother Weatherbee Flowers, thank you for this tremendous honor to share and participate on this sacred occasion and for your years of service and leadership in our community. To the King Coalition, thank you for your commitment and investment to put these annual events together despite the ongoing pandemic. To our gracious host and production team here at First Unitarian Society, thank you for the honor and generosity you have extended each year of this partnership. Today's sacred celebration of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is not mere historical commemoration. It is the honor of a man and a movement from our broken history as a nation so that the message of the man and the movement continue speaking to our present until our future fulfills the dream of Dr. King. It takes a person of great faith and character to dream great dreams while living in a nightmare. The contentious times we live in are not creations of our contemporaries but rather fruit of the seeds that were sown yet never uprooted by prior irresponsible and prejudicial generations. For those who claim they were not responsible for the past, we must realize that we are responsible to repair the present brokenness caused by the past. Lest people remain wounded, marginalized, and oppressed and we, culpable in perpetuating the harm that the past initiated. Ancestors of the Indigenous and Black communities have suffered because the American Christians were more Eurocentric than Christocentric in their ethics. Their greed was not just for money but for power, superiority, and selfish gain. And these weeds of greed and justice and oppression have grown to full stature and continue to cost us Black and Indigenous lives. This day of celebration has become a special and a token or partial fulfillment of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s dream. For us to be an inclusive country, we ought to celebrate the progress of our inclusivity and the influence of Dr. King's messages that they have had on all identities and communities. Diverse representation at events like this is an annual testament to the inclusion and honor our Black leaders have had for all people. However, to all of us non-Black leaders, having received such a gift of inclusion from the Black community led us, steward our responsibility to not co-opt these moments or messages from Black civil rights leaders, but rather lift up the Black community in honor and recognition of their brilliant and courageous leadership that they have shown us and the vision that they have portrayed of a better America. One where liberty and justice for all actually means all. An America where all lives matter because Black lives matter. We are being led by Black Americans' exemplary leadership and character. When a person is suddenly suffering and gasping for air, we do the humane thing and lend them our own breath through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, knowing that we have plenty to give. America, we have lost our humanity because we have ignored and even degraded the humanity of Black people. It is revealing our own poverty of the soul that has led us to hoard and lay up treasures where moth and rust destroy, as the scriptures say, for we have been stricken with fear that we would not have enough for our own selves if we lived and if we led with generosity, the only humane and dignifying and righteous thing to do. The economic inequalities and injustices of our day will not be solved through philanthropy or taxation alone because neither of them require proximity to your neighbor and universal responsibility to love. Life, like its simplest form, breath, is meant to be consistently given and received, not hoarded. Elder Possoa Camara, a Brazilian archbishop, said, when I give to the poor, they call me a saint, but when I ask why they're poor, they call me a communist. It is grievous to see that even the consideration of all people in social and economic practices and policies incites reactionary dismissive rhetoric of anti-communism and anti-Marxism. But compassion compels us to consider all. I was taught that God so loved the world that he gave, yet we fail time and time again to love as he loves. Children are taught young that it is right to give back the toy they stole from a peer, yet the mention of reparations or investments to and in black or indigenous people is profane to most of America. Jesus warned that it is no profit for a man to gain the whole world but lose his soul. And Paul, the early apostle of Christianity reaffirmed that even giving all of our goods to the poor but not having love profits us nothing. Neither the right or left have a monopoly on truth or even excelling at love. Our binary dualistic thinking has created much of this toxicity and it is only love that can transcend the dualism and reunite our head and heart. Dr. King surmonically spoke that Jesus says love because hate destroys the hater as well as the hated. Love is the only creative, reductive and transformative power in the universe. Love is the only way forward. Love is the more excellent way. Love never fails. Thank you and God bless you. Good evening. Thank you to the King Coalition for inviting me to share a few words with you on this occasion celebrating Dr. King's work and legacy. I'm Rabbi Bonnie Margulis, Executive Director of Wisconsin Faith Voices for Justice. We are a statewide interfaith education and advocacy organization. As people of faith, we believe as did Dr. King that all people made in the image of the divine are endowed with human worth and dignity, universally deserving of love and respect, deserving to have all their basic needs met and deserving of having their votes counted and their voices heard. Sadly, we seem further away than ever from a society where these beliefs are made manifest. We are living in difficult times and facing existential threats from this seemingly never-ending pandemic to the increasingly devastating effects of climate change, to the widening chasm between rich and poor, to the current threats to our democracy. These many challenges are creating a deep feeling of fear in many of us. But beyond these fears, there's a segment of our society that is steeped in a different kind of fear. Fear of the other, fear of change from a white majority country to white minority, fear of loss of privilege, fear of loss of power, even when that power is illusory. These kinds of fears lead to hate, which leads to racism, discrimination, and oppression. We see that fear manifested in hate speech and outright threats being aimed at school board members and public health officials. We see it manifested in misinformation campaigns that seek to sow division and distrust. Most horrifying of all, we saw it take the form of a violent insurrection a little over a year ago at our nation's capital. Dr. King