The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described the goal of those working for justice as “beloved community.” While we can fairly easily think about “community” as something we can accomplish, but thinking of “belovedness” as an accomplishment doesn’t come so easily. Today we explore combining community with belovedness as a social justice goal and as spiritual practice.
Sermon audio:
Sermon video:
Doing Beloved Community
Rev. Joe Cleveland
January 14, 2024
We have a problem with love.
Consider for a moment for yourself how that is a true thing to say. “We have a problem with love.”
When I told my wife that the first line of my sermon was going to be “we have a problem with love,” she said, “Yes, we think it’s all about chocolate hearts. Not that there’s anything wrong with chocolate hearts, but love is not all about chocolate hearts.”
We have a problem with love. We have lots of problems with love. We are too comfortable with “love” meaning almost anything and thus almost nothing at all. We are too comfortable understanding “love” as a feeling. And, thinking this weekend as we are of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we are too comfortable thinking of “beloved community” as simple sentimentalism.
We use the word “love” in so many ways, and I wonder if it isn’t because we are a little intimidated by what love can mean. The writer bell hooks observed that
Undoubtedly, many of us are more comfortable with the notion that love can mean anything to anybody precisely because when we define it with precision and clarity it brings us face to face with our lacks—with terrible alienation.
hooks believes that “an overwhelming majority of us come from dysfunctional families,” families where one is shamed and abused and at the same time told that one is loved. hooks says that she grew up in a family “in which aggressive shaming and verbal humiliation coexisted with lots of affection and care . . .” Her family experience was not all bad. As dysfunctional as it was, it was “also a setting in which affection, delight, and care [were] present.”
We often think of love as the experience of affection or satisfaction or comfort. hooks notes that “affection is only one ingredient of love. To truly love,” she says, “we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust, as well as honest and open communication.” hooks was dissatisfied by the definitions and the lack of definitions she could find for “love” until she read the definition that M. Scott Peck gives it in his book The Road Less Traveled. Peck defines love as “the will to extend oneself for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” hooks admits that “Applying Peck’s definition of love to my childhood experience in my household of origin, I could not honestly describe it as loving.” hooks suspects that “For most folks it is just too threatening to embrace a definition of love that would no longer enable us to see love as present in our families.”
Maybe Peck’s definition feels like a tall order. However we might pshaw at ‘spiritual growth,’ nurturing that growth in oneself or in another seems like a good thing. It’s certainly something that members of a religious community should spend some time doing. But I don’t find this definition of love to be sufficient. It feels a bit too much about just individuals.
Maybe that’s not a problem. Love is certainly a good thing to have present in the relationships of individuals with one another. But something tells me, maybe it’s my intuition that tells me, love is bigger than that.
When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., tells the story of how he arrived at his commitment to nonviolence, he talks about various philosophers and theologians that he read. By the time he went to college, King was already interested in social change and civil rights. He grew up in the Jim Crow South, after all, and had more than enough experience to tell him that things needed to change. When he got to college, and as he went through his seminary studies and worked toward a doctoral degree, he was looking for a method that might effectively make the kind of change he could feel was necessary. He was in school and an intellectual and he read a lot, but without much satisfaction. At one point in the early 1950’s, he said “I had almost despaired of the power of love to solve social problems.” [“Pilgrimage”] And then, after hearing a sermon by the president of Howard University, Dr. Mordecai Johnson, King was introduced to the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. King says,
Like most people, I had heard of Gandhi, but I had never studied him seriously. As I read I became deeply fascinated by his campaigns of nonviolent resistance. I was particularly moved by the Salt March to the Sea and his numerous fasts. The whole concept of “Satyagraha” (Satya is truth which equals love, and agraha is force; “Satyagraha,” therefore, means truth-force or love-force) was profoundly significant to me. As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time its potency in the area of social reform. Prior to reading Gandhi, I had about concluded that the ethics of Jesus were only effective in individual relationships. The “turn the other cheek” philosophy and the “love your enemies” philosophy were only valid, I felt, when individuals were in conflict with other individuals; when racial groups and nations were in conflict a more realistic approach seemed necessary. But after reading Gandhi, I saw how utterly mistaken I was.
