This year Easter was on April 4 which was also the 53rd anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. In the years since his untimely death at the age of 39, the following question has been asked repeatedly, “Who will be the next Dr. King?” I believe that this is the wrong question if we are to honor and continue his legacy. I was reminded of this earlier in the week when I saw a video clip of part of Dr. King’s landmark speech “Beyond Vietnam” given at Riverside Church in New York on April 4, 1967, one year to the day before he was killed. The video clip is posted below, and I hope you will take the time to watch it and reflect on it. Throughout the speech, Dr. King refers to Scripture and his own Christian faith as the foundation for God’s call on his life to resist what he calls the giant triplets of evil (racism, militarism, and poverty) through the power of nonviolent redemptive love. Yet he goes on to share the following words that are meant for all of us:
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God, and our brothers wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full men, and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message—of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
The imperative and questions Dr. King poses above are addressed to us 53 years later. So the question is not “Who will be the next Dr. King?” Rather it is, “Will you and I commit to discerning and following God’s call to nonviolent, sacrificial, redemptive love in our time starting now? The good news of the resurrection of Jesus that we celebrated on Easter is that this kind of love is the greatest power and ultimate reality for our lives and our world. Will we dare to not only believe this but to also make it the foundation for our lives? As Dr. King said, “The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise, we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.”