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Good morning. I am delighted to be with you again to worship with you today. I asked President what if he knew what he was doing? Um , I'm not ordained. Um, so I'm not

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sure how much of a sermon this is going to be, but having set through this morning's worship so far, I think I'm pretty much on accord. The wonderful rendering of deep river um wonderful choir from

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Houston Tillotson University and all the students gathered here. Thank you for being here. My pastor, reverend Sylvester Chase, glad to see you here and and all of those who have come to share with us

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today. As I listened to the scripture, I thought about how much struggling I had been doing and preparing for this presentation this morning and it all comes together. So ted, I think you did.

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Okay, okay. It worked out. We have , we have been friends for uh, as long as we've been here, we came to Austin uh , within two years of each other, both coming

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from Atlanta having had mutual friends that of course we didn't know until we got to Austin and we share with each other periodically with the other leaders of uh higher education and seminaries uh in this region. So

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we, we have a long standing friendship and for that I am very grateful. It gets fairly lonely sometimes when you are the chief executive of an institution and you need someone to commiserate with who understands what

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you're going through uh day by day and week by week and muscle month. And As it turns out a year by year, um this year culminates 15 years for me at Houston, Tolson, I've been

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extremely blessed to have the opportunity to serve. Um and it really brings to a total of 42 years of service in higher education, both here and in Atlanta. So I am fortunate to have had a

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chance to touch the lives of many students and others with whom I've come in contact and certainly I have been affected by those who I have met, Having been a child of the 60s. Uh I have

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a special reference point for today's presentation. You see , I grew up in a small town by today's standards uh called Chattanooga Tennessee. Uh what I said , a hand going up and someone from chatting to

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go over there. All right, homeboy, Chattanooga was a fairly conservative community and was not taken with the efforts of dr king. Um there was considerable resistance to opening the community, but that resistance was

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not just from the anglo community, it was also from the African american community. See, I remember back when we did not sing so fervently we shall overcome. And as a matter of fact, african

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americans were just as concerned about how much disorder would be created by integration, as were the Anglos in the various communities around the nation. So it wasn't always as we remember it today. Uh, people

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wanted to know why DR king wouldn't go somewhere and sit down. But I also remember 1968 when I was a freshman at Clark College. Now Clark Atlanta University, the day when Dr King was killed.

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And it was at that time that the conscious of America was really shaken and the fact that the world came to southwest Atlanta to celebrate the life and work of DR King and everyone knew that something had to

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happen. We had had support from an unlikely source at that time. Gentlemen, from these parts called LBJ with his advancement of many of the pieces of legislation that enabled the breaking down of barriers at that

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time. So we look in retrospect and being old enough to look in retrospect, I can think about what happened then and how we, we we have survived and come to this point and in my thinking

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and musing about what I could share with you today , I wanted to talk about three concepts. I think the teacher that is seminary to don't three, those being fear hate and competition. And if you

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listen to the scriptures this morning, even though I did not select them, it's a coming together of these elements that really focuses our attention on as martin Luther King would say, where do we go from

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here? Fear, Fear of the unknown. Fear of what would happen. Were there to be an end to separate but equal and that everyone would be treated fairly fear. You see, we develop fear

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when we start to accumulate things and there were some african americans as there were Anglos who had begun to accumulate things and there was a fear that all that had been accumulated would be lost in this beloved community

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. That martin Luther King talked about fear, getting over our fear, hate. Why do we hate people? We don't even know them. Something critical to our inequality, biases are exploitations, competition being

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on top of someone else, uh, being ahead of the game. You know, we, we talk about competition in this country, particularly in the business community, um, that we want to be

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competitive. We want our students to be competitive. We want our graduates from Houston Tillerson to be competitive . Sometimes in our zeal for competition. We lose sight of the larger picture and I'm going to share

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with you, although we've had many, many games since the days of what some of the students tell me now back in the civil rights days. And that really dates me because they they talked to me

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like I was a character in a history book. But I remember back in the days of the civil rights movement and there have been significant gains. Uh , and you, you need only look to the

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White House to see that we have an african american president. You've seen doors to corporations opened. You've seen access to higher education change that we have access for almost everyone. Almost everyone to some of the

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best institutions in the nation. But still, there are vestiges of what happened when we had a separate but equal system. Our housing still reflects separation. You can check who elsewhere by zip codes, not

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only by race but by income level and by other socio economic indicate us. We know where people live health care. Even today, we will be announcing a partnership and this is a bit of bragging.

