IJust a year ago, I was honored to offer the invocation at this county’s 11th annual Martin Luther King, Jr. celebration.

I am embarrassed to say that it was the first such celebration I had ever attended. But because it was the first, I was particularly receptive to what I heard and saw. My participation was not tarnished or dulled by familiarity, by that certain “ordinariness” that creeps in when we’ve been somewhere, done something, more than once; when we become a little blasé, a little complacent. And so everything was sharpened by that bright edge of newness, and I was deeply moved and inspired by the songs and speeches and prayers that filled the Civic Center. And I was lifted up, and carried along, by the living reality of two or three hundred of us gathered together, honoring and keeping alive the memory of a man whom I consider to be one of the great moral leaders of the twentieth century, one of the greatest inspirations I know for living with integrity in this difficult and dangerous world. One of my heroes.

But as the program unfolded and came to an end, I was struck by a sense of something missing, a feeling of standing still, a lack of energy and momentum. On this 75th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s birth, more than 35 years after his death, all the life and all the passion of the day were focused in the past, in the 39 brief years of his life, in the 13 transformative years of his public ministry, in the work that he did and the effect of that work on those who walked and wept and worked with him. What I missed was the spirit of a living legacy, the passion of new leadership, the energy of a community still looking forward, still fully engaged in the journey that Martin Luther King had begun, but that is still so far from over. This celebration, like all such celebrations past and future, near and far, serves to keep the flame of Dr. King’s dream alive. But nowhere could I see evidence that the torch of moral and ethical and civil rights leadership had been passed to a new leader, a new generation. I think we are still waiting for that.

In the meantime, we run the risk of elevating Martin Luther King Jr. to sainthood, and relegating ourselves to impotence. If we come to interpret Martin as one whose unique combination of experience and education, eloquence and courage, passion and compassion and inspiration and perhaps divine guidance converged in one particular time and place, then how ever can we take up his torch; who ever would be worthy? Some have tried: Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young; Marian Wright Edelman and Julian Bond and Jesse Jackson, but their calls to faith and to action echo off the walls of churches and State Houses and Civic Centers; the sparks glow for a brief time, then fade to nothing.

How, then, can we remember Martin Luther King, without reducing his memory to a romantic ideal? How can we understand at once the power of his life and his words, and the apparent fragility of his ministry? How can we respond, even now, in a way that is true to the spirit of his life and work, a spirit that deserves to live on not just in story but in redeemed lives; not just in celebration but in transformation of the world?

As I explore my own memories and my own responses, I am coming to understand Martin Luther King, Jr. as a prophet, consciously and appropriately heir to the prophetic tradition of Judaism and Christianity. A prophet whose words rang loud and true in his day and in ours, and will continue to resonate until, at long last, his visions are realized.

Martin Luther King surely understood the prophetic tradition. He was a Baptist minister by experience (he was licensed to preach in his 18th year), by ordination (when he was barely 19 years old, in the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta where he served as assistant to his father, who was pastor there), and by education (at Crozer Theological Seminary where he received a Bachelor of Divinity degree, and at Boston University where he received a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology. He readily quoted the Hebrew prophets in his most familiar speeches. He echoed the words of Amos in his “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered in Washington DC on August 28, 1963: “No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.” He quoted Micah in his Christmas Sermon on Peace, delivered to his congregation in Atlanta from the pulpit at Ebenezer Church on Christmas Eve, 1967: “I still have a dream today that in all of our state houses and city halls men will be elected to go there who will do justly and love mercy and walk humbly with their God. I still have a dream today that one day war will come to an end, that men will beat their plowshares into pruning hooks, that nations will no longer rise up against nations, neither will they study war any more.”

But quoting the prophets does not make you a prophet, and King surely understood this, too. To be truthful, I am not aware of his ever claiming the role or the mantle of prophecy – and why would he? Though Jesus pointed out that “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown…” (Mk. 6:4), Biblical prophets stood in the unenviable position of truthtellers to the powerful, and, as messengers, they were seldom more warmly received than their often-unwelcome messages.

