Over the last eighteen months have you felt like all things sane have taken a turn for the worse? What with a politicized medical pandemic, a rise in racial hostility, a bitter division within families, churches, neighborhoods, relationships, and ever other group in which people are involved it seems that life has taken a devastating blow to all things normal, if things have ever been normal.
The condition of our world makes me think of something the humorist, Will Rogers, once said, “If you find yourself in a hole quit digging.” Sadly, not too many people these days seem to know how to “quit digging.” In a world where everybody is right and everybody else is wrong, it’s hard to find a way through the maze.
Maybe it takes a plague to awaken us to a true self-realization. Maybe there are broken issues deep down inside each of us that stay hidden until they are forced to the surface. Maybe we are not as civilized as we would like to think we are. Maybe racism is a very real thing. Maybe everyone of us needs a reality check. Maybe all of us need to take a class on ‘How To Live Together On This Planet.” Truthfully, speaking the right words without the internal moral foundation to live out those “right words” is an exercise in futility. It was Martin Luther King, Jr. who said, “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”
Speaking of a moral foundation, Martin Luther King, Jr. said, “ If there is to be peace on earth and good will toward men, we must finally believe in the ultimate morality of the universe, and believe that all reality hinges on moral foundations.” If my heart isn’t right I certainly can’t fix your heart if it needs fixing. If my culture is broken, and I’m not dealing with the brokenness in my own heart, I really have nothing to contribute to the healing of my culture.
The problem goes deeper that self, however. Robert Kennedy said something that resonates in my heart concerning things like this. On the morning after Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered, Kennedy gave a speech at The Cleveland City Club, in Cleveland, Ohio. It was not the speech he had intended to make. In dealing with the murder of Dr. King, Kennedy spoke of the violence in the world and said,
And this too afflicts us all. For when you teach a man to hate and to fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies that he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your home or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies–to be met not with cooperation but with conquest, to be subjugated and to be mastered.
In the opening words of his speech Kennedy said,
It’s not the concern of any one race. The victims of the violence are black and white, rich and poor, young and old, famous and unknown. They are, most important of all, human beings whom other human beings loved and needed. No one–no matter where he lives or what he does–can be certain whom next will suffer from some senseless act of bloodshed. And yet it goes on and on and on in this country of ours.
In his speech, Kennedy added these potent words: “Some look for scapegoats; others look for conspiracies. But this much is clear: violence breeds violence; repression breeds retaliation; and only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our souls."
“Only a cleansing of our whole society can remove this sickness from our souls.” This a probing and powerful admission. Something is wrong in society. Could it be that societies are simply the macro of the micro? Enough human hearts gone bad will, eventually, work themselves into the whole.
Our culture is not well, and we all know it. We need a “cleansing” of some kind. We are in a hole, and we had better stop digging. And perhaps, in the words of Jesus, we all need to take the log out of our own eyes before we seek to take the speck out of somebody else’s eye.
The Titanic is sinking and it is no time to rearrange the furniture.
