There’s that one Sunday in America, in which millions of
people will hear words of inspiration intended to change their lives. Words
meant to encourage them to strive for something more. Those responsible for
these words wonder, will it work? Will change occur?
I’m not talking about Christmas, Easter or Mother’s Day. I’m
talking about Super Bowl Sunday. Those words of inspiration are from
advertisers, and they are attempting to inspire people to buy something. A few
of the people watching the Super Bowl were in church that morning. You may
wonder, which will be more inspirational, a Sunday morning sermon whose purpose
is to get people to connect with God, or a Sunday evening commercial that’s
purpose is to get someone to buy a new Chrysler?
But hold on, let’s level the playing field. These
advertisers have millions of dollars for a production budget. They’ve got the
latest special effects. They have trained animals, puppies, Clydesdales. They
have Eminem, Morgan Freeman, Clint Eastwood.
The Sunday preacher stands alone.
Plus, the ad guys have a year to work on the Superbowl ads.
Sunday morning sermons come up once a week.
And with Superbowl ads, you’re looking at the very best work
of the very best people in the business. There are plenty of advertisers out
there, making ads everyday, who are working hard and doing their best, but will
never rise to the level of being good enough to be hired to do a Super Bowl ad.
If you’re wondering why I’m talking about football in May,
that’s just an indicator of how far behind I am. But don’t worry, I’m sure I’ll
be all caught up by the time Annual Conference comes around about six months
from now.
Let’s go back a few years. 2018. The before times. There was
an ad break, and suddenly many of us were surprised to hear the familiar voice
of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. preaching about a call to service. It’s
from his sermon entitled The Drum Major Instinct, which is critical of our
inherent desire to be the one out front, in the lead. It went on to be one of
the most discussed ads of the game.
Some of my clergy friends couldn’t tweet or Facebook post
fast enough. The common initial reaction was this: “Are they using Martin
Luther King’s words to sell trucks? That’s wrong.” They were indignant that
this sacred sermon was used for a commercial.
They weren’t the only ones. A couple of days later one
headline read: Martin Luther King's family slams Ram for using his speech to
sell trucks in most-hated Super Bowl ad.
Most people watching the game probably weren’t familiar with
this sermon, given at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta exactly 50 years to
the day preceding the commercial, and also exactly two months before King’s
assassination in Memphis, Tennessee.
In case you missed it, here’s the full script of the
commercial, an unabridged excerpt in King’s voice taken directly from his
sermon:
If you want to be
important—wonderful. If you want to be recognized—wonderful. If you want to be
great—wonderful. But recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your
servant. That's a new definition of greatness.
And this morning, the
thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of greatness, it means
that everybody can be great, because
everybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You
don't have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to
know about Plato and Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's
theory of relativity to serve. You don't have to know the second theory of
thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul
generated by love. And you can be that servant.
Everyone agrees that is a strong message. And Ram trucks,
formerly known as Dodge, spent upwards of $5 million to get it in front of
people, when they could have been talking about their best in class V-8 towing
capability (12,700 pounds!).
I’m pretty sure the person who pitched the idea was well
intended. Had it not kept flashing to pictures of the truck, and had it not
ended with the silent tagline that read “Ram trucks, built to serve,” the
public at large may have thanked Dodge for its generosity of putting out a
Public Service Announcement calling for public service.
Astute scholars of King also picked up on something that
made the whole situation even more ironic. Earlier in the very same sermon,
King warned about consumerism pushing people toward buying a car they can’t
afford. He got specific, saying you shouldn’t buy a car the cost more than half
of your annual salary. Let’s read the part of the speech that didn’t make it
into the commercial.
Now the presence of this instinct explains why we are so
often taken by advertisers. You know, those gentlemen of massive verbal
persuasion. And they have a way of saying things to you that kind of gets you
into buying. In order to be a man of distinction, you must drink this whiskey.
