05/06/2018

Good morning. Looking back and wondering what might have been is a futile business and most of us avoid it. But sometimes it’s very hard to resist.

50 years ago, today, Robert Kennedy – the younger brother of President Kennedy was assassinated – just as his brother had been 5 years earlier. He was fighting for the Democratic nomination to run for President. And looking back it’s almost irresistible to think about whether he’d have won and what kind of a president he would have been.

At the time he was a divisive figure – most major politicians are. And we’ll never know how he’d have developed if he had gone on to win the Presidency. But he did leave many tantalising clues about what kind of a person he was.

The night Martin Luther King died Robert Kennedy was due to address a mainly African American audience in Indianapolis. Amidst fears for his safety, he could have ducked out but instead he stood up and told the crowd that their hero had died. But more than that – he went on to win them over with a short but very powerful speech in which he talked about his own brother’s death and said that the nation had a choice. They could react with hatred and revenge. Or, in his words they could… “Make an effort, as Martin Luther King did, to understand and to comprehend, and to replace that violence, that stain of bloodshed … with an effort to understand with compassion and love.”

And in a world where every day seems to bring new horrors and new threats, that kind of clear statement of humane and rational values seems to me to be as challenging to us today as it was to that crowd 50 years ago.

Lord God, Robert Kennedy once said: ‘Tragedy is a tool for the living to gain wisdom, not a guide by which to live.’ Remind us of that when terrible things happen. Amen