A call to Public Service

By Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr.
RainbowPUSH Coalition
Saturday, September 23, 2006
773-731-4306



Last week, I discussed how Pharoah told Aaron to deliver the message to his people that they were to make bricks without straw. Friends, our own Pharoah here in the City of Chicago tried to quietly rear his ugly head this week. And so, before I get into the substance of my remarks, I want to talk a little bit about the difference between power and service, in the context of elected officials. You see, those who are in public life solely for power are fearful of losing that power, and will stop at nothing to prevent other leaders from emerging. Those who are in public life to serve will stop at nothing to make sure that the will of the people is done. And so, this week, some people who are concerned only with power, tried to make a few power plays. You see, they are afraid of others emerging, who might be democratically elected BY THE PEOPLE to assume their power.



A lawyer friend of mine, last week, lost several prominent and important clients who have close ties to the city, because he has worked for me.



One of my best friends, a man who works every day on behalf of Chicago's children was suspended from his job for 5 days this week.



Another of my closest friends, who has a young family to support, received at his business this week an anonymous letter saying that if he wanted to stay in business he'd give up his political desire to become an Alderman.



And finally, yesterday morning, at my Exploratory Committee office, we arrived to find our cable and internet service cut. Comcast Cable came to our office and told us that they had taken the lines down on the orders of the City's Bureau of Electricity. The Bureau of Electricity gave them ten days to take the lines out of our building under threat of a fine for each day after ten that they were still up. The Bureau said they were replacing all the electric poles in the neighborhood. But none of that work has begun. And no other cable lines have been ordered taken down. Just the ones to my office. Last week we talked about making bricks without straw. This week were are told to go forth, send an email with no internet connection.



A CALL TO PUBLIC SERVICE

John F. Kennedy, our late President, said in his inaugural address in 1961, "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." Not everyone can be President. Today I want to paraphrase President Kennedy's statement to say, "Ask not what Chicago can do for you. Ask what you can do for Chicago."



In our efforts to engage in public service, our means must be as consistent with our ends as is humanly possible. Many people enter public service for the wrong reasons. Some people enter public service for the wrong reasons.



o I asked one candidate and he said - It's his time and "To get mine." I promptly corrected him and said that those of us who genuinely enter public service are making a sacrifice. That it is a high calling and a form of ministry.

o I asked another candidate who sought my endorsement in a race why they wanted to be in public service and the response was, "Because we need more Christians in elected office." I quickly responded, "We need more Jews, Muslims, and anyone who is committed to upholding the Constitution and providing equal protection under the law for all Americans."

o I asked another candidate why they wanted to be in public office and they said they believed that with faith and belief in the people a change was possible and that God through us had the power to work great miracles through human history. This person is the kind of person I believe belongs in public service.



I believe people have the power to change. In Acts, Saul of Tarsus - who plotted against and persecuted Christians - was approaching Damascus when a light from heaven suddenly fell around him. He was knocked to the ground and heard a voice say, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" What was the result of his traumatic experience? He changed! He had an epiphany on the road to Damascus. It's hard to imagine that an old person can become a new person, but Saul of Tarsus was born again and became Paul the Apostle.



When Moses was an infant, his mother hid him in a basket and put him in the water to keep him from being killed by Pharaoh. But Pharaoh's daughter found Moses and raised him in Pharaoh's court. But Moses saw how his people were treated in slavery, and even though he was afraid of God, was slow of speech and not eloquent, he soon - with God's help - gained enough courage to become a liberator of the Jewish people and later delivered to the world the Ten Commandments.



A little baby from Omaha, Nebraska named Malcolm Little - later known as Detroit Red, then El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz - became a hoodlum and street hustler dealing in drugs, gambling, racketeering and robbery in Boston. Arrested for burgulary in 1946 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, he converted to Islam, taught himself by reading extensively, and became a world class debater while in prison. As Malcolm X, he eventually became a world-renowned African American/Pan-Africanist and human rights activist. One person, Malcolm Little, became several different people, but was converted to become a very different person.



A friend of mine, Don Rose, told me that Harold Washington was one person when he was in Congress, but became a different person as a candidate for Mayor, and became a different person still when he was Mayor. It's hard to imagine one person becoming three different people in such a short period of time - but it apparently happened with Harold Washington.



Like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., I can say that at the center of my faith is the conviction that in the universe there is a God of power who is able to do abundant things in nature and in history. I too believe in a God who is able to beat back gigantic waves of opposition and to bring low prodigious mountains of evil. For many African Americans, and other Americans, that is a belief born of experience and a faith tested by time.



In the Bible, the greatest sin was idolatry -- putting something or someone, a false god, above the one true God. So there have always been attempts to substitute man-centered, thing-centered or nature-centered gods above the one true God. There is nothing new under the sun in the modern age about that. In the period of the Renaissance, and subsequently in the Age of Reason, the talented gifts of artistic expression and intellectual reasoning of men was elevated to the stature of God. In the industrial age, the necessity of God was questioned. During the scientific revolution, a belief in the inevitability of progress became the God-substitute.



In modern times, the conversion of the economic theories of Karl Marx and Adam Smith into undemocratic economic determinist intellectual and political movements of the left and the right do not suggest that "God is able," but that men and women through the "forces of history" or "market forces" are able. But "man is not able to save himself or the world. Unless he is guided by God's spirit, his new-found scientific power will become a devastating Frankenstein monster that will bring to ashes his earthly life." (FN-8, Strength To Love, p. 108)



In his book Strength to Love, in a sermon entitled "The answer to a perplexing question," Dr. King says that "human life through the centuries has been characterized by man's persistent efforts to remove evil from the earth." (FN-9) STL, p. 127 In effect, Dr. King is also posing the question of "religion and politics." He is asking, "Is the answer to the human family's quest to build a more perfect Union and a more perfect world in 'human effort' or in 'letting God do it'? Is human ingenuity or divine goodwill the path to international peace, social and economic justice? It is a question that many religionists and non-religionists wrestle with daily.



