Sermons at St. John’s Presbyterian Church

2727 College Avenue Berkeley, California 94705
(510) 845-6830 

Martin Luther King, Jr., Dangerous Man and Prophet

Transcribed from the sermon preached January 15, 2012

The Reverend Max Lynn, Pastor


Scripture:  Exodus 4:10-12,5:1-2, Luke 6: 20-38

It was one of the first memories of my mother crying: There were only three tv stations back then, ABC, NBC and CBS. A special news bulletin broke into regular programming: “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has been shot.” Shortly after the announcement, they showed a clip of the Washington Memorial speech….There was something inspired, different, more powerful about this speech than anything I had ever witnessed. My dad, the history teacher, gave us the background. My mom, the passionate, angry and eager to show her small part, told a story. Years earlier, Mom was in the Dallas airport in Texas and heard white people next to her making fun of the African American woman trying to carry her bags and shuffle three small kids along. My mom got up, and grabbed a couple of bags and helped the family out to a taxi. On her way back someone said, “We don’t help niggers around here.”

I was five years old when King died, and this was my first lesson that my little life was situated within a larger history, and this history mattered to my parents. And as I listened to King’s speech, I was moved by the passion and the massive crowd. It is to this moment, the death of Martin Luther King Jr. and the hearing of his dream, that I trace my dream of being a preacher.

What a gift it is to the Church and society when someone answers the call to be Christ alive in his time. It reminds us who we are supposed to be, what a Christian is supposed to be. We know Martin wasn’t perfect, but by the grace of God he certainly embodied the command to love your neighbor as yourself, to turn the other cheek. We witness as well in his life, how the righteous suffering of one or some, does in fact help redeem the world. He is one of those great examples of the living Word of Christ, and a witness that the words of scripture are not just hocus pocus, that a life of a Christian can be set apart, inspired, lifted up above the madness of the world.

And thanks to King and all those who worked with him, we have a very different nation than when he first began his work. Certainly it would have been unthinkable back then to imagine Barack Obama being elected president. This is a partial realization of King’s Dream, that one day we would have a nation where children are “judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

It is appropriate that we have finally erected a monument, a stone statue of Martin in Washington DC. But there is also the danger that as Martin Luther King Jr has become mainstream, we forget the radical prophetic nature of the embodied love of Christ.

There has always been a danger that our prophetic religious figures are co-opted by the status quo. Since at least Constantine, Jesus has too often been co-opted and softened to fit nicely and quietly into unjust society. It is a sad truth that as the Western empires made their journeys of conquest, they dragged along a co-opted Christ and forced it down the throats of native peoples. In the conquest of the Americas the thirst for riches led the so called Christians to horrific crimes against indigenous people.  Bartolome de Las Casas chronicles the darkness: pregnant women flayed open, their fetuses skewered; fighting dogs ripping children to pieces. Las Casas tells the story of the Taino chief Hatuer, who was caught and convicted for armed resistance. When asked on his funeral pyre if he wished baptism so that he could live forever, he asked for clarification: “Do Christians go to heaven?” “Yes,” replied the priest. “Then I would rather go to hell.”

Thankfully the Spirit of Christ continued to bust out of the casket fitted by empire and shake people up. Prophets spoke out. In Hispaniola five hundred years ago, the Dominican Friar Montesino stood up to preach an advent sermon to his brothers and sister Spanish: “With what right and with what justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible servitude? With what authority have you waged such detestable wars against a people who were so gentle and peaceful in your lands, where you have consumed uncountable numbers of them with death and unheard of tortures? …Are they not men? Do they not have rational souls? Are you not obligated to love them as you love yourselves? Do you not understand this? Do you not feel this? How is it that you are in such deep, lethargic sleep? ” (Wilson, Andrew. With What Right and What Justice. First Things. Dec. 2001. P. 50)

And when indigenous people died off, the European so called “Christians replaced them with Africans. There was an African slave ship named the “Good Ship Jesus,” as if God had ordained their cruel oppression. And the scripture was used by oppressors to placate and keep the slaves subservient. But thanks to the protestant Reformation, literacy for the purpose of reading scripture trickled down to slaves. And it is one of the great truths of history, that though scripture has too often been brought as a tool of the oppressor, the liberating Word of God cannot be held down. Rather than simply accept the idea that slavery was ordained by God, slaves read how God heard the cries of his people, and sent Moses to tell ol’ Pharaoh, “Let my people go!”

The co-optation of Jesus and the petrifaction of scripture is by no means finished. Somehow it is the so called Christian backed candidates who promote hate and war, and many churches are more concerned that children learn the world was created in six days than that those children have health care. They want them to be born, but they don’t care if they live.

And so too it is a mixed blessing to incorporate Martin Luther King Jr. into a national and cultural treasure. Cornel West, Christian philosopher who has just moved from one Presbyterian University, Princeton, to another, Union Theological Seminary in New York, warns against the “Santiclausification” of Martin Luther King. With all the cozy celebrations of King around the country, “He just becomes a nice little old man with a smile with toys and a bag, not a threat to anybody, as if his fundamental commitment to unconditional love and unarmed truth does not bring to bear certain kinds of pressure to a status quo. So the status quo feels so comfortable as though it’s a convenient thing to do rather than acknowledge him as what he was, what the FBI said, “The most dangerous man in America.” Why? Because of his fundamental commitment to love and to justice and trying to keep track of the humanity of each and every one of us.” http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/on-martin-luther-king-day-remember-the-message-not-the-monument/2012/01/11/gIQAx2YXrP_story.html

King, the disciple of Christ, was a critic of racism, poverty and war, and he preached that Christians ought to actively work to eliminate them. To the degree that we are complacent and comfortable as racism, poverty and war continue, we should be uncomfortable with King. We should feel uncomfortable to the degree we are a comfortable church. If the Gospel doesn’t shake us up a bit, then it is not likely the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Woe to us if we are rich and full and popular, and do nothing to further peace, justice and equality.

I know we are all busy people. If we are lucky we have jobs and families to look after, soccer games and music lessons, back to school nights, dinner and laundry, bills and mail and email. And maybe we come back to church because we want our kids to know a bit about God. And we don’t think we are that good a Christian, and we have never been activist types and we don’t like public speaking. Yet God sees the disproportionate poverty and incarceration rate among African Americans, and the demonization of immigrants and gays, and that we treat corporations as humans for lobbying and speech yet there is never any human employee found responsible when corporate action and policy results in the destruction of homes, pensions, lives or Creation… God sees that we spend mountains of money on war while the poor are trapped in a valley of despair without adequate schools, health care, or job training, and God says, I need someone to go down and turn things around. And our excuses are not as important as the job to be done, our complaint of inadequacy not as great as God’s love or as important as the journey of liberation to which we have been called.

So I leave us with a quote from King: Even a superficial look at history shows that social progress never rolls in on the wheels of inevitability. It comes through the tireless effort and the persistent work of men and women willing to be coworkers with God. Without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. “  Forgiving ourselves for being born into a world of prejudice and violence, let us commit body and soul to the transforming love of Christ, and in both small and bold acts, live and work with love and peace. “Forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a constant attitude.”

This is the Gospel of Jesus Christ.