"What Would Martin Say?"

READING

Peter J. Gomes, a Harvard professor and minister to Harvard’s Memorial Church, is known as one of the finest preachers in the country. An American Baptist with deep roots in the African American religious tradition, Gomes makes his faith come alive with eloquence, humor and contemporary relevance. His latest book, "The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus," deserves our full consideration – which I am saving for next month; this excerpt from it addresses the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.

"One of the invitations I least welcome is an invitation to speak on some college campus in the month of January at a Martin Luther King Jr. Day service. It is not that I lack regard for Martin Luther King Jr. If Protestants had saints he would be one of them, and I am convinced that he saved America from itself and allowed it to begin to live out the full implications of its own demanding creed. I am second to no one in my regard for Dr. King's heroic accomplishments, of which I and all other Americans are beneficiaries. Having said that, however, I still find the day, with its celebrations, problematic. There is a dutifulness about most of those occasions, a sense that "something must be done," and the sad conclusion that inevitably only a black person can do it. In almost all colleges the young people are so far removed from the civil rights era that Martin Luther King Jr. might as well be a contemporary of Abraham Lincoln. Most black students regard the holiday as their prize in the social calendar, although there is no agreement on what should be done with it. "Older black Americans who remember "the movement" wax either nostalgic or angry - nostalgic for the good old days when race topped the social and moral agenda, or angry that so little lasting good appears to have come from those days. Older white people remember when they played their part in the great struggle and wonder now, in late middle age, what happened to the movement. Were King and the movement he personified an aberration, what we thought was a movement turning out to be only a moment? Is his an impossible legacy. Has it been betrayed?"

SERMON

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. died in Memphis, Tennessee, April 4, 1968, victim of murder by gunman James Earl Ray. With his death we lost a voice that inspired us to live by our highest principles, what Peter J. Gomes calls “the full implications of [America’s] own demanding creed.”[1] And though King’s uplifting words still echo at this time every year, we might ask ourselves what has become of his message. His sermon at Riverside Church in New York, delivered exactly one year before his death, warns prophetically that unless we address “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism,”[2] we’ll be marching forever, waiting for the world to change.

The marching and waiting continue. Yet unlike the fired-up activists of the civil rights era, those of us who participate in such events now have to contend with cynicism and a sense of futility. The current primary elections have rekindled some of the old optimism, as we watch an African American man and a woman contend for their party’s nomination. But the backdrop of war, economic turbulence, the widening divide between rich and poor, and anxiety about everything from health care to national security to global warming, does little to reassure us we really are going forward. King’s message is as relevant today as it was forty years ago.

I talked to a neighbor the other day, a woman who lives in subsidized housing on disability income. She is terrified about the proposed California budget cuts, which will affect her personally and where it hurts. She stands to lose her dental care, she told me. I hadn’t read far enough below the headlines about Will Rogers State Park to know her side of the story, and I expressed chagrin for not knowing more of the details. “You have very nice teeth,” she replied.

How did we end up living in a democracy where some people can buy multi-million dollar estates and others can’t afford to care for their teeth? It’s safe to say King would be appalled by today’s economic injustices, among the social blights that have become part of the American landscape we cannot seem to change. Nobody can know what he would have said or done if he had not been gunned down, but there is one conclusion we can make based on his record: he would remind us that everything was connected, personally and systemically.

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny,” King said. “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” Though I do not feel vastly separated from my neighbor by wealth or privilege, the differences are still uncomfortable. Especially when someone else has to point them out. This discomfort is what it means to be in an “inescapable network of mutuality,” to have that twinge of realization that we are each other’s keeper, even through such political and bureaucratic entities as our state budget.