King suggests that sincere and dedicated human effort in the areas of reason, science, invention, agriculture, education, technology, industry and all humanitarian efforts to eliminate the social evils in the world today must be respected, encouraged and continue. But he also warns that unless we recognize our mortal nature, our human limitations and the presence of sin in the world we are self-deluded and doomed to failure. Through my own observations of people involved in the Civil Rights Movement, I have observed that such human failure and frustration can turn to bitterness, disillusionment and despair, and even manifest itself in violence against ourselves, our families, neighbors or society.



Dr. King wrote, "The second idea for removing evil from the world stipulates that if man waits submissively upon the Lord, in his own good time God alone will redeem the world." (FN-10) STL, p. 130 Here he contrasts the difference between the overly optimistic Renaissance and the overly pessimistic Protestant Reformation with regard to human nature. The Renaissance saw our capacity for good and overlooked our capacity for evil. The Reformation saw our capacity for evil and overlooked our capacity for good, and turned both God and man into absolutes. God was absolutely sovereign with man having no freedom, and man was absolutely helpless and could make no difference in the world.



The over emphasis on human sin and evil led people to give up on this world and instead to concentrate on a Christian religion that was other-worldly and that left the troubles of this world behind -- concentrating almost exclusively on getting to heaven after this life, or a "pie in the sky by and by" religion.



This kind of religion has no application of religion to politics. This pessimistic view of religion is other-worldly oriented or, in a modified form, concentrates only on meeting the physical or emotional needs of an affected individual. It seldom, if ever, comes to grips with working to eliminate the underlying systemic social, economic, legal or political causes that created the individual human need in the first place.



Prayer, in this kind of religion, becomes a substitute for effort and makes a mockery of work. This limited-hope religion is concerned only with the issues of an after-life, not with the issues of life. This false and heretical Christianity -- Christian heretics were not persons who did not tell the truth, but persons who did not tell the whole truth -- creates too rigid a wall of separation between the sacred and the secular, between the human and the divine, between the mortal and the immortal, and between the religious and the political. Dr. King put it this way:



"We must pray earnestly for peace, but we must also work vigorously for disarmament and the suspension of weapon testing. We must use our minds as rigorously to plan for peace as we have used them to plan for war. We must pray with unceasing passion for racial justice, but we must also use our minds to develop a program, organize ourselves into mass nonviolent action, and employ every resource of our bodies and souls to bring an end to racial injustice. We must pray unrelentingly for economic justice, but we must also work diligently to bring into being those social forces that make for a better distribution of wealth within our nation and in the underdeveloped countries of the world....We must learn that to expect God to do everything while we do nothing is not faith, but superstition" (FN-11) STL, p. 132-133



How then do we reconcile the two -- human effort and divine guidance? Dr. King says the answer is with two different kinds of faith in God working together -- a rigorous intellectual faith that is tough minded (a faith that "believes that"), and a tender faith of the soul that engulfs and commits the whole person to God's will and service (a faith that "believes in"). "So by faith we are saved. Man filled with God and God operating through man bring unbelievable changes in our individual and social lives." (FN-12) STL, p. 134



We cannot build a more perfect Union by shear human will and making New Year's resolutions. Neither can we build a more perfect world merely by calling on God through prayer to change our circumstances and to save us. God, through us, can build a more perfect Union. Through faith we must surrender ourselves to become instruments of God's love, justice and peace.



"Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1) Those in America and around the world who will allow God to work through them in history have this kind of faith, and are held and sustained by this kind of faith.



The Reverend Dr. Samuel DeWitt Proctor argued that:



"Faith in God, faith in their own worth and dignity, and faith in the idea that America's 270 million diverse peoples can cohere in a true community that gives space to ethnic preference, but gives loyalty to the basic values of equality, compassion, freedom and justice. Through the long, winding trail of political fortunes, with a disciplined transcendence over movements and individuals who would impede their progress, they have survived every challenge and still press forward toward helping America fulfill a unique and unprecedented role in the history of humankind.



"Like millions of other black Americans, I am heir to the faith that was born the day twenty frightened black captives were unloaded at Jamestown in 1619. Their slow, courageous journey from the Dutch slave boat to the present, in the face of unrelenting oppression, is the story of their faith; and therein I believe lies the clue to the answer to today's dilemma.



"Faith put steel in their spines to endure physical bondage, and zeal in their souls to prevail against evil; it illumined their minds to keep the vision of a better day, and inspired their hearts to learn and embrace the great human conversation. Faith gave them a sense of eternity, a mystical transcendence that transposed their pain into song and their agony into a durable, resilient quest for complete humanity, the substance of things hoped for." (FN-13) Proctor, pp. xx, xxi)



I have a faith that gives me the courage to believe that the same Constitution that freed the slaves can improve upon our democracy by providing for our right to vote, create and sustain full employment, advance public education, extend health care and affordable housing, sustain the environment, fulfill equal rights for women and render taxation fair for all Americans. It is with that faith that I press on, with God's help and guidance, to build a more perfect Union. We can all be instruments of God's love and peace and justice if we will but open and surrender ourselves, and let God work through us.



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