Enlarge The Temple Beth El Choir sang "This Little Light Of Mine."

Posted: January 18th, 2010 Greg Lacour

The Xchange Sermons series kicked off Jan. 15 with a rousing sermon by an African-American university president in a Jewish temple on Shabbat.

The president was Dr. Ron Carter of Johnson C. Smith University, the occasion Temple Beth El’s annual Shabbat service honoring the memory of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., himself a Baptist preacher.

Temple Beth El has held an MLK Shabbat service every year for the past 15. But this night, as Rabbi Judith Schindler told a congregation that spilled out of the Levine Jewish Community Center on Providence Road, was different. It was a night for two congregations, two peoples, two faiths, to – as an impassioned Carter said during his sermon – “share a common purpose that God himself declares genuine.”

The common purpose is what Mecklenburg Ministries and Crossroads Charlotte are aiming for in the Xchange Sermons series, which will run until the end of February, Black History Month. In those six weeks, clergy from 28 congregations throughout Charlotte will swap pulpits and deliver sermons to other congregations and other faiths – Baptist and Presbyterian, Jewish and Lutheran, Muslim and Methodist, Catholic and Baha’i.

The timing is intentional, with MLK Day on Jan. 18. “The Xchange Sermons series is a wonderful way to honor the work and teachings of Dr. King, whose faith taught him that imagining a changed world is not enough,” says Dr. Maria Hanlin, Mecklenburg Ministries’ executive director. “Action is required.”

The blending was in the choir and the music, performed by the all-black, purple-robed East Stonewall AME Zion Church Choir and the all-white Temple Beth El Choir, who under the direction of the AME church’s Bill Ward, performed “This Little Light of Mine,” a song not generally heard at Shabbat.

Mayor Anthony Foxx, Charlotte’s first African-American mayor since Harvey Gantt and only the second in the city’s history, congratulated “the Temple Beth El Gospel Choir” to laughter and told the congregation: “I want us to reflect on how far we’ve come as a society and how far we have to go.” He compared the strife of the Civil Rights movement to the historic struggle of the Jews, saying, “It’s still going to take that same struggle and hard work … to move our country and city to a more just place.”

A little later came Carter, who delivered a stemwinder in the ornate language and deliberate cadence of an old-time Baptist preacher – and, not coincidentally, King: “There can be no doubt in my mind that the threshold to this place is rich with hospitality.”

His message, though couched in elaborate phrases, was simple and ancient: Put yourself in your brother’s (or sister’s) shoes.

“We need not be bound by those things that shut us inside ourselves,” he said. When we fully embrace each other’s humanity, “Now I know that you, too, think. Now I know that you, too, feel. Now I know that you, too, hope. Now I know that you, too, anticipate. That you can cry. That you can pray. That you all can dream dreams …

“If race relations were practiced with a sense of the presence of God … then the beloved community Martin Luther King spoke so passionately about would become a persistent reality.

“As long as we ignore this need … we will continue to terrorize the mind of God, for he did not create our differences to be each other’s nightmares. In his image, God created us as co-creators of a loving community. Tonight – tonight – we can ease his mind to live a Godly togetherness with a sense of his presence.”

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