Readings: Romans 12:1-3
Letter from the Birmingham City Jail”
Martin Luther King, Jr. was an important person for me in my formative years, and so it is hard for me to let the occasion of his birthday observance pass without bringing it into our worship service and into my preaching, especially since I know there are others at Sojourners for whom that is true, that he is an important person for them.
I am of an age to have lived through the times when Dr. King was a central figure in the life of our nation. I was in Chicago the summer Dr. King added the resources of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and his presence to the civil rights movement in Chicago. I volunteered in the movement there, as I had done in other places before coming to Chicago. I had the occasion to hear him speak not only in large public gatherings but in smaller settings, in churches where workers and supporters were making plans and gaining strength for the next day. I say all this not to somehow tout my credentials as a civil rights activist, but simply to say that when I say Martin Luther King, Jr. was an important person for me, I mean it in a very personal way. He touched my life in tangible ways. Ministry is all I have ever done as an adult, and although such statements are always filled with imponderables (what would have happened if this or that were different, if this person had not been there), I am quite sure it is the case that I would not have become a minister without his influence on my life. I am grateful to be part of a church where it is appropriate to bring his birthday into our time of worship.
At the same time, I do so with a not entirely comfortable feeling. There are all sorts of unproductive, unhelpful, unfaithful ways to acknowledge Dr. King’s birthday, unfaithful both in the sense of unfaithful in a Christian context and untrue to Dr. King himself. I feel like I need to caution myself at every turn. Now don’t go this way, don’t go down that road, don’t take that approach. There can be, and from where I sit there has been, a tendency to engage in a kind of hero-making that is an extension of the cult of celebrity so widespread in our culture that is always unproductive, unhelpful, unhealthy, and unfaithful. The tendency to focus on what a great person he was and not to focus on what he stood for, similar to what I see as a mistake in Christian theology, to focus more on the person of Jesus than on what he stood for and the directions he leads us.
Similarly, there can be, and from where I sit there has been, a tendency to engage in nostalgia when honoring Dr. King, talking about his times as though they were past, admiring him but also implicitly admiring ourselves for what we have accomplished and how far we have come, being thankful that “we have overcome” those evils Dr. King was engaged with. Whether by engaging in the adulation of a hero or by placing him safely in the past, we separate ourselves safely from him, so that there is no real challenge involved in his birthday observances.
And there can be, and from where I sit there has been, a tendency to restrict Dr. King to his role as a leader in the movement for racial justice, a fighter for the right to ride at the front of the bus, to sit at lunch counters, and to exercise the right to vote, and to further narrow him to the man who spoke at the March on Washington and said “I have a dream”…and to ignore or conveniently forget about his steadfast, and controversial, commitment to non-violence as a way of life, his vocal, and very controversial, opposition to the war in Vietnam, his opposition indeed to militarism in general as a tool of foreign policy, his concern with general issues of poverty as well as race, and his questioning, his controversial questioning of capitalism as an economic system.
To act as though Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. were some kind of a consensus, cultural hero, even though recognizing that there are some who still don’t buy into the consensus, but to act as though he was someone whose greatness would be recognized by any right thinking person, and who only said and did things that would be easily recognized by most good people as admirable, is out of keeping with who he was. Not only was he not a perfect person; he was a controversial person, sometimes even among the people who were his friends and associates and co-workers in the movement. And to make his birthday a national holiday and lift him up as someone we all ought to admire is on the one hand something I want to endorse but on the other hand is out of keeping with who he was.
He was an outsider in American society. Partly that role was forced on him by the color of his skin. Partly he chose that role as one who was willing to challenge American society at its core, not only its obvious but persistent racial bigotry, but also its military power and its capitalist economy. As much as he saw himself as speaking for the best values of the United States as well as being grounded in his understandings of Christian morality and what is right in the sight of God, he also saw very clearly that his role was to be an outsider, to question if not at every turn, certainly at many turns, the way we do business as a society.
He saw it not only as his role but as the role of every Christian and of the Christian church as a whole. And it is because of what he had to say about that, not only because it was an eloquent response to so-called white liberals or moderates of the time, but because of what he had to say about the role of the church that still applies today, that I chose the words from his “Letter from the Birmingham City Jail” as a reading this morning. You heard them; let me repeat just the last part of them. “Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that sacred body through social neglect and fear of being non-conformists. The contemporary church is often a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. It is so often the arch-supporter of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church’s silent and often vocal sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If the church of today does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authentic ring, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the 20th (one can now add the 21st) century.”
