Unitarian Universalist Meeting of
“Martin Luther King, Jr.: Moving On”
Rev. Kathy Duhon
This weekend we are celebrating what would have been Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 75th birthday. It reminds me of how young he was when he changed the political, social, and religious landscape and climate of our nation. Our reading by William Jones reminds us that if we concentrate only on the dead, enshrined, thirty-something year old Martin Luther King, Jr., we will not honor him. We need to move on with our own journeys of peace and justice, of faith and hope and love.
King eulogized
W.E.B. DuBois, the great Black thinker born in Great
Barrington, after DuBois’ death in 1963 with a
similar understanding of how to approach DuBois’
legacy that I want to offer about King’s legacy. While King talked about DuBois’
vast intellect and scholarship, courage and deeds, he stressed that love
permeated all of DuBois’ words and actions. So too with Martin Luther
King, Jr. King said, “Dr. DuBois has left us but he has not died. The spirit of freedom is not buried in the
grave of the valiant.” And then he called
on the people, as a tribute to DuBois, in this way,
“We have to go to
Martin Luther King, Jr. was a faith-filled man, a Christian, which undergirded all of who he was and what he did. He was a civil rights leader, peace activist, preacher, scholar, community leader, and family man. And underneath it all he was religious. To have a clue about how to move on from where Martin Luther King, Jr. left off with his dream for America, for the world, into the unfolding dream that we are called upon to uphold for our beloved community, for our country, for our world, we need to know about what held him and sustained him in his religious life.
Sometimes we think of the baseline of Christianity as its moral teachings, which is important, but only a part of the larger story of faith. Christianity means more than following Jesus’ teachings – minimally it also means following Paul’s teachings – much of Christianity is preached from Paul’s letters – but it’s more than teachings, Paul’s or Jesus’. And I don’t mean that you must have faith in Jesus in a particular way. I believe that Christianity is not, at its core, about taking Jesus into your heart, or believing in him as God, or as Redeemer, or as Savior, though many Christians would say that.
I once heard a Christian evangelist, a Baptist if I remember correctly, preach it this way – the heart of Christianity is becoming most truly yourself, which can be done by emulating and following Jesus, since Jesus was most truly himself. You don’t become like Jesus – you become as Jesus was. Martin Luther King, Jr. seems to have been one of those rare Christians in history who really got it – really understood Christianity, or we might say, religion. He became most fully himself, a man who sought to put at the center of his life the dynamic that Jesus had put at the center of his.
If you grant me this premise, then what was at the center of Jesus’ life as he tried to be most truly himself? Paul was the first one to study Jesus and try to figure it out, and probably his best encapsulation of the religious center of Christianity was when he spoke about faith, hope and love, in his letter to the Corinthians. Those three are the abiding center of religious life, of any life – faith, hope, and love.
First, faith. Faith in what? Faith that all will be well. Faith in life as ultimately good. Faith that something stronger than us as individuals is available to us when we need it most, when we have “gone down to the Pit”, as the Psalmist writes. Faith that death is not the definer of our lives, that life and love is the center, the key. Martin Luther King, Jr. said this in his eulogy of slain civil rights activist and UU minister, James Reeb: “…death is not a period which ends this great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to a loftier significance. … Let this daring faith, this great invincible surmise, be our sustaining power during these trying days.”
Next, hope. Hope is the opposite of despair. Hope brings the surprise that somehow, “joy comes with the morning”, as the Psalmist also writes. Hope is present in King’s “I have a dream” speech, a hope that helps give birth to our dreams. Augustine said, “Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they are.”
Anger is important to justice, to spiritual well-being – not bitterness, not violence, but anger. William Sloane Coffin recently said we need anger in order to combat the moral lassitude that despiritualizes our country. Sometimes we are too immune to the sufferings of the world, of our brothers and sisters, of all our relations. King felt the pain of injustice and poverty and war, and he was angry, and he didn’t mince words. Here’s something King said that might be relevant to us, “Over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate . . . who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
Hope’s daughters are anger and courage. Courage stood by Martin Luther King, Jr. because he had hope that what he had seen, through his faith, on that divine mountaintop, was within reach of the world, if not of himself during his lifetime. He knew that his people would be “free at last”.
“And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.” That’s usually where we stop the quote from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians, but his next words are “pursue love”. In fact, the whole passage has been about love, its importance and unending nature, its qualities and ways. That’s not surprising, since it’s what Jesus mostly talks about too – love – and also where his life is centered, in love for others, for himself, for God. Martin Luther King, Jr. seemed centered in the same streams of love.
Too often, Christians, and people from other religions, center their lives on faith, or on hope – they become dogmatic in their faith, or they live in the too sweetly pleasant future with their hope. But the greatest of these is love – that’s where the center should be. A love so strong that you are willing to lay down your life, a love that is more powerful than death. In 1963, Martin Luther King, Jr. said “If a man hasn’t discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.”
In King’s final
talk, on
Over the years since his assassination, King’s words have called to us, some well-known, others discovered fresh by us again and again. We are moving on with our own dreams. We don’t want to be Martin Luther King, Jr, but we’d be better people if we could find a way to be as he was. We needn’t become a Christian, because he was one, in order to embolden our dreams, but we could find in our religious journeys a touchpoint with his that helps us to live more truly as ourselves. He said, “Raise a call for an all embracing and unconditional love for all mankind.” (humankind). Yes, let’s call out for love for the whole wide world, beginning here and now. Let’s bring forth the dream of justice and peace, and center it in love. Amen.