In order to make your neighbors envious, you must drive this type of car. In
order to be lovely to love you must wear this kind of lipstick or this kind of
perfume. And you know, before you know it, you're just buying that stuff.
That's the way the advertisers do it.
I got a letter the other day, and it was a new magazine
coming out. And it opened up, "Dear Dr. King: As you know, you are on many
mailing lists. And you are categorized as highly intelligent, progressive, a
lover of the arts and the sciences, and I know you will want to read what I
have to say." Of course I did. After you said all of that and explained me
so exactly, of course I wanted to read it.
But very seriously, it goes through life; the drum major
instinct is real. And you know what else it causes to happen? It often causes
us to live above our means. It's nothing but the drum major instinct. Do you
ever see people buy cars that they can't even begin to buy in terms of their
income? You've seen people riding around in Cadillacs and Chryslers who don't
earn enough to have a good T-Model Ford. But it feeds a repressed ego.
You know, economists tell us that your automobile should
not cost more than half of your annual income. So if you make an income of five
thousand dollars, your car shouldn't cost more than about 2,500. That's just
good economics. And if it's a family of two, and both members of the family
make ten thousand dollars, they would have to make out with one car. That would
be good economics, although it's often inconvenient. But so often, haven't you
seen people making five thousand dollars a year and driving a car that costs
six thousand? And they wonder why their ends never meet. That's a fact.
So this is about as ironic as you can get – in the same sermon
that a car company used for its Super Bowl ad, King is advising people not to
buy a new car. But this sermon is too good to walk away from, so I’m going to
give you some more.
Now the economists also say that your house shouldn't
cost—if you're buying a house, it shouldn't cost more than twice your income.
That's based on the economy and how you would make ends meet. So, if you have
an income of five thousand dollars, it's kind of difficult in this society. But
say it's a family with an income of ten thousand dollars, the house shouldn't
cost much more than twenty thousand. Well, I've seen folk making ten thousand
dollars, living in a forty- and fifty-thousand-dollar house. And you know they
just barely make it. They get a check every month somewhere, and they owe all
of that out before it comes in. Never have anything to put away for rainy days.
Lots of good stuff here, but I’m going to skip down a bit
further in the sermon, when he’s talking about the danger of exclusivism.
And you know, that can happen with the church; I know
churches get in that bind sometimes. I've been to churches, you know, and they
say, "We have so many doctors, and so many school teachers, and so many
lawyers, and so many businessmen in our church." And that's fine, because
doctors need to go to church, and lawyers, and businessmen, teachers—they ought
to be in church. But they say that—even the preacher sometimes will go all
through that—they say that as if the other people don't count.
And the church is the one place where a doctor ought to
forget that he's a doctor. The church is the one place where a Ph.D. ought to
forget that he's a Ph.D. The church is the one place that the school teacher
ought to forget the degree she has behind her name. The church is the one place
where the lawyer ought to forget that he's a lawyer. And any church that
violates the "whosoever will, let him come" doctrine is a dead, cold
church, and nothing but a little social club with a thin veneer of religiosity.
When the church is true to its nature, it says,
"Whosoever will, let him come." And it does not supposed to satisfy
the perverted uses of the drum major instinct. It's the one place where
everybody should be the same, standing before a common master and savior. And a
recognition grows out of this—that all men are brothers because they are
children of a common father.
The drum major instinct can lead to exclusivism in one's
thinking and can lead one to feel that because he has some training, he's a
little better than that person who doesn't have it. Or because he has some
economic security, that he's a little better than that person who doesn't have
it. And that's the uncontrolled, perverted use of the drum major instinct.
And just a bit further down in his sermon he takes us to
his jail cell, and does a better job at it than the Apostle Paul:
The other day I was saying, I always try to do a little
converting when I'm in jail. And when we were in jail in Birmingham the other
day, the white wardens and all enjoyed coming around the cell to talk about the
race problem. And they were showing us where we were so wrong demonstrating.
