Three years ago I posted on this blog a sermon I had given on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. It still rings true, so I am re-posting it here today as we once again remember Dr. King.
It’s Martin Luther King Day, 2011. A lot of people are talking about him today. Some progressive voices are saying what I want to say about him, but most people aren’t. I’ve haven’t before posted one of my sermons here, but I’m now posting the one I gave yesterday. It’s about Martin Luther King, and it’s about the Martin Luther King we’d rather forget. It’s an important message. I hope that by posting it here I can in some tiny measure help to get the word out.
A Light to the Nations
Rev. Tom Sorenson, Pastor
January 16, 2011
Scripture: Isaiah 49:1-7
Let us pray: May the words of my mouth and the meditations of all of our hearts be acceptable in your sight O God, our strength and our redeemer. Amen.
It’s Martin Luther King Day weekend. This weekend we pause to remember and celebrate the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. If Protestantism had saints he’d probably be one. He would at least be venerated as a martyr for the faith, as many people are in Orthodox Christianity. We don’t do that exactly, but we do celebrate King’s life and work. Yet as I considered Martin Luther King once more this past week I discerned that we need to ask ourselves just what it is about his life and work that we celebrate; and we need to ask whether there aren’t parts of his life and work that we don’t celebrate, that we’d rather forget. I am convinced that there are such aspects of his life and work, and that’s what I want to talk about this morning.
We celebrate Martin Luther King the civil rights leader. We celebrate his courage and the powerful way he articulated, in the great preaching tradition of the Black churches, the cause of equality in our country. We celebrate his immortal “I Have a Dream” speech. All of that is worthy of celebration, and we do celebrate it. But here’s the thing. Martin Luther King was about a lot more than that, and it’s that a lot more that we maybe would rather forget, that, in fact, a lot of Americans do forget or ignore.
We know that King insisted on nonviolence in the civil rights movement. It was, I think, that insistence on nonviolence that made him white people’s favorite civil rights leader. We wanted the civil rights movement to be nonviolent. That was a good thing, although maybe we only thought it was a good thing because we were afraid of Black America’s righteous anger at centuries of white racism resulting in violence against us. What we pay less attention to is the fact that King did not limit his call for nonviolence to the civil rights movement. He saw the connection between violence at home and the violence we were perpetrating at the time in Vietnam. So he spoke up. He spoke out against the Vietnam War, and when he did he became a lot less popular with white America. People told him to stick to his proper sphere of activity, the civil rights movement. That was of course a racist response to King’s opposition to the war because it said that a Black man’s only legitimate concern was the civil rights of his own people, but just as importantly it greatly misunderstood King’s—and Jesus’—message of nonviolence. It limited nonviolence as a value to one aspect of life, one set of issues. It failed to see that King’s—and Jesus’—call to nonviolence is universal, that it applies to all aspects of life. That was, and is, a part of King’s—and Jesus’—message that a great many of us did not and do not want to hear; but Jesus proclaimed it and King preached it just the same.
And King insisted on more than nonviolence; and he insisted on more than legal equality, equality of legal rights, for Black Americans, as important as that was and is. He insisted on economic justice for poor people, Black and white and every other color as well. When he was assassinated in Memphis Tennessee, he was there to support the demands of sanitation workers for a fair wage and safe working conditions. That was an issue of economic justice not of race. King also saw the connection between poverty and violence. He saw that it was disproportionately Black Americans and other poor Americans whom we sent to fight and die in our imperialist war in Vietnam. A great many white Americans reacted to King’s calls for economic justice the same way they did to his call for an end to the Vietnam War. Civil rights are fine, we said, as long as you’re only talking about legal rights. But don’t go supporting the economic rights of the poor. That’s not your concern, we said, perhaps out of fear that true economic justice for the poor might mean that those of us with economic privilege might have to live a little less high on the hog.
We celebrate Martin Luther King as a civil rights leader, but he was much more than a civil rights leader. He was an advocate of nonviolence in all aspects of life, and he demanded economic justice for the poor. Where did all of that emphasis on nonviolence and justice come from? It came from Jesus, that’s where. Why did King insist on preaching those things as well as civil rights? Because he was a Christian, that’s why. Jesus preached economic justice, what Crossan calls distributive justice, economic justice that assures that all have enough. Jesus called us to be advocates of such distributive justice as well. Jesus preached and lived nonviolence, and he calls us to preach and to live nonviolence too. Martin Luther King got all of that. A great many Christians do not. Those things are hallmarks of King’s life that many of us would rather forget.
Our passage from Isaiah this morning may not seem to have much to do with the message of Martin Luther King, but I think it does. That passage is one of the so-called servant songs from the part of Isaiah scholars call second Isaiah. In it God calls God’s servant, whose identity historically is unknown, to be a light not only to his own people Israel but to the whole world. God says to the servant “I will give you as a light to the nations.” By that light, God says, the nations of the world will see and come to the ways of God.
For us Christians the primary light to the nations is Jesus Christ. He is a shining beacon in a world of darkness. He lights the way to God and reveals the ways of God. What is the way to God that he lights? What are the ways of God that he reveals? They are more than anything else the ways of economic justice for the poor and of nonviolence in all aspects of human life. Martin Luther King understood that truth. He proclaimed that truth, a truth he learned from his Lord and Savior, and ours, Jesus Christ, our primary light to the nations. Everyone who reflects the light of Christ is also a light to the nations. God, you see, calls us to be a light too.
Friends, the world today desperately needs that light. It desperately needs the light of economic justice. We are starting to see the effects of the world’s unjust distribution of resources, an unjust distribution from which we all benefit, revealed more and more starkly. In recent days we’ve seen stories of soaring food prices causing hardship in places like India and Indonesia. In our own state services on which many people depend just to stay alive are being reduced or eliminated because the rest of us won’t pay for them. Economic injustice today threatens to destabilize the whole world. If it doesn’t do it today, it most certainly will do it tomorrow.
Violence today threatens to destroy the whole world. Prophets of nonviolence like Crossan and Wink say, rightly, that unless we humans can overcome our addiction to violence, can transcend our belief in what Wink calls the myth of redemptive violence, the belief that violence can save us, we will eventually and inevitably destroy ourselves and our part of God’s creation. We have the means to do it. More nations are seeking the means to do it. I and many others are convinced that Jesus’ way—God’s way—of nonviolence is our only hope of escape, the only path of salvation for the world.
Martin Luther King knew these truths. He knew them because he knew Jesus Christ. He was a light to the nations because he reflected the light of Christ. He did that not only by working for civil rights but by working for economic justice and by preaching universal nonviolence as well. In all of that he was a light to the nations. Are we? Amen.
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