Reconciliation for America : The Lion and the Lamb, the Powerful and the Poor

At an alarming rate our nation is tearing at the seams, divided by class, sub-divided by race and region. Beverly Hills and Watts--one city, a tale of two worlds. One of manicured lawns, the other coughing and wheezing in the dust. Two worlds in one city--division bred not by character nor brains nor effort but by systems and tracks. This division occurs at an astronomical financial cost and immeasurable human cost.

Tonight, I see us in splendor in celebration, reflecting in our dress and manner the gifts, the privileges that are uniquely ours. Earlier today I visited Martin Luther King Jr. Hospital (where) 10% to 20% of the babies are born underweight, premature or addicted to drugs. That’s 750 to 1,500 babies a year in one hospital in this city. Babies deprived of their innocence or options in the womb. A number of the babies are the second of the same mother. Prenatal care would be less than $1,000 for nine months. Low-birth weight, addicted babies--$1,700 to $2,000 a day. I held one baby in my arms today, brain damaged, already in the hospital several months at a cost of more than $250,000. An epidemic of mothers checking in under false names and addresses, checking out leaving babies abandoned--a generation of 28-year-old grandmothers.

We see a growing sub-class, underclass. For one world, the stratosphere--no limits to heights. For others, no limits to depths--a bottomless pit, unfathomable depths of alienation and despair. The daily death toll from D.C. to Los Angeles, from our political to our entertainment capital, from the makers of laws in D.C. to the transmitters of culture in Los Angeles, we watch the daily death toll as a part of our evening news, our daily menu. We’ve adjusted. Audacious killers with easy access to AK-47s and Uzis, (semi)automatic weapons, who kill our children without shame or remorse.

Tonight we are called to reunion. After eight Reagan years, 10 million more working poor people, having made $3.35 an hour for 10 years, which is now worth $2.51 an hour. Most of the poor are not black and brown as projected in the media. Of the 40 million poor, 29 million are white. The poor are mostly white, female and young. But whether white, black or brown, hunger hurts. When a baby cries out at midnight after having gone to bed supperless, it doesn’t cry race, sex or religion; it cries in pain. Somebody must hear the crying babies.

As we seek to build a coalition in our country between our communities to overcome these worlds of division and growing insensitivity, anxiety and fear and hatred which turns to violence, we are reminded in Scripture that the peace that we seek requires that the lions and lambs--the extremes in life’s forest--find common ground. The members of both worlds, Watts and Beverly Hills, the coalition of the lion and the lamb is evidence (that each) is overcoming fear of each other. The lion and the lamb--the extremes in life’s forest--the haves and have nots, have been separated by a history of intimidation and violence.

Lions--big, strong, arrogant, confident, greedy--eat lambs. Lambs by instinct and experience avoid lions. But the wisdom writers in the Bible suggests that in spite of these different worlds, lions and lambs must come together in coalition to have a real day of peace. Palestinians and Israelis, African-Americans and whites, Jews and Gentiles, Arabs and Asians--we are all Americans. We are all God’s people. We are all beneficiaries of the real genius of the American experiment. Of many, we are one. We are the quilt with many patches and pieces bound by common thread. It makes us a great nation.

What conditions forge a coalition between lions and lambs? It’s simply a quest for common survival. What lions and lambs know by instinct, we should know by instinct, intelligence and a sense of history. Neither lion nor lamb wants acid rain on their backs. Neither lion nor lamb wants nuclear fallout. Neither lion nor lamb want the ozone layer altered or the forests on fire, nor dioxin in the earth, nor contaminated water, nor poison air.

We face the same challenges: drugs in schools. I speak to 15,000 to 20,000 children every day between September and May. In suburbs or inner-city, public schools or private academies, I say: If you know someone in your age group who is dead because of drugs, please stand. About 25% of the students always stand. If someone in your age group is in jail because of drugs, please stand. About half of them always stand. If you know someone in your school who has tried drugs, please stand. About 90% of them always stand. And then I ask if you know someone in your age group who has contemplated suicide, about 60% of them always stand. These are our children. In the hospitals, they lie abandoned. They are our children. The murder count in Washington, D.C., is more than the days in the year. These are our children.

Our generation must do more than reunite. It must build. It must rebuild America and make the world more secure. We have a harder thing to do than embrace. We must build. The alternative to dope is hope. We defied the laws of nature, that’s why we have an abandoned urban and rural America. When honey bees get their nectar from the flowers, they don’t just fly away. There are no honey bees with master’s degrees or law degrees or honey bee judges. There are no honey bee slum hives. Honey bees get their nectar from the flower but then they obey the law. They drop pollen where they pick up nectar because they honor the law of regeneration. The honey bee knows by buzz or instinct if it does not drop pollen where it picks up nectar, the flower will die. And when the honey bee flies back and the flower is dead, the honey bee will die. It honors the law. We have slums in America tonight because we are not honoring the law.

We have a harder challenge than to embrace. We have to think and to work. Union is not enough. We must think. We have the strength if we have the will. End the slums! We are the instruments of peace.

We must not let cynicism outdistance our hope and our will to peace. Peace is risky. It’s worth the risk. War is guaranteed death. We must challenge the cynics to get behind us. The cynics’ thinking is tired. Their spirit is tired. Their ideas are tired. Enough hatred and fear and violence. Send them behind us. Give peace a chance.