Reflections on Martin Luther King Day

It is both sobering and deeply moving to honor the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King this year, when the seemingly unrestrained power of the federal government is in the hands of those whose vision of America is antithetical to nearly everything King stood for.

We are living through yet another fierce backlash against the efforts to reckon with the embedded racism and economic inequities in our country, including the erasure of our history and the dismantling of institutions that protect our democracy, care for our people, and sustain the planet upon which all life depends.

Yet we are not without resources. King would be the first to remind us not to give up on one another; that truth pressed to earth will rise again, that no lie can live forever, and that God has a way of wringing good out of evil.

King was no stranger to dynamics of backlash and retrenchment–it was as much a part of the Civil Rights story as the moments of sweet triumph after a long, hard-won struggle to secure some measure of human dignity or equal rights. He had strong things to say when racism and white supremacy struck back hard, and in response to the arrogance and complacency of religious leaders who took it upon themselves to criticize him from a distance.

Let me remind you of what he said on those occasions when he found himself in the pulpit speaking to hurting people, those whose children had been killed or dreams had been shattered. King was their pastor, and he called them to tap into the deep wells of faith in God to carry them through.

We need those same wells now.

One Sunday in 1966, King was at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta. The sermon he preached wasn’t for a big public meeting or in preparation for some event that we now consider historic. It was Sunday morning. And it’s clear that King was trying to help the congregation deal with disappointment, hardship and loss, when the blessings of God seemed far indeed.

“Don’t imagine that there’s something wrong,” he said. “Failure is as much a fact of life as success; disappointment as likely as fulfillment. Take your burden. Look at it, don’t run from it. Say this is my grief and I must bear it. Look at it hard and ask, ‘How can I transform this liability into a blessing?’”

He went on to describe the power and the presence of God in those times.

God doesn’t say that you’re going to escape tension; God doesn’t say that you’re doing to escape disappointment; God doesn’t say that you’re going to escape trials and tribulations. But God has the power to give you a kind of inner equilibrium through your pain. So let not your hearts be troubled, Jesus says. . .Come to me, all you that labor and are heavy laden. Come to me all who are burdened down. Come to me, all that are frustrated, with clouds of anxiety floating in your mental skies. I will give you rest. And the rest God gives passes all understanding. The world doesn’t understand this kind of rest, because it’s a rest that makes it possible for you to stand up amid outer storms and yet maintain inner calm.

On March 3, 1968, a month before his death, Martin was back at Ebenezer. The non-violence movement was unraveling all around the country, and he was no longer the primary spokesperson for his people. In this sermon, he was working hard to make his peace with failure.

I want to preach this morning from the subject: Unfulfilled Dreams. My text is taken from the eighth chapter of First Kings. It’s not one of the most familiar passages in the Old Testament . . . David, as you know, was a great king. And the one thing that was foremost in David’s mind and in his heart was to build a great temple. The building of the temple was considered to be the most significant thing facing the Hebrew people, and the king was expected to bring this into being.

David had the desire; and he started. And then we come to that passage over in the eighth chapter of First Kings, which reads, “And it was in the heart of David to build a house for the name of the Lord God of Israel. And the Lord said to David, “Whereas it was in thine heart to build a house unto my name, thou didst well that it was within thine heart.”

And that’s really what I want to talk about this morning: It was well that it was within his heart. As if to say, “David, you will not be able to finish the temple… Your dream will not be fulfilled. The majestic hope that guided your days will not be carried out in terms of an actual temple coming into being that you were able to build. But I bless you, David, because it was within your heart.

So many of us start out building temples; temples of character, temples of justice, temples of peace. And so often we don’t finish them. Because life is like Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony.” At so many points we start, we try, we set out to build our various temples. And I guess one of the great agonies of life is that we are constantly trying to finish that which is unfinishable. We are commanded to do that. And so we, like David, find ourselves in so many instances having to face the fact that our dreams are not fulfilled…

…If I can leave you with anything, let me urge you to be sure that you have a strong boat of faith. The winds are going to blow. The storms of disappointment are coming. The agonies and the anguishes of life are coming. Be sure that your boat is strong, and also be very sure that you have an anchor. In times like these, you need an anchor. And be very sure that the anchor holds.

We need to tend to our boats now, and remember that God is our anchor.

On the eve of his assassination, King preached his last sermon in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to march in solidarity with striking sanitation workers.

One memorable portion of the sermon was his retelling the story of the Good Samaritan: He reminded his listeners that two religious leaders saw a man mortally wounded and chose to pass him by. Only a man of a despised race, the Samaritan, stopped to help. That man illustrated what King called a “dangerous unselfishness,” which is the essence of love.

The first question the Levite and the priest asked when they saw the wounded man was ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ The Good Samaritan reversed the question. ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’... That is the question before you tonight. Not, ‘If I stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to me?’ But ‘If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?’ That’s the question.”

That is our question now. Not what will happen to us if we step up in a time when violence is state-sanctioned. But what will happen to those in the greatest danger if we do not step up, show up, speak up? What will happen if we don’t do everything we can to protect what we can and never give up hope?

For all that King endured, he never lost hope. In the midst of circumstances that we would never have chosen but find ourselves in, with God as our strength, it is our turn to do the same.