And they were showing us where segregation was so right. And they were showing
us where intermarriage was so wrong. So I would get to preaching, and we would
get to talking—calmly, because they wanted to talk about it. And then we got
down one day to the point—that was the second or third day—to talk about where
they lived, and how much they were earning. And when those brothers told me
what they were earning, I said, "Now, you know what? You ought to be
marching with us. You're just as poor as
Negroes." And I said, "You are put in the position of supporting your
oppressor, because through prejudice and blindness, you fail to see that the
same forces that oppress Negroes in American society oppress poor white people.
And all you are living on is the satisfaction of your skin being white, and the
drum major instinct of thinking that you are somebody big because you are
white. And you're so poor you can't send your children to school. You ought to
be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march."
Now that's a fact. That the poor white has been put into
this position, where through blindness and prejudice, he is forced to support
his oppressors. And the only thing he has going for him is the false feeling
that he’s superior because his skin is white—and can't hardly eat and make his
ends meet week in and week out.
Put that in your pickup truck ad. But let’s keep going.
But this is why we are drifting. And we are drifting
there because nations are caught up with the drum major instinct. "I must
be first." "I must be supreme." "Our nation must rule the
world." And I am sad to say that the nation in which we live is the
supreme culprit. And I'm going to continue to say it to America, because I love
this country too much to see the drift that it has taken.
God didn't call America to do what she's doing in the
world now. God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war as the
war in Vietnam. And we are criminals in that war. We’ve committed more war
crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say
it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation.
But God has a way of even putting nations in their place.
The God that I worship has a way of saying, "Don't play with me." He
has a way of saying, as the God of the Old Testament used to say to the
Hebrews, "Don’t play with me, Israel. Don't play with me, Babylon. Be
still and know that I'm God. And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll
rise up and break the backbone of your power." And that can happen to
America. Every now and then I go back and read Gibbons' Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire. And when I come and look at America, I say to myself, the
parallels are frightening. And we have perverted the drum major instinct.
Man, that would have preached in 2018. Ram missed the
best part. But just a little further down in the sermon he gets to the section
that they used for Ram trucks.
And so Jesus gave us a new norm of greatness.
Ok, they cut out
the first sentence, because, come on, you can’t just come right out and say
Jesus on TV. But the
next part is uncut. Let’s read it again.
If you want to be important—wonderful. If you
want to be recognized—wonderful. If you want to be great—wonderful. But
recognize that he who is greatest among you shall be your servant. That's a new
definition of greatness.
And this
morning, the thing that I like about it: by giving that definition of
greatness, it means that everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.
You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your
subject and your verb agree to serve. You don't have to know about Plato and
Aristotle to serve. You don't have to know Einstein's theory of relativity to
serve. You don't have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to
serve. You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love. And you
can be that servant.
Commercial ends.
So that was it, a great call to servanthood. But the next paragraph was even
better. You didn’t get to hear it on TV, so let’s look at it now.
I know a man—and I just want to talk about him a minute,
and maybe you will discover who I'm talking about as I go down the way because
he was a great one. And he just went about serving. He was born in an obscure
village, the child of a poor peasant woman. And then he grew up in still
another obscure village, where he worked as a carpenter until he was thirty
years old. Then for three years, he just got on his feet, and he was an
itinerant preacher. And he went about doing some things. He didn't have much.
He never wrote a book. He never held an office. He never had a family. He never
owned a house. He never went to college. He never visited a big city. He never
went two hundred miles from where he was born. He did none of the usual things
that the world would associate with greatness. He had no credentials but
himself.
Wow. What a sermon. Truly great. It’s too bad Methodists
can’t preach that good.
Now comes the plot twist.