The immediate context of those words of course was the civil rights movement that Dr. King was so deeply involved in at the time, but they could apply to a much broader context, and Dr. King did apply them in a much broader context in the years that followed. He was disappointed in the church because it had failed to act in opposition to prevailing attitudes in society, had failed to be a prophetic voice, had failed to distinguish itself from the social mainstream, had failed to distinguish itself…period. He applied that view of what the church should be about to Montgomery in 1956, to Birmingham in 1963, and he applied it later when he opposed the Vietnam War a few years later. It is well to remember that opposition today a few days after the president announced his intention to re-emphasize the military option in Iraq. Birmingham was the occasion for Dr. King to express this vision of the church standing outside of established society, but his vision applied far beyond Birmingham.
Probably most people in this room would be offended at the notion that we live in a Christian nation, rightly so. But in the light of what we’re talking about here, the reason we should be offended is not only that it represents a dangerously misleading idea of what our pluralistic, diverse country is all about. It also represents a dangerously misleading idea of what Christianity is supposed to be about. Which is not to be aligned with the nation, any nation. The idea of a Christian nation should be as offensive to Christians as it is to citizens of the United States. It is the purpose of the Christian church and of Christians to stand outside the established structures, outside the mainstream. It is the purpose of the church to occupy a different ground to be in a position to challenge, to criticize, to speak prophetically, to question. It is not the purpose of the church to be one of the pillars of society, an institution to that provides for social stability, an organization that along with the home and the school makes for a healthy social fabric. Not that the church can’t do things that contribute to the public good from time to time. It can and it should. But its purpose is broader and different. If it does not to some degree, to some very large degree, stand apart from society, it loses its soul. Dr. King not only said that. He did things which exposed the soullessness of the Christian church.
This can all sound like a kind of an abstract, theoretical issue. Maybe it sounds that way the way I am talking about it this morning. I hope not, because although it is an issue that can be talked about abstractly, it is also a concern that at its core has to do with the heart as well as the mind, has to do with how we feel when we are together and trying to be church. Feelings are constantly changing and hard to pin down to be sure. There are all sorts of feelings that may be appropriate from time to time in our church experience. We may come to church sometimes needing to be comforted. We may at various times feel joyful, thoughtful, prayerful, grateful, loved, inspired, strengthened—all sorts of feelings are appropriately part of being church. But in addition to all those I have named and others, there is the feeling of being an alien, out-of-place, challenging, questioning presence in the society we are part of. To the degree we are not, as a church, producing that kind of feeling in one another, not as an abstract thought but as something we feel in our bones, to that degree we are failing to embody the vision of the church Dr. King was giving voice to.
In another place Dr. King said: “In a sense all of us must live the well-adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But there are some things in our social system to which all of us ought to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to the evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to the inequalities of an economic system which keeps necessities from the masses and provides luxuries to the classes. I never intend to become adjusted to the madness of militarism and the self-defeating method of physical violence. It may be that the salvation of the world lies in the hands of the maladjusted, and the challenge to us is to be maladjusted…” In light of those words and his words earlier about the church, it follows that it is part of the core purpose of the church to produce in us that very concrete, very real, very visceral sense of being maladjusted. If we don’t, we aren’t being the church.
I have often said that questioning is a part of faith, not just allowed but a necessary part of faith, and in part I believe it is the very purpose of the church to question itself and to question its own truth, our doctrine, our practice, in the name of God who is greater than all our institutions and creeds and ways of doing things, in the name of God to question everything about ourselves. I am saying today, with Dr. King’s help, that it is also the very purpose of the church to question others, policies of the government, ways of life, not to be conformed, as Paul put it, to the world as it is or to ourselves as we are. To practice a kind of divine discontent with the world as an integral and necessarily part of our faith. That is certainly not the only purpose of the church. It is certainly not all Christianity is about. But it is one very important thing Christianity is about, that I believe the church needs to be about, that I believe I need to be about. It is a lesson Dr. King teaches me, a truth he reminds me of over and over again. And for that I am grateful. Amen.
Jim Bundy
January 14, 2007