When I watch all the rioting and attacks on our national leadership, I can almost feel the fright oozing or leaking out from the inanimate television screen. It would be easy to turn it off and go to bed, a favored option. But that would be, what? A cop-out? Being like a head-in-the-sand ostrich? Do they really do that out of cowardice? I am trembling, not inert or inept, but deserted. I feel caught in the middle of a feud without a leader.
Feud is a funny word, of Germanic origin loosely related to hostility or ill will or foe. Definitionally, it means prolonged mutual hostility.When I say FEUD over and over my lips curl and pout and my teeth roll over onto my lower lip, expectorating if I try hard enough. This little-used word has power, somewhat like another famous F-word made powerful for its verboten status. Feud is not the same as conflict or disagreement or out-and-out war demanding a winner. In a feud there is no winner.
The word feud evokes for me the image of a pot of boiling water arrested in a simmer.
Famous feuds include families such as the Hatfields and the McCoys, or the Montagues and the Capulets as portrayed in Romeo and Juliet, or more modernly, the Puerto Ricans and the New York elite in NYC as portrayed in West Side Story. Jesus of Nazareth was born into a feud culture—many tribes vying for territory, investing, or wasting, energy in futile feudal feuds over which tribe was God’s favorite. Jesus was murdered/executed for his efforts at feud- reconciliation. Only fools try to resolve feuds, because feuds are by nature insoluble, emotionally transmissible like a virus, and deeply, unconsciously rooted from generation to generation.
All feuds have tragic consequences. The original dispute festers, buried deep in the flesh and blood of feuders, generation to generation. Even when the original dispute is forgotten and irrelevant, feuds live on. When my parents, afraid of those Puerto Ricans invading their safe white space, fled the city, my dearly beloved hometown, for the suburbs, I was twelve. I felt like a teenage tragedy all by myself and caught in a feuding culture not of my own making—as impotent as Juliet, María or Jesus or a hapless Pharisee or Hebrew, caught in a feud response not of my making. What I needed were friends to walk with. I found love and knowledge in books, good words, also experiences of loss, humiliation, and deep sorrow.
What a feud need is leaders. Leaders whose power is one of mutual and prolonged self-respect and other-respect—both. This kind of leader comes out of tragedy, grief, faith in God, and that mysterious quality of interior life we call Soul. This kind of leader has qualities that can reassure followers who are attracted out of their need to follow and their ability to intuit spiritual intellectual, emotional, and mental dignity within and without, in self and in others. Such leaders do not feud or succumb to its lies.
MLK Jr. was such a leader. There is much written about him and we all know it or can look it up. He, like all victims of feuding, in this case north/south, died for his efforts, but is never forgotten. It was his birthday on January 15 and his national holy day Jan 18. I offer you his preaching, based on the prayer of the psalmist who in Psalm 90 recognizes that God’s time is now and yesterday and tomorrow, every day newly acceptable. May we make it so. MLK the preacher still lives on.
Excerpted and paraphrased sermon, delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. at Ebenezer Baptist Church, Atlanta, Georgia, on 5 June 1966. “Guidelines for a Constructive Church”
The acceptable year of the Lord is any year (Amen) when we decide to do right.
The acceptable year of the Lord is any year when we will stop lying and cheating. (Amen, Make it plain)
The acceptable year of the Lord is any year is when we will stop throwing away the precious lives that God has given us. (Make it plain)
The acceptable year of the Lord (Yes) is that year when people the world over will elect governance that will act justly, love mercy, and walk humbly with each other.
The acceptable year of the Lord (Yes) is that year when we will keep our theology abreast with our technology, our morality abreast with our mentality.
The acceptable year of the Lord is that year when we will keep the ends for which we live abreast with the means by which we live. (Yes)
The acceptable year of the Lord is that year (Yes) when all of the leaders of the world will sit down at the conference table (Make it plain) and realize that unless humankind puts an end to war, war will put an end to humankind. (Yes)
The acceptable year of the Lord is when we discover that out of one blood Creator God made all people who dwell on the face of the earth.
The acceptable year of the Lord is God’s year.
