Sermon

The Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost (RCL, Year A, Proper 25)
October 26, 2008

Stephanie Deutsch

Listen Live!

Having trouble listening in?

If you can't see the buttons above to play the sermon, chances are you don't have Macromedia Flash installed. To download the components you need, please visit: www.macromedia.com/downloads.

Our round the corner neighbor Andy Walton, pastor of Capitol Hill Presbyterian church, calls stories the “seeds of our faith.” Seeds contain – in fact they are – the very essence of survival so if he’s right, stories are life-giving. It’s not surprising, then, that Jews retell the story of their deliverance out of slavery in Egypt every year at Passover just as each year, from Advent through Easter, we Christians remember the events of Christ’s life. We tell these stories to widen the circle of those who know them and also to deepen our own understanding of them. And when we share our personal stories we gain wider knowledge of human experience, the intimacy that helps create community, the encouragement we get from knowing that others have faced what we face.

In the story we just heard from the Hebrew Scriptures Moses, that crucial figure who has led the people out of Egypt and suffered with them in the wilderness, is led to the top of a mountain so that he can see the whole land that God has promised. God then tells him that despite all his “mighty deeds and the terrifying displays of power,” the aged Moses himself will not enter that land. He will not live to see the result of his lifetime of faithful service.

Reflecting on this passage, maybe you hear in your head, as I do, the powerful tones that Martin Luther King Jr. used the night before he was killed. He was in Memphis, remember, to march in solidarity with striking sanitation workers and he had received death threats. “I may not get there with you,” he prophetically told a crowded meeting, “but we will get to the promised land.”

The passage suggests to me also another story, one that you perhaps don’t know, about two other men of vision who, long years before Martin Luther King, reacted to racial injustice with action. Booker T. Washington was born in 1856, a slave on a small farm near Roanoke, Virginia. Julius Rosenwald, was the son of Jewish immigrants who came, practically penniless, to the United States from Germany. He was born in 1862 in Springfield, Illinois, went to the local public school, received religious instruction with other Jewish children and worked in his father’s clothing store. While a slave, Booker envied the white children he caught glimpses of reading inside a schoolhouse. In freedom he worked in a salt mine, was baptized in a river near his home and, finally got a little schooling. Julius never finished high school but was apprenticed to his successful uncles and went into the clothing business in Chicago. Booker found his way to Hampton Institute in Eastern Virginia where he was educated and trained as a teacher. At twenty-five, he was hired as the founding director of a new school to train black teachers near the tiny town of Tuskegee, Alabama.

In 1895 each of these two men had an unusual opportunity. Julius was offered the chance to buy into a small, unknown company called Sears, Roebuck. Despite the fact that he had just launched a different venture, he sensed a good opportunity and quickly accepted the offer. With his partner’s flair for promotion and Julius’s meticulous attention to detail, not to mention the introduction of Rural Free Delivery, business was terrific. By the turn of the century Sears was selling everything from work clothes to pocket watches to farm machinery and Julius was soon a millionaire many times over. He bought a big house (by this time he had a wife and five children) and immediately increased his annual donation to the Associated Jewish Charities so that his was the largest in Chicago. He gave money generously but he hung on to his personal frugality. The first time he went to Europe his wife asked him to bring back some lace bedspreads from Paris. He wrote to her that he had looked at them but with the import duty they would be just too expensive. He couldn’t do it.

Booker’s opportunity in 1895 made him not rich but famous. As a prominent educator, he was invited to be the only black speaker at the opening ceremony for a world’s fair type exhibition in Atlanta celebrating the progress the South had made since the end of the Civil War. His speech, to a large white audience with blacks listening from the Jim Crow balcony, emphasized the good will that blacks brought to the task of developing their region and reversing, through their own effort, the effect on them of enforced ignorance and lack of opportunity. The speech was only half as long as this sermon but it was wildly applauded and praised. Frederick Douglass had died earlier that year and people of both races started referring to Washington as the new black leader.

For Booker, this success was mixed with tragedy. His first wife, his childhood sweetheart, and his second, a beautiful, brilliant teacher at Tuskegee, both died leaving him twice widowed with three young children. He married a third time but spent a lot of time on the road away from home making speeches. And despite all his optimism, despite speaking invitations from places like Harvard and dinner with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, even as he encouraged black people to work hard and become educated, he knew that the treatment they were receiving from white Americans was, in some ways, getting not better but worse. The year after his speech, Plessy v. Ferguson made it legal to mandate separate accommodations for the races in trains and elsewhere, southern states were systematically excluding blacks from voting and the vigilante “justice” of lynching (which I, in my ignorance, used to think of as an occasional, random thing) was an ongoing horror. Some blacks had become harshly critical of Booker’s leadership as too timid and to refer derisively to his famous speech as “the Atlanta Compromise.”

Julius Rosenwald and Booker T. Washington met in Chicago in 1911 and they hit it off. Booker was always eager to meet wealthy people who might support Tuskegee. And Julius had begun to look for ways to expand his philanthropy beyond the Jewish community. In the summer of 1908 there had been a shocking three days of rioting in his hometown, Springfield, that left several people dead and the black part of town largely destroyed. Knowing about the pogroms Jews were suffering in Europe sharpened Julius’s reaction to this. Shortly after that, a friend gave him a copy of Booker’s memoir, Up From Slavery. Julius began to see improved racial understanding as essential to the country’s future.