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So I'll do a little bit of that too with the University of texas where we are forming a a historic partnership in conjunction with the Dell Medical School to have a facility erected on the Houston Totin campus uh

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to provide for the middle and behavioral health needs of our immediate East Austin community, which is undeserved and the total Austin metropolitan area for underserved communities. But access to health care is unequal. Uh and no

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matter how hard we try to remedy that, we seem to have some problem with the beloved community where everyone has access to a high quality of life. There's education, educational access is really at the core

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of much of the advancement for our society. I think many of you would be shocked to know that the elite in this country go to fewer than 500 colleges in the nation. There 5000 colleges in the

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nation. But the elite go To fewer than 500 as artifacts, 486 of them um that the elite go send their kids to for college and uh advanced study, which leads to a point that has been

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made recently by Lanny Grenier who in her book the tyranny of meritocracy democratizing higher education in America. She argues that systems that dictate admission to americans esteemed universities are a pipeline for admitting privileged individuals, thus ensuring

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future generations of inequality and little diversity. That's a mouthful. But what she is saying is that we have to be careful about all of our institutions to make sure if we indeed are committed to having a

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beloved community where every life is valued, Ferguson Orlando new york, where every life is valued. We've got to provide a venue in the larger sense where we can all come to appreciate each other as individuals

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. So move forward To 2015, the civil rights movement now, surely as I've just painted, there are vestiges of the problems of the past that we still endure. And as W. E. B

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du bois told us, that will be the scar on America in its future. And so far, he has proven quite prophetic as that has been one of the things that has held this this country back

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. But moving forward, we've learned some lessons from the civil rights movement Of the 1960s and the early 70s. Not only were African americans are not only are african americans at the margins of the society,

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truth advances have been made, but they are still , If you look at every demographic, it will point you to that direction. African americans Women who are still earning at a rate, a fraction of

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that of men. Whether they be african american men or anglo men, we still have a challenge why all God's Children, as we heard in the scripture this morning? Why do we have that disparity?

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The handicapped? We as a society still look at it as a burden to care for the handicapped. Why all of God's Children. And I know a hot topic today is is, uh, the gay

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marriage issue. What is it that causes us to fear or hate or to have trouble with caring for all of God's Children? It is controversial. Everything has been controversial, uh, as a matter of

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fact, when during the days of segregation and that was done by the law. That was not just the will of the community, it was written into law. So everything that is written into law may

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not be in accordance with God's will. So we have to be very careful as we move forward dealing with Civil rights issues in the 21st century. They afflict many of us, sometimes we don't talk about

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it, we don't talk about the gender issues and I know particularly and I'm gonna I'm gonna pick on on african americans who have arrived. Um we don't like to talk about it. We don't like to

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tell the story so that our Children will not have the story repeated. Mm But the story must be told. The women's rights, equality of pay and all the issues afflicting gender uh disparities. Those stories

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have to be told so that we can actually achieve the beloved community. It's up to us to live by what dr martin Luther King suggested to us and to think that he was only 38 years old when

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he died and how much of an influence he's had on all of us around the world to make us want to do at least from time to time, as we should do, and treat others as equal

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. So those three things that I talked about this morning fear, hate and competition, let's look at the reverse. What is the opposite of fear? Courage. Let us have the courage to move forward

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on God's plan. For us all, courage will stand us in good stead now, folks who were afraid that they would lose whatever it, uh, tangible things they had acquired in life were fearful.

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But if you have the courage to do what's right , we will all benefit. Hate the opposite of hate love. I don't see how you can't can hate someone you never met because of their color,

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their gender, the economic circumstances, the nation in which they were born and for that matter, their religious traditions. You know, I have questioned some folks from time to time about the notion of uh

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really having a pecking order for different religious traditions. And how do you think that would affect young folk , babies, infants who had just been born if they happen to have been born in a certain region

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of the world where a certain tradition is observed? Are they doomed? Because they are not of another tradition of another region of the world. So that leads us to think about embracing the religious traditions of

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others and not being so quick to put them off , not hate love. And through love, we get understanding the opposite of competition is collaboration. And I know in higher education that is the buzz word

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of the day. Uh, they have suddenly discovered that we can go farther quicker if people, even students can collaborate in classes rather than going on their own to try to find the solution by themselves,

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collaborations make a difference. And in our scripture this morning there was a discussion about collaboration. So you go back to the scripture and read it again and see how God speaks to us about pursuing those values

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that will lead us to the beloved community. This is what martin Luther King talked about. I had the privilege of standing in line about three o'clock in the morning uh to go two sisters chapel to at

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Spelman College to view his body. The world was for a moment quite different. Then we can go back to business as usual, but people were shaken by the fact that this could happen in this country

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, that a man would be gunned down in Memphis Tennessee, and then later that same year, bobby Kennedy was gunned down. And then we started to really reflect that we ought to do something different to

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have a different kind of outcome. We don't want to be communities that resembled those communities where there's great strife that we see on the evening news every day . We want, we say to be the beloved

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community, to be the beloved community, calls us to have courage, To love one another and to collaborate and understand each other. That is the message I bring to you this morning. Thank you.