On Monday January 21 the nation will be celebrating Martin Luther King Day. I want to make a few brief remarks about what Martin Luther King means to me.
Leaving aside that many people are celebrating little more than getting a day off, which I am all in favor of, I think there is a disconnect between what the nation celebrates on Martin Luther King Day and what Martin Luther King himself stood for. When we celebrate Martin Luther King Day we generally focus on race relations and the progress that has been made and still needs to be made in that area in the United States.
And it is true that there has been a lot of progress made there, and that is certainly something to celebrate. But in our secular culture what gets overlooked is that the man we normally call Dr. King was also, and primarily, Rev. King. Martin Luther King, Jr., was an ordained minister in the Baptist Church, and it was in that role that he conducted his public life. In other words, when King spoke, he spoke as a preacher, not as an academic or a political leader.
Another way to get at the point I am trying to make here is by noticing that we generally celebrate the man by saying that he was a great black leader. But the reality is that he was a great leader who was black. Martin Luther King's work in seeking justice was not limited to black people. On many occasions Martin Luther King publicly stated that the focus of his work was not to serve black people but to serve all people, particularly those who were poor and without a voice.
And we can hear the echo of this in his most famous speech, that we know as the "I have a dream" speech, where he says,
When we allow freedom to ring... we will be able to speed up the day when all of God's children [emphasis mine], black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, "Free at last! Free at Last! Thank God Almighty we are free at last!"
Let me share with you some of my own personal journey. I was raised in the South and although I wasn't raised to be particularly racist, racism was definitely a part of that culture. It wasn't until I was in my twenties and I read a biography of Martin Luther King that I realized the incredible stupidity of race prejudice and segregation. It was through the really courageous efforts of King and those who followed his leadership, both black and not black, that the nation woke up to the destructiveness of its racism and historically declared it wrong. On a personal level I came to see that many of the things I had taken for granted when I was growing up were also wrong and that I needed to change my attitude about a lot of things especially regarding race.
But more than that what I have come to realize is that what drove King was not just the particular evils of American racism. Yes, of course that was a situation that cried out for justice. But it was a situation that fell under a bigger umbrella of God's over-arching passion for justice.
God's passion for justice is not something that came to the forefront in 1950s America. It is recorded in the first pages of Bible in the Book of Genesis and it is a constant throughout the Bible: Old and New Testaments. God has never not been passionate about justice. God’s word is filled with his demand that his people demonstrate justice in their personal lives and in their dealing with all others, including strangers and foreigners, Even enemies.
Now one of the things that I have been accused of in terms of my understanding of what it means to be a follower of Jesus is that I am too radical. I remember sitting in a men's Bible study and mentioning that something Jesus said about giving to the poor had to be taken seriously and one of the other members told me, "Well you can't think like that." What this man was saying to me was that that's too radical. It’s too radical to think that Jesus really meant that I must love and forgive and be willing to die for others, even my enemies, that I must give to the poor until it hurts, that I must be willing to give up all material possessions and all human relationships to follow him. And I agree that these and many other of Jesus’ commandments demand a radical response.
But not too radical. If I am Jesus’ disciple, that means I want to look like him. I must be willing to do what he did. And the things he did were so radical, such a threat to the status quo, that he had to be done away with by the powers of the age. If I am his follower, practically everything I do will be radical, but it cannot possibly be too radical.
It's pretty easy on the one hand to pick and choose the parts of Jesus' teachings that inspire us and don't seem too difficult. But on the other hand I think we all just want to ignore the teachings that are hard. We want a spiritual cafeteria: I'll take the fried chicken and the apple pie. I'm not that interested in the broccoli, and I hate lima beans. But Jesus is like my mom when I was little. I either eat everything on my plate, or nothing.
Martin Luther King came to be one of the Christian leaders I really admire. His life inspires me. Certainly he was a sinner. He made a lot of mistakes in his personal and public life that I wouldn't want to make, or I wouldn’t want to be caught making, and these are well documented. They are often pointed to in an attempt to discredit the man. I think one of the reasons we still collectively consider him great is that in spite of his flaws he remained true to his calling and in the end he gave his life for his convictions. Who of us could be counted sinless under the scrutiny he had to endure? Who among us could be considered sinless at all?
The foundation of the Christian faith is not that God uses great people but that God uses not so great people to do great things. Moses was a murderer. David was an adulterer and a murderer. Jesus’ disciples were dull and petty and fought over who would be the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. Peter denied him. Paul persecuted him. The lesson of the Bible seems to be that greatness in God’s eyes does not come from ourselves and what we are but from what God is able to make us and accomplish through us.
There are a lot of things about Reverend King that I don’t want. I do not aspire to be great in the eyes of men. I don't want the nation getting the day off on the first Monday after my birthday every year. I don't want to be famous.
But I do want to be like him in other ways that I think matter more. I want to be faithful to my calling, as God makes it more and more clear to me. I want to have the courage to stand for God's character of Justice, Righteousness, and Love, even when it is not popular, even when it is dangerous. I want to be willing to die for the gospel.
So in response to anyone who would accuse me of being too radical or too extreme, I want to end with a quote by King from his famous “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”:
…the question is not whether we will be extremist but what kind of extremist will we be. Will we be extremists for hate or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice--or will we be extremists for the cause of justice? In that dramatic scene on Calvary's hill, three men were crucified. We must not forget that all three were crucified for the same crime--the crime of extremism. Two were extremists for immorality, and thusly fell below their environment. The other, Jesus Christ, was an extremist for love, truth and goodness, and thereby rose above his environment.
I want to be counted as an extremist for love. Amen.
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