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nobody@vox.com(the rev. nicole janelle) — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 22:01:44 -0800

I consider myself a “child of the sixties”, by which I mean not that I was born in the 1960s, but that they were my formative years. In 1969 I was 25 years old. During the preceding decade I arrived at some clarity, at least in broad terms, about what I value, how the world works and my place in that world. That’s what I mean by formative years. There are many iconic, shorthand ways to describe the sixties. Some people refer to the music, or certain movies, or the drug scene, or the war in Vietnam or the protests against the war. Certainly all those things were important in my life. But for me, being a “child of the sixties” means, above all, that you can picture, as if it were yesterday, exactly where you were and what you were doing when you heard news of the assassinations of John Kennedy, of Martin Luther King, Jr. and of Robert Kennedy. Each of those days is seared into my mind; they are as clear in my memory as the days my three children were born!

On April 4, 1968, the day Martin Luther King was shot, I was walking in downtown Palo Alto with a friend from work, Gil Johnson. Through the plate glass window of a store, we noticed a TV screen showing footage of the assassination of Dr. King. We didn’t even go inside. We just stood transfixed on the sidewalk, staring at the images. I felt stunned and disbelieving, as I had when Kennedy was shot, but this time more disillusioned. It seemed there was a world conspiracy to get rid of the leaders we admired most.

Martin Luther King, Jr. did not set out to be a civil rights leader. He came from a middle class family in Atlanta, his father and maternal grandfather were respected Baptist preachers, and young Martin was an impressive scholar, going all the way to get a Doctorate of Philosophy in Systematic Theology from Boston University. Before he was tapped to lead the Montgomery bus boycott, King’s main claim to fame was probably his dissertation entitled A Comparison of the Conceptions of God in the Thinking of Paul Tillich and Henry Wieman (definitely not destined to become a NY Times bestseller). In later years, King often remarked that in the mid fifties, when he got married, received his Ph.D. from Boston University and began serving as the pastor of a Baptist church in Montgomery, he had no idea what lay ahead. But, in 1955 when the organizers of the Montgomery bus boycott were looking around for a public spokesman and leader, the new Baptist minister in town seemed liked the perfect choice. Dr. King was eloquent and hadn’t been in town long enough to antagonize the establishment, either black or white.

It occurred to me when reading the Gospel of John for today that the time when the Montgomery organizers identified Martin Luther King, Jr. as their new leader might have been a little like this description of Jesus being identified as the new leader. Until the moment of Jesus’ baptism, John had been the Jewish preacher that people were flocking to listen to and be baptized by. But after the baptism of Jesus, John comes to understand that his role has been to pave the way for a new and more powerful leader. John tells his followers: “I myself did not know him; but I came baptizing with water for this reason, that he might be revealed to Israel.” And, those who have been following John the Baptist do start following Jesus. “The next day, John again was standing with two of his disciples, and as he watched Jesus walk by, he exclaimed, ‘Look, here is the Lamb of God!’ The two disciples heard him say this, and they followed Jesus.” And later that day one of the disciples, Andrew, went to look for his brother Simon and told him, “We have found the Messiah”. We have found the anointed one.

It’s almost too easy to find these parallels between the life of Jesus and the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. Both men emerged as inspirational leaders of a social movement in their early thirties. Both exercised leadership through a combination of teaching, preaching and direct social action. Both Jesus and Martin Luther King, Jr. used non-violent but purposely-provocative methods to identify and confront injustice. Both stood in solidarity with the poor and disenfranchised. And both Jesus and Martin Luther King were killed before they were forty, increasingly feared by the government and rejected by many in their own movement.

Despite the occasional set back, the early years of Dr. King’s leadership of the civil rights movement were remarkably successful. There was the Montgomery bus boycott, the establishment of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the integration of the lunch counters in Atlanta, and of course the historic March on Washington marked by King’s inspirational “I have a dream” speech. These are the parts of the Martin Luther King Jr. story that we like to remember. Over the last forty years, a popular oversimplified version of Martin Luther King’s life has emerged. It’s easy to get the impression that Dr. King led a string of increasingly effective desegregation campaigns in the South, which culminated triumphantly in 1964 with the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize, and that almost everyone was grateful to Dr. King for setting the country on the right path.