Walter Brueggemann, in his examination of The Prophetic Imagination, depicts prophetic ministry, even in our own age, as “offering an alternative perception of reality and … letting people see their own history in the light of God’s freedom and his will for justice.” [The Prophetic Imagination. 1978. p. 110] The prophet’s perception is alternative to what Brueggemann calls “the dominant consciousness:” the status quo, the entrenched values that the wealthy and powerful in society are invested in maintaining. The prophet knows that the comfortable commonplaces are sustained at the expense of justice and mercy and the people’s own covenant with a higher order and a higher truth than those which may serve their short-term needs. And so the prophet criticizes, publicly naming the injustices that the people have learned not to see, taking seriously the pain and suffering that the people – even the rulers, in their insulation and numbness – have learned to ignore. And the prophet energizes, boldly inspiring the people with a vision of a new way of living, a new way of being with one another and with reality – past, present, and future.

Unitarian theologian James Luther Adams describes the “forthtelling,” – the analyzing and criticizing – function of the prophet as the action of “one who stands at the edge of a community’s experience and tradition, under the Great Taskmaster’s eye, viewing human life from a piercing perspective and bringing an imperative sense of the perennial and inescapable struggle of good against evil, of justice against injustice. In the name of the Holy One the prophet shakes us out of our pride and calls for a change of heart and mind and action. With fear and trembling the prophet announces crisis and demands ethical decision here and now.” [The Prophethood of All Believers in The Essential James Luther Adams: Selected Essays and Addresses. 1998. George K. Beach, ed. pp. 106-7]. But this is an incomplete picture, Adams, says, for the prophet is more than merely a critic. The prophet is also “foreteller” – predictor, visionary – “attempt[ing] to interpret the signs of the times and to see into the future. … At times of impending change and decision, they have seen the crisis as the crisis of an age; they have felt called to foresee the coming of a new epoch.” [ibid. pp. 107-108].

The indispensable tool of the prophet, then, is vision – an ability to see beneath the surface or beyond the horizon of the commonplace, the familiar. The prophet is an artist, holding up a mirror for society to see itself in all its inertia and complacency; painting a picture of what will be if nothing changes, what can be if everything changes. And the medium of the prophet is the word: powerful as poetry, enduring as prose, indelible as metaphor and symbol; written, spoken, hammered home to the place that’s deeper than logic and reason, the place that houses our own dreams and fears and hopes and possibilities.

Martin Luther King, with his vivid dreams and his compelling eloquence, was surely a prophet. Perhaps he became a prophet precisely because of who he was and where he was in a particular time of crisis. Richard Lischer, author of the book The Preacher King, suggests that, “King was summoned by events he did not initiate and exposed to conditions he did not create, but his response was so powerful an interpretation of events that it reshaped the conditions in which they originated. His answer was so true that it reframed the question. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not the first Negro to champion the cause of civil rights in the twentieth century. He was merely the first to name the struggle and declare its meaning.” [quoted in I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. 2000. Michael Eric Dyson. p. 304]. Reframing the question, naming the struggle, declaring its meaning. Truly, these are the marks of a prophet.

It has been said that King was not an original thinker. Certainly he used the words of the Hebrew prophets and of the prophet Jesus, and of liberal theologians and colleagues in ministry. But feminist thinker, writer, scholar bell hooks writes: “King’s personal magic resided in his ability to take complex ideas and break them down bit by bit, placing them in a vernacular form that rendered them accessible to the widest possible audience.” [Surrendered to Love: King’s Legacy in Shambhala Sun 13:3 (January 2005), p. 51] Making the vision concrete, describing it in words that are both accessible and indelible in the minds of the people – truly these are the marks of a prophet.

