Today is our national holiday in honor and memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His name is one of the most familiar in modern American history. In the nation’s capital, the MLK, Jr. Memorial stands among our major monuments. Yet the danger of today and of that monument is the temptation to domesticate and trivialize Dr. King’s life and witness through turning him into a spokesman for vague generalities about getting along and doing good deeds. This results in Dr. King being coopted by those who want to push their own agenda or to promote holiday sales of a variety of products. On the other hand, the gift of today is to allow Dr. King to speak his own words that continue to inspire and challenge us today. I believe that his witness is summarized in a powerful way in one speech (Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence) that he gave at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967. Click here for the link to that speech (the page also includes an audio link). It is a long address but well worth your time, because Dr. King traces the thread that ran throughout his leadership of the civil rights movement – his commitment to being a disciple of Jesus Christ and to nonviolent love. He also proclaims the challenge of recognizing and addressing what he calls the giant triplets of evil – racism, war, and poverty. Here are just a few quotes from that address:
About Dr. King’s call to follow Jesus:
I cannot forget that the Nobel Peace Prize was also a commission, a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for the brotherhood of man. This is a calling that takes me beyond national allegiances.
But even if it were not present, I would yet have to live with the meaning of my commitment to the ministry of Jesus Christ. To me, the relationship of this ministry to the making of peace is so obvious that I sometimes marvel at those who ask me why I am speaking against the war. Could it be that they do not know that the Good News was meant for all men—for communist and capitalist, for their children and ours, for black and for white, for revolutionary and conservative?
Finally, as I try to explain for you and for myself the road that leads from Montgomery to this place, I would have offered all that was most valid if I simply said that I must be true to my conviction that I share with all men the calling to be a son of the living God. Beyond the calling of race or nation or creed is this vocation of sonship and brotherhood. Because I believe that the Father is deeply concerned, especially for His suffering and helpless and outcast children, I come tonight to speak for them. This I believe to be the privilege and the burden of all of us who deem ourselves bound by allegiances and loyalties which are broader and deeper than nationalism and which go beyond our nation’s self-defined goals and positions.
About Dr. King’s Commitment to Nonviolence and Love:
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores, and thereby speed the day when “every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low; the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain.”
Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another, for love is God. And every one that loveth is born of God and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God, for God is love. . . . If we love one another, God dwelleth in us and his love is perfected in us.” Let us hope that this spirit will become the order of the day.
If we truly want to remember and honor Dr. King, there is no better way than learning more about who he was and what he said beyond the few general quotes that we hear at this time each year. Then we are challenged to continue his legacy by following the way of Jesus’ nonviolent inclusive love in our time.