If you’ve ever learned much about King outside of
celebrating in legacy, you know it has been found that he sometimes plagiarized
a bit in some of his college papers, including big ones like his doctoral
dissertation. And it also comes up in his sermons. King’s Drum Major
Instinct sermon was largely based upon a homily called… I’ll give you one
guess… The Drum Major Instinct. It was by J. Wallace Hamilton, an old
white guy, and a Methodist. He preached it first in 1949. Many of his sermons
were published in books. Hamilton was famous enough to be talked about in
seminaries, but not famous enough to have a page on Wikipedia.
So maybe you’re saying, ok he used some of the same
metaphors, but that’s not really stealing, right. Well, remember the magazine letter
story that I shared a bit ago? Here’s Hamilton’s version:
I received a letter from the subscription manager of a
newly launched magazine. He started off on what he called a perfectly honest
note: “As you undoubtedly know,” he said in the first paragraph, “Your name is
on several mailing lists in which you are classified as ‘highly literate,
progressive, interested in world affairs, good literature and science.’
Therefore I believe you will be interested in what I have to say.” Of course I
was interested since he had described me so exactly.
Ouch. Ok, that’s not just using the same theme.
But now I had an in. I could write about the whole Super
Bowl commercial fiasco in the Methodist magazine because I now had a Methodist
angle on it. And I could say to my upset Methodist friends, “Hey relax. Don’t
worry about the sacred words of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King being used for
a commercial purpose, because they weren’t really his words anyway. He stole
them from a Methodist.”
I quickly dismissed that idea. I don’t think anyone was
going to be too well served by me coming out with a piece in the magazine in
black history month talking about King being a plagiarist. The wrong kind of
people would applaud me for writing that story. I don’t need those kind of
fans.
King’s sermon follows Hamilton’s most closely in the
beginning, by the end it becomes pure King. One piece that I read on this topic
noted that it could be argued that preachers swapping generic stories to
illustrate a point is a tradition in Baptist rhetorical style. I would argue
that’s it’s not just Baptist.
One of my favorite preachers is recently retired Rev. Fred
Leist. He works hard on his sermons. They are well researched. You know they
are well researched because, better than anyone that I know, Fred does a great
job of attributing his sources. That’s challenging to do a sermon. Because Fred
doesn’t just say, J. Wallace Hamilton once said, because he knows his audience
doesn’t know who that is. He would say, J. Wallace Hamilton, a Methodist elder
in Florida who preached from the 1930s through 1960s, said in his homily
entitled The Drum Major Instinct…”
Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King didn’t do that. I wouldn’t have
worked well with his delivery. This is hard for me to say because I’m a writer,
not a talker, but when I read King’s sermons I may nod in agreement and think,
“hmm… good point.” But when I hear actual audio of the same sermons, I get
chills. I’m moved to tears. His delivery was phenomenal. It gave his words
power, so much so that it made him dangerous to people that opposed his words,
which is why he was killed. I’m not saying J Wallace Hamilton was a bad
preacher, but he preached the same words and got to live to be a bout 70, and
King didn’t make it to 40.
Out of respect for J. Wallace Hamilton, Rev. Dr. Martin
Luther King and all great preachers, I suppose I should have three points and a
conclusion. So what are the points?
- Preachers – Gain inspiration from Super Bowl
ads, maybe even model a sermon after one (but not too closely), but don’t
compare your message to them too harshly – they have a lot resource.
- Don’t be too hard on people - I feel for the Ram
truck ad guy who chose the King speech for commercial. I think he thought he
was doing the right thing, and thought he’d be praised for it. To have the
immediate reaction go off the rails must have hurt,
- Realize that there’s a lot of good stuff out
there that has already been written. We’ve had the written word for something
like 5,000 years. Most topics have been covered by now. If you can
contextualize something in a powerful way, good for you.
Shall we pray?
Gracious good, please give us wisdom as we go about our
work, so that the impact of our actions may stay inline with the purpose of
which we intend them. And help us follow the teachings of your son, as he
called us to be servant leaders. Amen.