The connections are not just person to person; they are systemic and global. King addressed them on all levels. In one of his last sermons, he talked about the poverty he observed on a trip to India. He found what he saw very disturbing. “As I noticed these things,” he preached, “something within me cried out, ‘Can we in America stand idly by and not be concerned?’ And an answer came – ‘Oh, no!’ Because the destiny of the United States is tied up with the destiny of India and every other nation. And I started thinking of the fact that we spend in America millions of dollars a day to store surplus food,  and I said to myself, ‘I know where we can store that food free of charge – in the wrinkled stomachs of millions of God’s children all over the world who go to bed hungry at night.’” And then he concluded, “Maybe we spend far too much of our national budget establishing military bases around the world rather than bases of genuine concern and understanding.”[3] I wonder what King would say about New Orleans, or the homelessness here in our own community.

King often invoked the words of the prophet Isaiah, “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain.” It was his way of endorsing the evening out of the distribution of power and wealth, so that all could inherit the promised land. This was a revolutionary concept – in biblical times, in King’s times, and in our times. What it takes to make that happen is nothing short of a “revolutionary spirit.” Declare “eternal opposition to poverty, racism and militarism,” he preached, even in a world that is hostile to your message.

King was not afraid of hostility, even though he lived with it and died because of it. He operated in the spirit of Christian love, expressed through the practice of nonviolence as he learned it from Gandhi. “To meet hate with retaliatory hate,” he wrote, “would do nothing but intensify the existence of evil in the universe. . . . We must meet the forces of hate with the power of love; we must meet physical force with soul free.”[4]

What would King have told us in the aftermath of 9/11, as our country once again used military force against enemies, real and imagined. I remember turning to his words first as I searched for what to say to you the first Sunday after that event. “We shall hew out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope,” he once said; once again those words had the power to comfort. King would no doubt have opposed the war. What might he have told us to do, besides march and wait?

He would have showed us the connections. After King’s sermon at Riverside Church, he gave a series of lectures to expand further on his opposition to the Vietnam War.[5] He pointed out that war was “an enemy of the poor.” “I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor,” King said, “so long as adventures like Vietnam continue to draw men and skills and money like some demoniacal destructive suction tube.”

And he would go further than make the connection between poverty and militarism; he would asked us to look at who we are as a nation. “I am convinced,” King said, “that . . . we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.”

What King asked his followers to do – and perhaps, would have asked us today – requires courage, hope and a willingness to struggle as long as necessary until justice is done. He would have told us not to give up. For this is how he lived his life – up to the end.

Every year, preparing for this Sunday, I browse through my big anthology and re-read many of King’s famous sermons and speeches. They never fail to move me, but different ones speak to me at different times. This year, as I read his last sermon, “I See the Promised Land,” I was struck by how aware he was that he would likely die soon, and probably in Memphis. He spoke of being grateful to be part of such a great period of history. He thanked his friends and fellow clergy for their support. He made the case – one last time – for the nonviolent struggle against injustice. He gave instructions for an economic boycott on behalf of the Memphis sanitation workers. And then he said, “I ask you to follow through here . . . we’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point, in Memphis. We’ve got to see it through.”

He digressed to tell the story of the Good Samaritan and about getting stabbed and almost dying while on a book tour. He expressed his gratitude for surviving the attack. He offered a short retrospective of his accomplishments.

And then “I got to Memphis,” he went on. “And some began to say the threats, or talk about the threats that were out. What would happen to me from some of our sick white brothers?”

“Well, I don’t know what will happen now,” King concluded. And he spoke his famous valedictory words, “I’ve been to the mountaintop. . . . And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land.” And he feared no one.

What Martin Luther King would tell us now, no one can say. But his message remains and his message is clear. Remember me. Don’t give up. Don’t get lulled into cynicism or apathy. Do not be ruled by fear. Give all you have to the struggle for justice, until the end. You will never regret it.

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1 Peter J. Gomes. "The Scandalous Gospel of Jesus" (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), p. 161.
2 Thank you to Rick Rhoads for finding this quote for his chalice lighting.
3 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution,” March 31, 1968.
4 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “An Experiment in Love,” 1958.
5 Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Trumpet of Conscience,” November & December, 1967.

Many of the other quotes in this sermon come from the speeches mentioned, and are often repeated in more than one place throughout King’s work, and consolidated into various readings, such as in our own hymnbook.