Julius took Booker on a tour of the Sears plant and accepted an invitation to visit Tuskegee. That fall, as he would do many times in the following years, Julius and his wife took a private train car full of friends and relatives for the long trip from Chicago into rural Alabama to spend several days visiting the Tuskegee campus, meeting students, teachers and staff. The highlight of the visit was a chapel service where students sang the spirituals that for many whites were a revelation. They had never before heard the longing they communicate so powerfully.

Julius agreed to serve on the Board of Tuskegee. And he invited Booker to come spend a week as his houseguest in Chicago. Several years ago I interviewed Julius’s youngest son (by then a very old man) and he said he remembered that visit and how the two men talked and talked.

The result of those conversations was a plan to address what Booker and Julius agreed was one of the most glaring needs of Southern blacks - education. Booker felt that well-built schoolhouses would have a tremendous positive impact on rural communities and that people would contribute their own money to get them. This fit well with Julius’s philosophy that it is better to teach a man to fish than to give him food. He contributed $350 for each of the first three schools plus $50 per school for an agent from Tuskegee to go out into the countryside and talk up the project among whites and blacks – a kind of community organizer if you will -- to generate excitement and solicit donations.

The school building program created by Washington and Rosenwald resulted in the construction of almost five thousand small schools that educated about a third of the African American children in the South in the years from 1914 til the end of segregation, schools that became great sources of pride in their rural communities. They are called “Rosenwald schools” but this is really a misnomer. Rosenwald’s contribution was just fifteen percent of the schools’ total cost. The bulk of the money to build them came from the state governments that, pushed by the communities, became their proprietors. A sum slightly greater than Rosenwald’s gift came from the people, most of them black, most of them poor, who gave not just money but land, building materials, food for workdays and vital energy.

Less than a hundred miles from here, in the woods near Sperryville, Virginia, is the two-room Scrabble school, built in 1921 and closed down and neglected since 1968, that is until recently. Two weeks ago I was invited out there to visit with a group of women who are working with other alumni and community members to preserve what they see as a precious bit of their history. Like all Rosenwald schools, the Scrabble school was segregated, not as large or as well supplied as the local white school, and the women remembered walking down the road I walked along with them to get there while their white neighbors rode schoolbuses. To them, though, it was had been a loving environment, a place where families took turns bringing soup for lunch once a week, a place where the strength of their community gave them confidence. They had gone on from there to high school, college and careers – one as a pastor, another as a social worker, a third as a bookkeeper.

Some of you may remember that two summers ago, one of our guests at the Congregation-based shelter project here was an eleven year old boy named Zach. And you may remember that as the result of astute and well-connected parishioners, I was able to take Zach to visit one of the giants of the Civil Rights movement, Congressman John Lewis of Georgia. Before the visit, I pulled off my shelf Lewis’s memoir, Walking With the Wind. From my check of the index, I learned that the school he had attended in rural Alabama was a Rosenwald School. Then I noticed that my copy was signed by the author. On the flyleaf he had written, “Keep the Faith.” For Zach he dedicated another book the same way.

These words – which at one time became almost trite through over use – and the story of Lewis’s own career, suggest to me that the legacy of Rosenwald and Washington, while it is represented by buildings, is actually about the extraordinary power of community and faith. Confronting the particular and distinct challenges of their lives – sudden, extreme wealth for Julius, personal sadness and the reality of racism for Booker – each resisted self-interest and kept faith with values grounded in the religious traditions in which they were raised. As our Gospel reading and the passage from Hebrew Scriptures that inspired it proclaim, God’s way means not taking vengeance, not bearing a grudge but seeking justice and loving the neighbor as oneself. This is not syrupy sentiment but an exhortation to respect and fair dealing for every human being that is totally at odds with racial prejudice. It is the attitude that guided Rosenwald and Washington. It underlies both the American and the Christian ideals of radical inclusion. All persons are equal in the eyes of the law and are precious in God’s sight. We realize these ideals imperfectly, of course, as human being do, but that does not render them meaningless. And perhaps they mean most to those who have had to struggle for them. Condoleeza Rice, who grew up in segregated Alabama, observed recently in an interview, “Black people loved and kept faith with this country when white people did not love and keep faith with them.” Booker, who led Sunday evening chapel services at Tuskegee, stressed to his students not the bitterness that could have been natural to them, but practical steps they could take and an attitude of faith and the example of Christ, the suffering servant. They sang the spirituals their forebears sang, not in meek submission to injustice but in proud remembrance of the way God had sustained his people – them -- from generation to generation. It must have been tempting to give in to anger and hate but so many – Booker T. Washington, Martin Luther King, John Lewis, the vast majority – did not. They, like Rosenwald, like Moses millennia earlier, took faithful steps in trying times without knowing exactly where they would lead.

A final note. I asked Zach what Congressman Lewis’s inscription in his book meant and he told me, “Never give up.”

Amen.