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First posted on January 21, 2019
A Reflection for the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday
How you feel about the society we live in today probably depends in large part on where you are in the nation’s political spectrum. If you’re a conservative and a Republican, you probably think we’re living in great times, when America is on the way to being “great again.” If you’re a liberal and a Democrat, you probably think we live in dark times, when the country is being dragged back into a not-so-great past. It seems to me that most African-Americans live with a sense of frustration that they continue to struggle for legal and economic equality.
The Martin Luther King holiday is an annual invitation for Americans to look backward to a time that almost nobody thought was a good time. The 1960’s were a dark period in the nation’s history. And that probably means this occasion is especially important for people who are too young to have lived through the darkness of that time.
The nation felt surrounded by its enemies – real enemies, not just desperate refugees fleeing violence in Central America. The communist world’s leadership had vowed to crush us, and there were communist revolutions taking place around the world. And then the Russians put nuclear missiles in Cuba – just a hundred miles off our coast. I can still remember the elders at my church setting up extra chairs for the people who came flocking in on that Sunday morning because they thought we were on the verge of nuclear war. Politicians didn’t have to manufacture a threat – we could see it on TV.
And it was a dark time for other reasons, too. It seemed like we struggled to do things right. Over and over, the rockets we were building to carry astronauts into space blew up on the launch pad, or didn’t even get off the ground. And when we tried to organize an invasion to get rid of the communists in Cuba, it wound up being a humiliating fiasco at a place called the Bay of Pigs. And every time something went wrong, the times seemed to get darker and darker.
And then our nation went through the traumatic assassination of a president – a charismatic leader with a glamorous family that even his political rivals admired. Someone who said we should ask what we can do for our country instead of what our country can for us, and nobody laughed. And then we were watching his funeral on TV. It was a dark time.
And we found ourselves knee-deep in a quagmire of a war in a part of the world most Americans couldn’t even find on a map. And before helicopters evacuated the last survivors, 55,000 Americans had been killed and a generation scarred forever.
And for the one in five Americans who were black or Hispanic, it was an even darker time. In some parts of America, they were legally required to sit in the back of the bus, and to use separate bathrooms and water fountains. They weren’t allowed to register to vote and when they tried, they were bullied and beaten and some of them were killed. As time went on, even white Americans became more and more ashamed that a country that claimed to believe that all people are created equal refused to grant equal rights to one out of every five of them. It was a dark time.
And it was in that dark time that God called a prophet to speak into the life of our nation. God made an interesting choice – a soft-spoken pastor’s son from Atlanta. A Bible scholar who was considered so brilliant that even predominantly white theological seminaries competed to recruit him for their faculties. And that’s who God called to speak into the life of our nation. And through him, God called us to be the kind of country we had always claimed to be.
That’s the prophet we celebrate one day each January. We think of Martin Luther King Jr. as a voice that only spoke to our nation about relations between the races. And obviously, that was the core of his public ministry. But he also called us to reconsider the way we use our military power, and he called us to a commitment to economic justice, as well. When he was murdered, he was in Memphis supporting garbage workers, people of all races.
I sometimes startle white people by telling them that we should honor Martin Luther King more enthusiastically than black people do. Brother Martin’s ministry made a difference to black people’s relationship with their government. But his ministry made a difference to white people’s relationship with our God. Martin Luther King called people like us to repent of the sin of institutional racism. And it’s ‘way better to be discriminated against for your race than to be guilty of a sin you won’t repent. And through Martin Luther King Jr., God called white people like us to examine our consciences, and to repent. And he’s still calling us to do that, because we still have a lot to repent of.
I’m pretty sure that without Martin Luther King, I would not have lived to see a black man serving as President of the United States. And whether you loved or hated his policies, the fact that we have had a black president makes us seem a lot more like a nation that actually lives by the principles it claims to believe in.
The greatest service any citizen of a democracy can perform for their country is to be a part of its conscience. And in a society that claims to be guided by the God of Israel, that’s how God uses his prophets to bring light into dark times. And that’s why our nation stops one day each year to remember Martin Luther King Jr.
Let’s pray. Lord, we thank you for those you send among us to act as prophets – to call us to live more nearly by the standards of justice and compassion you have established. Move in our hearts, and wash away whatever vestiges of racism remain there, so that we might reach out to all of your children as the brothers and sisters they are in your eyes. Amen.
Grace and Peace,
Henry
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