So I am sad not to be watching the inauguration live, and sad to be working as well, but my institution chooses to honor the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., with a special chapel. Sometimes I am asked to present it. Here's my words for the big day, which I will literally be reading as Pres. Obama is giving his speech.
Martin
Luther King, Jr.: Another Story
LCU
Chapel, January 21, 2013
Popular
theologian Stanley Hauerwas likes to remind Christians of what he calls the
Tonto Principle. When the Lone Ranger
and Tonto once found themselves surrounded by 20,000 Sioux Indians, the Lone
Ranger turned to Tonto and said, "This looks pretty tough; what do you
think we ought to do?" Tonto
replied, "What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?" Our tendency, Hauerwas says, is to view life
through the assumptions and perceptions of the dominant American culture and to
fail to see that "we" are not all alike, all sharing the same
heritages and present realities and life goals.
Neither Hauerwas nor I mean to focus here on ethnic and
cultural diversity but rather on Christian particularity. What does it mean to say we are Americans,
and to say we are Christian? When we
stress, for example, our "rights" to big cars and big homes, who is
the "we" that we are talking about?
When we pray for our soldiers going off to war, who are our
soldiers? When we teach our children to
grow up and be responsible citizens, what kind of citizenship are
"we" implying? When we focus
on getting a good job after we finish college, what do "we" mean by
"good"? When we honor and
celebrate the heroes of our past, who are we, and who are they, and why
are we continuing to honor them in such ways?
The Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday
provides us with an excellent example.
To virtually every American, Martin Luther King brings to mind certain
fixed phrases and images. We all know
the phrases. "I Have a Dream;" "We Shall Overcome." And if we Americans had to sum up his life
with one descriptive line, it would likely be "Civil Rights
Leader." We've all seen the crowds,
the marches, and even the monuments, and we have a fairly consistent and often
repeated picture of him and of this day.
And on this particular day,
we’ll see a more pronounced emphasis – President Obama will invoke both King
and Abraham Lincoln, with themes of rights, justice, and freedom.
But do we Christians realize that Martin Luther King, Jr.
was first one of our own? That at his
very core, he was not really a civil rights leader or a political activist, but
that he was a Christian, a disciple of Jesus Christ?
Do we
hear him, not quoting legal documents but the words of Jesus? Do we even know that the driving force in his
life was not a racial agenda, a political idealogy, or a personal lust for
power but that it was Christian love?
Listen with me to his own words.
What is the goal of life? "The end of life is not to be happy nor
to achieve pleasure and avoid pain, but to do the will of God, come what
may."
What is
the greatest good of life? What is the summum bonum? I
think I have found the answer, America. . . . The highest good is love. This principle is at the center of the
cosmos. It is the great unifying force
of life. God is love. He who loves has discovered the clue to the
meaning of ultimate reality; he who hates stands in immediate candidacy for
nonbeing.
And why
should we love even our enemies? He responds:
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do
that. Hate multiplies hate, violence
multiplies violence, and toughness multiplies toughness in a descending spiral
of destruction. So when Jesus says
"Love your enemies," he is setting forth an inescapable
admonition. Have we not come to such
an impass in the modern world that we must love our enemies---or else? The chain reaction of evil . . . must be broken,
or we shall be plunged into the dark abyss of annihilation."
And why
are we compelled to act for the hurting and oppressed of the world? Because love is "the true meaning of the
Christian faith and of the cross.
Calvary is a telescope through which we look into the long vista of
eternity and see the love of God breaking into time. Out of the hugeness of his generosity God
allowed his only-begotten Son to die that we may live. By uniting yourselves
with Christ and your brothers through love you will be able to matriculate in
the university of eternal life. In a
world depending on force, coercive tyranny, and bloody violence, you are
challenged to follow the way of love. You
will then discover that unarmed love is the most powerful force in the world."
Not
long after King's death, the young poet Carl Wendell Himes wrote,
Now that he is safely dead
Let us
praise him
build monuments to his glory
sing Hosannas to his name.
Dead men make
such
convenient heroes: They cannot rise to
challenge the images
we would fashion from
their lives.
And besides,
it is
easier to build monuments
than to make a better world.
Himes, I think, was quite
prophetic. Fourty-five years later, the
Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday is honored by some Americans, largely ignored
by most (“why are we out of school, today?”), and turned into partisan
political spectacles by still others, and King himself is captured in only one
or two repeated scenes from moments in past history.
I
wonder what might happen if on this day we heard more sermons and prayers of
King and saw less film footage of crowds and marches. I wonder what might develop if more churches
and less political action groups would listen to him. I wonder where we might be if we spent the
day, in the manner of King, reflecting on Jesus' Sermon on the Mount and its
ethical implications for our lives, if we took Christian love as seriously as
King did.
Ah, but we're back to the Tonto principle again. Who are the "we" that we are
talking about? My guess is that most of
us see ourselves as Christians and Americans, as some kind of ChristoAmericans
or AmericoChristians. We pray to God and
ask God to bless America, we value American goals of rights and freedoms as if
they were God-given licenses to personal excess, we tend to see the world in
terms of American Christian good and foreign religious evil. But the two --- American and Christian ---
are not the same, and it's Martin Luther King, Jr., who reminds us of this.
By 1965
King had already made a name for himself: ten years of work for civil rights,
Time's "Man of the Year" in 1957, the march on Washington in
1963. He had already been arrested and
threatened many times, and in 1958 he narrowly escaped death when a black woman
stabbed him. He had already gained
worldwide fame, receiving in 1964 the
Nobel Peace Prize, at age 35. So,
by 1965, the world was his. We are told
that he had always wanted to get a university professorship, to have time to
write and think and teach. Now, it
seemed, was the perfect time to retire from the public scene and to enjoy the
good American life.
But King did something really foolish, something very
unwise. He rented an apartment in a
dangerous ghetto of Chicago and began to work against injustices there, and
then he continued similar practices in other parts of the country. And this man who could have claimed any
number of privileges and exclusions, this Ph.D. in philosophical theology and
world leader, went to Memphis in 1968 to help some garbage workers who weren't
being treated fairly. And we know the
rest of the story.
Two months before his death, King was preaching in
Atlanta and reflecting on how he would like to be remembered after he was
gone.
"Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace
Prize. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards
– that’s not important. Tell them not to
mention where I went to school.”
"I'd
like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to give
his life serving others.
“I'd
like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr. tried to love
somebody.
“I want
you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry.
“And I
want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those
who were naked.
“I want
you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in
prison.
“I want
you to say that day that I tried to love and serve humanity.
“Yes, if you want to say that I was a drum major,
say that I was a drum major for justice.
Say that I was a drum major for peace.
I was a drum major for righteousness.
And all of the other shallow things will not matter.
"I
won't have any money to leave behind. I
won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life
behind."
What
kind of man has these goals? What kind
of person denies success and wealth and rights and safety and life itself for
the sake of love?
What
kind of man? A Christian.
And
it's high time we reclaimed him, and started listening to him, as one of
our own.
Thank
you.
-- Stacy Patty
