MLK -known by his fruits
Today at church here in Chicago, Melissa Harris-Lacewell was the guest speaker. She used as her text the Galations verses related to being known by your fruits. She also provided a biblical text from Mark that is more troubling about fruit. That's the one in which Jesus is hungry and approaches a fig tree but sees that it has no figs -- and he curses it. I wondered how she was going to weave these two texts together. In the end, she compared progressive churches like UU with the fig tree. We look good and we stand for the right things -- and it would seem, therefore, that we would be bearing good fruit. But she said, with all our rhetoric regarding such things as anti-racism, etc., if folks were not comfortable in our midsts -- then we were not bearing fruit. We are just like the fig tree with the pretty leaves. Something to think about!! Tomorrow at noon, Kweisi Mfume (former president of NAACP) will be the keynote speaker at the MLK Service at Rockefeller Memorial Chapel here on the U. of Chicago campus. Hopefully, my teacher will allow us to leave class early enough to march with other seminary students from Meadville Lombard to the chapel behind our banner. The ML students have encouraged students from all the seminarys to march together behind their schools banners to show the solidarity of those preparing for the ministry. Even though I'm trying to take advantage of these wonderful opportunities while I'm here in Chicago, I sure will miss marching in the parade in Statesboro with our little UUFS group as they take "one more step."