Though the pipe organ welcomes us into traditional Presbyterian churches, the Hammond B3 organ is a Black church staple. As our organist turns ours on and it begins to warm up, a familiar scent of audio tubes, circuit boards and preamps arises.
I am catapulted back to my childhood, and the many afternoons lying on the floor in front of our combination TV, turntable and eight-track player — and the sound of David Hood’s extraordinary bass-line introduction to the Staple Singers’ “I’ll Take You There.” Mavis Staples invited us to a place far better than the post-Vietnam, Watergate-scandal-riddled America of the day. A better place than the America that postured as the home of the brave, but was systematically driving Black people into poverty and treating women like another species. A place where there were “no smiling faces lying to the races”.
It strikes me as a Matthew 25 kind of place. Each year, as we look at the cornucopia of newly released books to help us fully embrace our church’s vision of engaging the unresolved issues of racism and poverty, I wonder how often we dial back and take a deeper look at some of the works that started it all?
The same world that the Staples Singers sang about had entered the imagination of another young man five years earlier. In both the title and text of his seminal work “Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?” Martin Luther King Jr. posed a question that continues to haunt us over 50 years later.
From a rented Jamaican hideaway in 1967, King reflected on a country attempting to evolve from underaddressed evil. He first shares how even the oppressed were becoming the thing they hated most. He proclaims that we should all understand the frustrations of a new Black Power movement that is disappointed in the swiftness of the nonviolent civil rights movement. Before we choose to be critical, King outlines for us the importance of understanding people suffocating under a blanket of nihilism in a system that constantly reminded them that they would never win. King asked his readers to consider the epic collision of immoral power with powerless morality as the major crisis of day. So it was in 1967; so it is still in 2021.
King then turns his readers to deep consideration of American involvement in the Vietnam War as a selfish endeavor. A disproportionate number of Black men were being sent and killed when the same Black men were still fighting for justice and equal treatment here at home. Likewise, he was concerned that, with all of our technological advancement and intellectual capacity, poverty had not been addressed. King calls for a war on poverty, and disparages a nation that would consider itself great while first caring for “the least of these.”
King ultimately proposes solutions to the problem of poverty that are based deeply in Walter Rauschenbusch’s theology of a social gospel. He lays the responsibility squarely on the shoulders of the church. According to King, solutions should include church-wide boycotts of businesses that don’t demonstrate fair employment and investment in impoverished communities.
As he closes, King still questions America’s ability to avoid falling into an abyss of chaos. He addresses his own fear that unaddressed racism would corrode our very foundation.
Yet, he hopes that recognition of our commonalities, our common blood and especially our common suffering can be balanced with our common sharing of the joys in the “World House” that we have inherited.
With a faith in humanity that is undefeatable, like the Staples Singers, King offers us an invitation to a better tomorrow. A tomorrow of community over chaos. A community shaped by Matthew 25; not simply as a slogan of the denomination, but the very directive of Jesus himself.
CARLTON JOHNSON serves as the coordinator for Vital Congregations for the PC(USA). He and his wife Cara split their time between Atlanta and Louisville.