understood the dangers of giving in to fear. He taught us that the antidote to fear is love, not the love of Eros, but the love of Agape. Dr. King defined Agape as understanding, redeeming goodwill for all, and overflowing love, which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and creative, the love of God operating in the human heart. He said, Agape does not begin by discriminating between worthy and unworthy people. It begins by loving others for their sakes and makes no distinction between friend and enemy. It is directed toward both. Agape is love seeking to preserve and create community. It is through this love that we will make real Dr. King's vision of creating beloved community. Our country is at a crossroads today. We have a serious decision to make. Are we going to move forward, build on the work of Dr. King and other civil rights heroes like Representative John Lewis, end systemic racism, and build the beloved community of Dr. King's vision, or are we going to go back to the days of Jim Crow? Will we protect and expand voting rights for all, or will we erect higher and more barriers to keep especially black and brown voters from exercising their right to vote? Will we overcome the forces that seek to divide us and lead with love instead of fear? Dr. King had faith in the human capacity to love and in the power of faith to inspire us to love even our enemies. Like us, Dr. King lived in dark times, but because of his love for humanity, he was able to envision a better time ahead. In his 1956 speech, Facing the Challenge of a New Age, Dr. King outlined what that time might look like and how it might be achieved. He reminded the listeners that the strategies were not ends in themselves, but rather he said, the end is reconciliation. The end is redemption. The end is the creation of beloved community. It is this type of spirit and this type of love that can transform opposers into friends. It is this type of understanding goodwill that will transform the deep gloom of the old age into the exuberant gladness of the new age. It is this love which will bring about miracles in the hearts of people. Our task on this day and in the days ahead will be to work together to bring that love into the world and together to create beloved community. None of us can do this alone, but together we can bring about miracles. May it be so. So Greetings on behalf of the Martin Luther King's Decidian Medicine Dane County King Coalition. I'm here representing them today as we celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King. As a person who loves history, when I got ready to think about what I was going to say, I went back and kind of researched some of his sayings and some of his speeches and I came across this one where he talked about the breath of life. He said, people are concerned today by the length of life and not the breath of life which consists of the concerns for others. We tend to focus on the individual or the narrow pieces of the individual more so than the broader concern of all mankind or the broader community. Christ acts, individual acts Christ, who is my neighbor? And Dr. King indicated that we should focus on who is my neighbor and not be afraid to see beyond race, ethnicity, social status. And here today, gender identity, but to focus on, on a copy love, to define who is our neighbor and not to be afraid to see beyond what is visible, but to honestly ask yourself who is thy neighbor and walk boldly in loving thy neighbor as thyself, as Christ instructed us to do. Thank you and enjoy the rest of the the presentation today and look forward to you joining us again on Monday for the celebration which were brought to you virtual. Thank you and have a good day and God bless. I want to begin by expressing my thanks for the humbling honor of being invited to speak today. As we honor the life and work of Dr. King and in particular the spiritual grounding which called him forth and spurred him on, I find myself returning to the words of his letter from Birmingham City Jail. Not because it is his greatest or most important work, that's not a thing for me to judge, but because it is, in my estimation, his most prophetic work. In my tradition, we recognize the words of prophets not by how easily we agree with them, but by how forcefully they challenge us to confront evil with love. I return to these words of his again and again, because they convict me when my soul needs to be called back to its purpose. Writing from his jail cell on Easter weekend, 1963, Dr. King described the moderate in part as someone who is more devoted to order than to justice, who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice, who constantly says, I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action. There is a part of me which I confess I see reflected in those words, a part which begins to get worried when voices get loud and fearful when an argument comes to blows, no matter who happens to be doing the swinging. I recognize that I have said before to my downtrodden human siblings, if only in my heart. Something like those damning words I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action. If you have ever accepted the absence of tension in substitute for the presence of justice, perhaps those words ring as loudly in your ears as they do in mine. In every struggle for freedom and justice, there are always debates and disputes about tactics, conversations that need to be had, but Dr. King reminds us, reminds me, that the righteousness of a cause is to be measured by the depth of the injustice it seeks to overturn, where there truly is something wrong with the world, painfully, harmfully, gravely wrong. The only moral answer is to fight it. If a newly revealed tension that makes my mind worry and my stomach rumble is the price of taking that position, I must be ready to pay it. A little later, Dr. King condemned what he called the myth of time, the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. He explained instead that actually time itself is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God. And without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. The fierce truth in Dr. King's words is no less withering an indictment of comfort and complacency today than it was 59 years ago. There is no refuge to be found in the sin of confusing peace and quiet with peace and justice. And the turning of days into weeks and months and years will, by itself, do nothing to rid the world of wrong. But what can bring healing to the dire afflictions of our society? What has before and may do so again is the hard work and creativity of human beings, human co-workers with God, my friends. May you and I not fall prey to the myth of time, neither to the false idea that time will cure all ills nor to the mistaken and uniquely modern belief that time has, in fact, already