Michael Eric Dyson begins the introduction to his book I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. with his memory of the night King was killed. Sitting on the living room floor, nine-year-old Dyson was watching television when the program was interrupted by a news bulletin announcing that King had been shot. Following the reporting of the barest facts, Dyson remembers, “the television gave us an audience with King at a speech he had delivered the night before.” Dyson describes the speech: the words, the rhythm, the tone, the body language, the response of the audience, and his own response. And when the speech was over, Dyson remembers, “The audience on television, and in my heart, exploded in thunderous applause. It was a life-shaping introduction to an ebony seer whose words fairly brimmed with the pathos and poetry of black life. … I knew instantly that I was forever and unalterably changed. King’s rhetoric electrified me, stood the hair on my arms at attention as he trumpeted a clarion call for freedom.” [I May Not Get There With You: The True Martin Luther King, Jr. p. 2.]
Dyson was transformed by the particular, unforgettable, unique impact of Dr. King speaking. Powerful as King’s written words are, his personal charisma endowed his speech with an energizing, inspiring power that makes it more than instructive, more than memorable. I think it attains the status of prophecy.

No wonder Martin Luther King stands alone, in our memories and in the movement towards freedom, not just of black Americans but of the human spirit. For he said, just months before his death, “I still have a dream this morning that one day every Negro in this country, every colored person in the world, will be judged on the basis of the content of his character rather than the color of his skin… ” [“A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” in The Trumpet of Conscience, 1967. p. 77.]

No wonder he stands alone in the struggle for justice, not just in American cities, but everywhere in the world. For he said, “There is nothing wrong with a traffic law which says you have to stop for a red light. But when a fire is raging, the fire truck goes right through that red light, and normal traffic had better get out of its way. Or, when a man is bleeding to death, the ambulance goes through those red lights at top speed.
“There is a fire raging now for the Negroes and the poor of this society. … Disinherited people all over the world are bleeding to death from deep social and economic wounds. They need brigades of ambulance drivers who will have to ignore the red lights of the present system until the emergency is solved.” [“Nonviolence and Social Change,” in The Trumpet of Conscience, 1967. p. 53.]

No wonder he stands alone in the call for peace, not in the comfort of our hearts but in the uncomfortable space between people who neither know nor like nor trust each other, for he said “Every time we drop our bombs in North Vietnam, President Johnson talks eloquently about peace. What is the problem? They are talking about peace as a distant goal, as an end we seek, but one day we must come to see that peace is not merely a distant goal we seek, but that it is a means by which we arrive at that goal. We must pursue peaceful ends through peaceful means.” [“A Christmas Sermon on Peace,” in The Trumpet of Conscience, 1967. p. 71.]

If Martin Luther King, Jr. was a prophet for our time, then we ourselves are cast in the role of hearers of the prophetic word. And that is a responsibility not to be taken lightly. For while Dr. King spoke knowledgeably of the black condition in America, his message was directed at a white audience – to people like us. While he spoke eloquently and compassionately of the condition and the treatment and the suffering of the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the discriminated against, his prophet’s message was addressed to the comfortable – to people like us. And while We Shall Overcome was the anthem of the civil rights movement, I say to you that the prophet King calls me to hear the song in a new way. Not as an affirmation of the triumph of the weak over the strong – not that kind of overcoming. But, much more difficult, We Shall Overcome challenges me to overcome my own complacency, my own vested interest in the “dominant consciousness.” Much more difficult, We Shall Overcome challenges me to overcome my own inertia, to relinquish my own comfort when it rests on the discomfort of others. For to hear Martin Luther King as a prophet is to acknowledge, with him, that something is terribly wrong in the world, and we will either work to make it right, or we will perish. For he said, “We may now be in only the initial period of an era of change as far-reaching in its consequences as the American Revolution. The developed industrial nations of the world cannot remain secure islands of prosperity in a seething sea of poverty. The storm is rising against the privileged minority of the earth, from which there is no shelter in isolation and armament. The storm will not abate until a just distribution of the fruits of the earth enables man everywhere to live in dignity and human decency.” [“Impasse in Race Relations,” in The Trumpet of Conscience, 1967. p. 17.]
We Shall Overcome. Thus said the prophet. May it be so.

Let us think on these things in silence.

The bell will lead us into silence, and music will lead us out.

Bell
Silence
Meditation music

Amen.

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