It was a cool April evening and I was at the fellowship hall
of my little country church, where along with my Dad, we were “adding on” to
the building. My mother came flying up State Road 35 (the road on which our
home and our church was located) in her dark green Buick Electra 225. (My Dad
always thought she drove too fast, but that’s for another day.)
She quickly got out of the car and told the group of men and
boys working on the fellowship hall that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated
in Memphis, Tennessee. For those of us who grew up in the 196os, this was
another one of those punctuation marks in the historical narrative that
impacted our understanding of life, the world, our own country, and tons of
other things. Things like the assassinations of John F. Kennedy in 1963,
Malcolm X in 1965, of MLK in 1968, and in June of 1968, Robert F. Kennedy.
As hard as it is for me to believe, it was 48 years ago this
evening that I first heard the words that King had been murdered. Of course
there were mixed feelings about King in those days. For many southern whites,
he was destroying what was viewed as a way of life. For many African-Americans –
though then I would have said Negroes – he wasn’t nearly radical enough and
many were more inclined to see SNCC and the Black Panthers as better options.
Those were troubled times. If you have read a biography of
King, you know there are issues in his life that he no doubt would have
preferred to never become public. Not to offer any excuses for his excesses in
several areas, the simple truth is that none of us would prefer to have every detail
of our lives made public. It is in that sense that I think we should be careful
not to dismiss his work because somehow he sinned – and especially if his sin
was different than our sin, then of course we view it as worse than our sin!
But remember Paul’s attitude about preaching Christ and sometimes less than stellar
behavior? “What then? Only that in every way, whether in pretense or in truth,
Christ is proclaimed, and in that I rejoice.” (Philippians 1:18)
That seems like a very hard standard to which I need to
measure up. But, if Paul could manage to say that from a prison cell while some
of the preachers – the “pretense” ones – are seeing to do him harm, then I
think I need to rejoice when Christ is proclaimed.
One of King’s most powerful legacies is, in my opinion, Letter from Birmingham Jail. In so many
ways it reflects King’s belief – one that is missing from much of today’s
rhetoric on the important issues of justice – that the gospel, imbedded in the
life of the church, transforms culture. Listen to a few of his comments:
There was a time when the Church
was very powerful. It was during that period when the early Christians rejoiced
when they were deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days
the Church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles
of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society.
Whenever the early Christians entered a town the power structure got disturbed
and immediately sought to convict them for being “disturbers of the peace” and “outside
agitators.” But they went on with the conviction that they were a “colony of
heaven” and had to obey God rather than man. They were small in number but big
in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be ‘astronomically intimidated.’
They brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial
contests.
He also gives great clarity to how we should understand the
meaning of “just law.” Here’s what he
had to say:
A just law is a man-made code that
squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is
out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of Saint Thomas
Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural
law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades
human personality is unjust.
Here’s an assessment about King’s preaching from N.T.
Wright, as noted in Simply Christian: “it was the Christian vision of Martin
Luther King Jr. that drove him to peaceful, but highly effective, protest. . .
King’s passion for justice for African Americans cost him his life. . . [his]
tireless campaigning grew directly and explicitly out of [his] loyalty to
Jesus.” (page 14)
Like was true in the late 1960s, it seems to me that we are
living in a very troubled time. We obviously haven’t solved all the issues of
race and prejudice, and have, in many ways, compounded them by class
distinctions that are based on dollars not skin tone. Income disparity is
growing wider between the “haves” and “have nots” on what seems like a daily
basis. The list of potential issues of justice confronting the church is
endless.
So it seemed to me, that on this 48th anniversary
of the brutal murder of a preacher who understood that real justice is rooted
in God’s character, that I should simply say – we could use his voice again to
help us dream of a day when “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness
like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos 5:24) God knows our culture needs to hear
that.
Sadly, I’m yet to hear a single candidate for president or
any other self-proclaimed leader and/or shaper of culture say what King had the
courage to say.
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