“Why We Can't Wait: The Legacy and Promise of Interfaith Leadership”
Sermon—Sunday, Jan. 24th, Memorial Church
gurur brahmā gurur viṣ ṇ uḥ
gurur devo maheśvaraḥ
guruḥ sākṣ āt paraṁ brahma
tasmai śrī gurave namaḥ
I bow down to my Teacher, the embodiment of Truth, and to all those gathered here
today.
Sometimes I wonder how we dare invoke the name of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther
King, Jr. I still tremble when I hear his sermons, the fervor of the Hebrew prophets
rippling through his words. King remains perhaps the greatest moral witness in
American history. He stood at the vanguard of a nonviolent revolution against white
supremacy (both overt and covert), against the U.S. military-industrial complex, and
against systemic capitalist exploitation of the poor. He was nourished by the spiritual
force of a people who found the strength to sing, even when “strange fruit was hanging
from the poplar trees.” Their movement has etched itself in the hearts of those of us who
still believe in what Cornel West calls “this precious democratic experiment.” From the
Montgomery Bus Boycott to Beyond Vietnam, King demonstrated a radical commitment
to justice, liberation, and fellow-suffering love. But there is another narrative which
strings together these two poles of his activist life: the narrative of interfaith leadership.
And that's the theme of my reflection today: the legacy of Dr. King as an interfaith
leader, and the urgency of recapturing that story.
As a young, twenty year-old seminary student in Pennsylvania, like many of us
still negotiating his own identity, King would hear a great Christian preacher, Mordecai
Johnson, give a lecture one night on Christian pacifism. He listened to Dr. Johnson
describe his trip to India, where he had found a man who embodied the ethic of
Christian love in the 20th century—a Hindu named Mahatma Gandhi. Now King's
reaction to this encounter with religious diversity was seminal to his future leadership.
He recognized that there was this love in Gandhi's Hinduism which resonated deeply
with a love in his own Christian faith. And when he heard that this love was used not
only to unite a nation, but even to redeem the oppressor, King knew he had received a
blessing from the most unexpected of places. He saw in Gandhi's satyagraha movement
a phenomenon of religious diversity coming together in a struggle for the freedom of all
people. This ethic would permeate his activist life. In 1965, he marched in Selma,
Alabama, with the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. He supported the efforts of the
United Farm Workers here in California, led by the Catholic activist Cesar Chavez. He
disagreed with but nonetheless admired the work of the brilliant Malcolm X, a Muslim
minister. And finally, he corresponded with the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who
convinced King that the fight for civil rights was inseparable from the fight to end the
unjust war in Vietnam.
Why is this narrative so forgotten, yet so central to our lives? Too often, in popular
media and political culture, the dominant image of strong religious affiliations in close
proximity is one of violence and mutual incomprehensibility. Moreover, the face of
religious extremism is one of highly motivated young people taking action. But while
religious diversity is a fact, the direction it will take—as King's story shows us—
depends on specific leaders. And the leaders who have the loudest voice right now are
clear on which side of the faith line they stand on. It's not just a side which pits different
religious groups against each other, or opposes religion and secularism, but a side which
says only my group dominates, and others suffocate. Those voices are clearly a minority.
But their message of an inevitable and endless cosmic clash looms heavy overhead,
because we have failed to provide a more compelling alternative. Under vague liberal
notions of tolerance, our institutions and public spheres maintain a fragile indifference to
engaging young people's diverse religious identities. We can no longer afford this
expensive façade of neutrality. “There comes a time,” King would thunder, “when
silence is betrayal.”
The interfaith youth movement—of which Stanford is a growing part—is about
removing that silence. We speak with our hearts and hands; in service and dialogue, in
activism and reflection. Today's clothing drive is a symbolic expression of our vision: a
world where diverse religious communities engage in common action for the common
good, witnessing and learning of each others' commitment to serving others; a world
where young people are at the forefront of building bridges instead of bubbles, or
barriers, or bombs; and most importantly, a world where interfaith cooperation is not an
anomaly, but a social norm. In other words, we want to change the headline from
“Religious Clash Erupts Again in Nigeria” to “Interfaith Cooperation Breaks Out Again
in Nigeria, as young Christians and Muslims work to eradicate malaria in their
communities.” Are we reaching too high, or have our hands been in our pockets all this
time?
The interreligious encounter is woven into my spirit. It has been with me since I
first set foot on the Stanford campus five years ago, in my senior year of high school. I
came to this very church, to hear His Holiness the Dalai Lama speak about nonviolence
and compassion. In my freshman and sophomore years, I would spend long hours alone
in these pews, Thomas Merton in one hand and Rumi in the other. As a junior, I was
blessed to be a part of the Fellowship for Religious Encounter, where I made so many
wonderful friends, who took their tradition as seriously as I did my own. And then I met
a young Indian-American Muslim, Dr. Eboo Patel, who opened to me a different
interfaith narrative: the one of Dorothy Day and Badshah Khan, of Howard Thurman
and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. The following words from Rabbi Heschel encapsulate that
shift: “Early in my life, my great love was for learning, studying. And the place where I
preferred to live was my study and books and writing and thinking. I've learned from the
prophets that I have to be involved in the affairs of man, in the affairs of suffering man.”
Through all of these encounters, what has stood out to me is how they have
strengthened and enriched my own Hindu identity. I grew up very involved in my
religious community, with a deep knowledge base of my tradition: its liturgy, music,
philosophy, and ritual. Now I know that I was the preacher's kid—or in my case, the
priest's kid—which probably explains why I'm up here today. But that identity didn't
take root in me until I came here, and met those completely different from me. To me,
the very measure of that identity is the extent to which I can connect with the suffering
of a people beyond my borders, and outside my tribe. So when extremists attack others
on the basis of their identity—like they may do outside Hillel this upcoming Friday—
my faith calls me to stand up, and respond to hate with solidarity and love.
Faith was, in the final analysis, at the heart of King's identity. He was
unapologetic about his inspiration from Jesus Christ, from the prophets of Israel, and as
a Southern Baptist preacher. Yet it was precisely this commitment that urged him to
build bridges of cooperation across racial, economic, and religious lines. King knew that
building such bridges was never an equal-opportunity affair. But he also understood that
a painful embrace of our tortured histories was necessary; and what I'd like to close with
is that same invitation: that we, as James Baldwin says in The Fire Next Time, “we...the
relatively conscious...must like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the
others.”
May His grace and blessings flow through us to the world around us. Thank you.