Gandhi was probably the first person in history to lift the love ethic of Jesus above mere interaction between individuals to a powerful and effective social force on a large scale. Love for Gandhi was a potent instrument for social and collective transformation. It was in this Gandhian emphasis on love and nonviolence that I discovered the method for social reform that I had been seeking . . . [Stride]
When love is active, potent, in this way, a force for not just individual but social change, love leaves all sentimentality behind. King asserts that
“The meaning of love is not to be confused with some sentimental outpouring. Love is something much deeper than emotional bosh.” [“Loving”]
I hadn’t run across the word before, so I looked up bosh. It means something regarded as absurd, nonsense. I’m going to try to use bosh in a sentence this week, but not in reference to love. To make clear how he defines love, King turns to the Bible and the fact that the Greek that the Bible is written uses three different words that get translated as ‘love,’ but these three types of love are very different. The kind King is interested in is agape, which he defines as “understanding, redeeming goodwill for all []. It is an overflowing love which is purely spontaneous, unmotivated, groundless, and creative. It is not set in motion by any quality or function of its object. It is the love of God operating in the human heart.” Agape is nonjudgmental. Agape is “an entirely ‘neighbor-regarding concern for others,’ which discovers the neighbor in every [one] it meets.” (Ibid.) King really pushes this nonjudgmental concern for others hard. The word King uses to describe agape is “disinterested.” For example:
If one loves an individual merely on account of [their] friendliness, [one] loves [them] for the sake of the benefits to be gained from the friendship, rather than for the friend’s own sake. Consequently, the best way to assure oneself that love is disinterested is to have love for the enemy-neighbor from whom you can expect no good in return, but only hostility and persecution. [Stride]
In a sense, King is saying that if you want to know if you are really practicing love, then check in on yourself and see if you are just loving people who you feel affection for or who are friendly to you. That’s not enough. Are you loving your enemies? That is really loving.
And that is really difficult. And maybe a bit further than I can reach in today’s sermon because you want this sermon to end soon. So do I. So I’ll skip to where King argues that
In the final analysis, agape means a recognition of the fact that all life is interrelated. All humanity is involved in a single process, and all [people] are [family]. To the degree that I harm my [sister], no matter what [she] is doing to me, to that extent I am harming myself. [Stride]
We can resist the notion of beloved community because we know that as much as you get told to like someone, it is not going to happen. Feelings cannot be compelled. I will never love olives or cantaloupe. It’s not going to happen. But when we argue this, we are trying to box love into sentimentality and bosh-ness. Belovedness isn’t about a feeling. It’s about how we treat one another. In so many ways, our world and so many of our communities are broken. And King’s call to us is to love. King tells us
Love, agape, is the only cement that can hold this broken community together. When I am commanded to love, I am commanded to restore community, to resist injustice, and to meet the needs of my [neighbors]. [Stride]
And agape, love, meets neighbors everywhere.
It isn’t that we have communities and we are being asked to love them. That’s not how belovedness happens. I’m very fond of this congregation, and I have a great affection for you all, but that isn’t belovedness. Belovedness is about the transformation of ourselves and society.
It’s important to also remember that love and achieving belovedness isn’t just about other people. It’s about a change in ourselves, too. I’m really glad that King didn’t preach about agape community and instead talked about beloved community. Because that word can shape how we treat ourselves, too. We treat others as beloved, and we also are to treat ourselves as beloved. We are interrelated. That’s what agape and belovedness teach us. As King’s teacher Howard Thurman says, “We become persons by an other-than-self reference which is other persons. We become human in a human situation.” The name for a human situation is beloved community. And the way there is through nonviolence and love.
Martin Luther King gets the last word:
And I say to you, I have also decided to stick to love. For I know that love is ultimately the only answer to [humankind’s] problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love, I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. And I have seen too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love.
So may it be for all of us.
Resources
- bell hooks. All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow and Co., 2018 (2000). Kobo ebook.
- Martin Luther King, Jr. “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence.” A Gift of Love. Beacon Press, 2012 (1963). Kobo ebook
- Martin Luther King, Jr. Stride Toward Freedom. Beacon Press, 2010 (1958). Kobo ebook.
- Martin Luther King, Jr. “Loving Your Enemies.” A Gift of Love. Beacon Press, 2012 (1963).
- Martin Luther King, Jr. “Where Do We Go from Here?” The Essential Martin Luther King, Jr. Edited and with a foreword by Clayborne Carson. Beacon Press, 2013. Kobo ebook.
- Howard Thurman. The Luminous Darkness. Friends United Press, 1989 (1965).
Topics: Beloved Community, Love