Martin Luther King as Christian, Even While Barack Obama is Inaugurated

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