Next Saturday, 16th January, is the anniversary of the birth of Dr Martin Luther King Junior, a Man of God whose notion of the Gospel wasn’t restricted to the pulpit. Dr King was convinced that you had to take the Gospel out onto the Streets. The Gospel demanded that we all fight injustice with every non-violent means possible.
One of Dr King’s many famous quotes reminds us that:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere!
It was not enough for us to stay at home and pray. It was not enough for us to devote time to Bible Study. It was not enough for us to love the Lord in our hearts. All these things are important but if that’s all we are going to do as Christians when God’s plan for all human children is being so wilfully ignored, then we may as well not bother!
If the Gospel meant anything at all we had to live it in our daily lives. Not just play lip service to it but actually make it a reality for all God’s children. If we stood back and let injustice happen then we have no justice at all. It’s all or nothing!
This is a tough act to follow.
It’s a standard that we all find difficult to meet.
God’s standards often are.
That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t bother trying. That we shouldn’t offer ourselves, our lives, our failures up to God and ask that God may sustain us as we struggle to be the people God has called us to be.
God understands that it isn’t easy. Giving up was the only thing that Martin Luther-King would consider as defeat. Our enemies can not defeat us if God is on or side. We can only defeat ourselves by giving up the struggle to create God’s Realm on this earth.
In our third reading from a work by Dr King, he makes it very clear that it’s often in the most difficult of situations that God’s presence becomes the most real to us. He wrote:
“In the midst of outer dangers I have felt an inner calm and know resources of strength that only God could give. In many instances I have felt the power of God transforming the fatigue of despair into the buoyancy of hope.”
Sometimes I think that we should almost thank God for making it difficult. When life is easy, when there are no real challenges, it is easy to believe that we are in control, that we can sort things out. I’m very much a doer in life. I want to get things done and believe that if I work hard enough I can do anything! That is, of course, not true. It’s when things are tough that God reminds us that we can’t do it all on our own. We need each other. We need God!
Martin Luther-King was sustained in his struggles by a God whose zeal for justice was being lived out in the struggles of the Black Civil Rights Movement.
We can’t do it on our own, but with God no one can stop us!
So why do we give up? Why aren’t we all out there day to day making the world a better place?
If God has made it so abundantly clear to us that part of our call is to fight for justice like Dr King, why do we all do so little?
There are lots of reasons. Some justifiable. My mother, who, as you know, is fighting cancer at the moment, I think can be excused from protest marches.
But, I suggest to you today that the single greatest reason for us not answering Christ’s many calls to us, is fear.
We are too frightened of the powerful to stand up against their actions.
We are too frightened of the weak to see their struggle as our struggle.
We are too frightened of each other to put our heads over the parapet.
We are too frightened of ourselves to love ourselves for what we are.
It is very unlikely in this country at this time that anyone will faced death or imprisonment for speaking out. We wont face dogs and police batons like Dr King’s non-violent protesters faced thirty years ago.
But there are fears that are very immediate for some people.
What if I’m seen on a Gay Rights Protest March and people find out I’m gay? Someone, no one here, once said to me that they would not even write to their MP about a equal age of consent because they didn’t want anyone to know that they were gay!
That terror is very real for some people and I do not seek to dismiss it for a moment.
Recognising fear is not wrong. Being afraid is not shameful. It is said that only a fool is never afraid. Only a fool wants danger, wants risk. A coward gives in to those fears. The brave go forward despite those fears.
I am sure that Martin Luther-King was afraid many times. I am sure the weak human child that is within us all wanted to run, wanted to hide, wanted to go back to the quiet life of preaching he once thought was his calling. I am sure he did not feel big enough to deal with the enormity of the events that he was facing.
But Dr King loved God and believed with all his heart that God’s plan for humanity would triumph. He stepped out in faith. Through love and faith he knew that the consequences of ignoring the Gospel were worse, worse for him ,worse for us all, than the consequences of struggling against injustice.
In our reading from Acts today St Peter is preaching to a crowd. He tells them:
I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is rights is acceptable to God.
Fearing God to me means that we must be more afraid of God’s Realm not being made real to all people than we should be of the consequences of trying to make this happen!
This does not mean that God wants us to be afraid for fears sake. We must also do what is right. We are not talking about an Old Testament God of thunderbolts and punishments. We are talking about a God that is offering us a life so full, so whole, so healthy that the prospect of us not living in this way must be utterly terrifying.
What God is offering us all is truly wonderful. Our God has no partiality, as our reading tells us. Each and every one of us is loved equally and is of equal value. We are called to live our lives in recognition of this. The world we would create in so doing would be wonderful. A real heaven on earth! The chance of creating such a world must be a priority for us. It is the prospect of our failure that we should fear more than any human danger we may face in trying to achieve it.
We commemorate the last supper at every service when we celebrate communion. It can so easily become formalistic. Certain prayers are said at certain places. It gets all very theological and technical. Who can celebrate Holy Communion? Who can receive? Does the bread and wine actually become the body and blood of Christ or only symbolically?
If we are not careful we have a rather dry, academic exercise of archaic prayer.
The last supper can’t have been like that. We had a young man surrounded by his closest friends celebrating his last meal before he was going to suffer an agonising and humiliating death. He must have been frightened witless. In the garden he prays to be spared from it all. Every bit of pain that you can imagine would have been felt, was felt by Jesus. He was human after all. Just because he was the son of God didn’t mean that he could endure pain any more easily than we do.
The difference between Jesus and myself is that he willingly bore pain and suffering because of those he loved. Jesus could have spared himself by denying God. He could have opted for a second-best life that was safer and pain-free. He could have ignored his calling.
His love for God and for all of us was so great that he faced up to what he had to do.
Martin Luther-King is an example, one of many I could mention, of how each and every one of us here can, in our own small ways, become Christ-like. We too can respond to God’s call to love the world and to seek to change it through love.
Yes it’s frightening. Yes it involves us in an enormous risk. But let us think just how frightening it would be if all we could say at the end of our lives was that injustice continued to flourish and that we did nothing about it!
In his last ever sermon, given in Memphis shortly before he was assassinated, Dr King summed up very well the joy of putting aside your human fears and leaping out in faith with the Lord. A great joy where you are more focused on the reality of God’s Realm than the mundanity of human danger.
Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter now. Because I have been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like a long life. Longevity has its place. But I ma not concerned about that right now.I just want to do God's will.And God has allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I have seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land.
And I am happy tonight. I am not worried about anything. I am not frearing anyone. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
Friends there is a Promised Land out there. Let no one tell you otherwise. God has made that promise. God’s promises are always kept.
It is up to us, each and every one of us here tonight, whether we struggle through the desert towards freedom or stay in Egypt in the bondage of our fears.
Friends, Let us pray tonight that we will not be afraid anymore, that God will give each of us the strangth and courage go to journey on, to the Promised Land where God's love and justice will be available to all.
For more information on the life and work of Dr Martin Luther-King Jnr, please visit the Dr Martin Luther-King Jnr Papers Project.
This sermon was delivered by Stephen Harte at Holy Trinity MCC Edinburgh on Sunday 7th March 1999.
© Stephen Harte 1999. Moral rights have been asserted.