cured all of those ills. May we remember that order has no value or purpose without justice and so find courage enough to overcome our fear of tension and chaos. The time is always ripe to do right. O Thou eternal God, out of whose absolute power and infinite intelligence the whole universe has come into being. We humbly confess that we have not loved Thee with our whole hearts, souls, and minds. And we have not loved our neighbor as Christ loved us. We have all too often lived our selfish impulses rather than by the life of sacrificial love as revealed by Christ. We often give in order to receive. We love our friends and hate our enemies. We go the first but dare not travel the second. We forgive, but we dare not forget. And so as we look within ourselves, we are confronted with the appalling fact that the history of our lives is the history of an eternal revoke against Thee. But Thou, O God, have mercy, have mercy upon us. Forgive us for what we could have been but fail to be. Give us the intelligence to know Thy will. Give us the courage to do Thy will. Give us the devotion to love Thy will. In the name and the spirit of Jesus we pray, amen. The offering for today's service will support the MLK Coalition, the organization behind this service, and so much of the celebration of Dr. King's life and legacy in the Madison area. We invite you to be generous in your giving to support their work of forwarding Dr. King's moral vision. The web address at which you may make donations will appear on your screen during the music. We bless now these gifts freely given and gratefully received. Holy Spirit, which makes possible all blessing and all abundance, thank you for all that we have to share and for the opportunity to share it. May the giver be blessed in the giving and may each heart be moved to gratitude by the source from whom all blessings flow. I am honored and grateful for the Martin Luther King Jr.'s Coalition's invitation to speak today and to be in such esteemed company. I serve a liberal congregation that intentionally named themselves after the Reverend James Reeb, the Unitarian Universalist minister who was killed by white supremacists in Selma in 1965. After answering Dr. King's call to people of faith to join the march for voting rights, we try in our ministries to live up to Reverend Reeb's values of service and justice and to his dedication to the work to which those values called him. As we live now in the intersection of a COVID pandemic that ebbs and flows but never goes away and the culture of white supremacy that changes form but also never goes away, I've been thinking a lot about maintaining and nurturing hope. One of the messages I often preach is the effectiveness of hope and collective action. Keep dreaming, keep working together and we will win. That's not surprising as one of the things that people have observed about liberal faith traditions is that we really like to stay positive. But there's a critique of this positivity that Dr. King, among others, some of the immunitarians found inadequate. He wrote this of liberalism in pilgrimage to non-violence in 1960, the last sermon in Strength to Love. I came to recognize the complexity of man's social involvement and the glaring reality of collective evil. I realized that liberalism had been all too sentimental concerning human nature and that it leaned toward a false idealism. I also came to see that the superficial optimism of liberalism concerning human nature overlooked the fact that reason is darkened by sin. The more I thought about human nature, the more I saw how our tragic inclination for sin encourages us to rationalize our actions. He went on to talk about how neo-orthodoxy, the other end of the theological spectrum from liberalism, was also unsatisfying on the question of the nature of man, observing that, quote, a large segment of Protestant liberalism defined man only in terms of his essential nature, his capacity for good. Neo-orthodoxy tended to define man only in terms of his existential nature, his capacity for evil. An adequate understanding of man is found only in a synthesis that reconciles the truth of both. Yes. While I am pretty inspired by the idea that dreaming and working together is all that it will take to build the beloved community, I am learning a hard truth in today's America that is so deeply divided and so full of hate and dismissiveness and violence in thought and in deed. That truth is that evil does exist. That we humans are deeply complicated and that good and evil, the capacity for love and wholeness and compassion and the capacity for hate and greed and selfishness co-exist in each of us. That it is necessary to have a dream to appeal to the good in us and to believe that the dream can be nurtured and realized through the good work of building communities and love and trust, but it is not enough. I don't think we can fight evil effectively if we believe that is enough. Dr. King wrote that it was midnight within the social order and within the moral order of his day. I don't presume to know enough to say that our time this day is worse, but it is later and the fight is still upon us. If Dr. King's time was midnight, then I think we are in the pre-dawn hours after the moon has set, but the sun is still not yet close to rising. I think we have come to terms with the realities of evil within us and among us that we have to come to terms with that. I see it clearly for what it is so we can stay in the fight for freedom and justice that is still, still, still with us. So we might go into that fight with eyes wide open, pupils dilated for the pre-dawn time is still dark. That is hard to say. I want to be lifting up the amazing work that has been done over the 60-some years since Dr. King wrote pilgrimage to non-violence and I'm so grateful for the people who are talking about that today. But if there's one thing that liberalism has taught me is that we need to change with the times to accept the wisdom that new information and new experiences have brought us to embrace who we are along with who we hope to become. May clarity of sight bring clarity of mind as we learn more about ourselves and our enemy so that in the end we do win. May it be so. O God, our gracious Heavenly Father, we thank thee for the creative insights in the universe. We thank thee for the lives of great saints and prophets in the past who have revealed to us that we can stand up amid the problems and difficulties and trials of life and not give in. We thank thee for our four parents who've given us something in the midst of darkness of exploitation and oppression to keep going and grant that we will go on with the proper faith and the proper determination of will so that we will be able to make a creative contribution to this world and in our lives. In the name and spirit of Jesus we pray. Amen.