But the truth is that Martin Luther King, Jr. experienced at least as much failure and criticism as he did success and admiration during his years of leadership. This was especially true after 1964, when Dr. King moved beyond integration efforts in the South. In preparing this sermon, my most valuable source, especially about the darker moments in King’s life, was Gary Commin’s chapter on the life of Martin Luther King, Jr. in the book, Spiritual People, Radical Lives. I learned, for example, that Dr. King heard the news that he had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while hospitalized for exhaustion. In 1965 State troopers stopped the marches on Selma and King lost the support of many of his followers. In fact, things pretty much went downhill for King after 1964. Gary puts it starkly: “The last three years of his life offered no honors or victories, only declining acclaim and developing despair.” White liberals, who had supported King’s fight against segregation in Southern cities, were much less enthusiastic when Dr. King went north to confront racism and poverty in Chicago. And black leaders bitterly argued against King’s public opposition to the Vietnam War, on both strategic and patriotic grounds.

Here’s how Martin Luther King describes the events of 1965 and beyond in his last book, Where Do We Go From Here. Referring to his “I have a dream” speech, he writes:

I remember the first time I saw that dream turn into a nightmare, just a few weeks
after I had talked about it. It was when four beautiful, unoffending, innocent
Negro girls were murdered in a church in Birmingham, Alabama. I watched that
dream turn into a nightmare as I moved through the ghettos of the nation and saw
my black brothers and sisters perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst
of a vast ocean of material prosperity, and saw the nation doing nothing to grapple
with the Negroes’ problem of poverty. I saw that dream turn into a nightmare as I
watched my black brothers and sisters in the midst of their anger and
understandable outrage, in the midst of their hurt, in the midst of their
disappointment, turn to misguided riots to try to solve that problem. I saw that
dream turn into a nightmare as I warched the war in Vietnam escalating, and as I
saw so-called military advisers, 16,000 strong, turn into fighting soldiers until
today over 500,000 American boys are fighting on Asian soil.

So what kept Martin Luther King, Jr. going through this nightmare?

Simply put, it was his relationship with God.

The oversimplified version of Martin Luther King Jr.’s life not only ignores his failures, but also pays surprisingly little attention to his religious faith. Dr. King’s training as a Baptist preacher is regularly cited as the source of his oratorical skills, but the centrality of prayer and King’s relationship with God are almost brushed under the rug. Which is strange, because Dr. King frequently told this story of what he called the most important night in his life. It was in 1956, after he had moved to Montgomery to become pastor of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. He had recently agreed to help lead the Montgomery bus boycott. King answered a late night phone call. An unfamiliar voice barked out a death threat and then hung up. With his wife and baby daughter asleep in the next room, King sat down in his kitchen with a cup of coffee that he never drank, overcome by a sense of fear and loneliness. He felt that he didn’t have the courage to go on, much less the strength to lead others. Desperate, King prayed for help, and had an epiphany. Dr. King described what happened next:

At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying: ‘Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth, and God will be at your side forever.’ Almost at once my fears began to go.

That inner conviction of God being at his side sustained Martin Luther King, Jr. through all the achievements and disappointments that were to follow. The words from the prophet Isaiah that we heard this morning could speak as well for Dr. King, especially towards the end. “I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity; yet surely my cause is with the Lord, and my reward with my God.”

I am grateful to Nicole for the opportunity to prepare this sermon. It’s given me a chance to become re-inspired by Martin Luther King’s life. For me the inspiration comes not from Dr. King’s early successes in the civil rights movement, but in how faithfully he continued speaking and working against injustice during his last three years of “declining acclaim and developing despair.” Dr. King held onto a faith that gave him infinite hope, even in the face of finite disappointment. This is the faith I want to share.

There is a phrase of Martin Luther King Jr.’s that my husband quotes frequently, that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Although the words were familiar to me, I was surprised and profoundly moved when I discovered that they come not from the heady, successful days of the civil rights movement, but from a sermon that Dr. King delivered just four days before he was killed by an assassin’s bullet. On March 31, 1968, from the pulpit of the National Cathedral, Martin Luther King, Jr. declared: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

Amen.

The Rev. Dr. Joanne Leslie, Deacon
St. Mike's 1.20.2008

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