"PERSISTENT INSISTENCE"

 “THE PERSISTENT INSISTENCE OF MLK”

Over the weekend, I had the privilege of talking with Pastor Andreas Holzbauer and member Dietrich Gerstner of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Lutheran Church in Hamburg, Germany.  We were discussing the life and witness of MLK, especially in these crazy and dangerous times.  I had met Dietrich through the Open Door Community, and they invited me to join in a conversation about King’s influence in my life and in current times.  It was a helpful reminder that Dr. King is not only a great American – he actually belongs to the world;  he influences people all the world over.

Many of you know my story of growing up in the belly of the beast of white supremacy on the Arkansas side of the Mississippi River delta.  I not only grew up in it – I believed it.  I believed that those males classified as “white” were meant by God and by nature to dominate the world.  I believed it because it was taught to me by people who loved me and whom I loved:  my mother, my extended family, my church, my segregated schools.  I received this belief and appropriated it long before I knew anything about it.  it just described the way the world is – an idea and a reality like gravity.  I say this not to diminish the terror and crushing oppression of white supremacy.  I say it to emphasize why it is so difficult to eradicate in individual and communal life:  it is a core belief of people classified as “white.”

I give thanks that God was sending other voices and stories into my life to begin to offer me freedom in the midst of my captivity to white, male supremacy.  There were – and continue to be – many voices that called to me, telling me of a different world.  On this MLK Weekend, I want to remember that Dr. King was one of those voices, whom God sent to us all to help us to see a different vision, to help us dream of a different world. 

     I remember watching Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington on a hot, August day in 1963.  As we approach the armed fortress of Washington, DC, for the Biden/Harris inauguration this week, I am reminded that King and his colleagues scared the white leadership to death.  In preparation for that march in 1963, some 4,000 regular US Army troops were stationed in Washington, with another 15,000 on standby in the DC suburbs.  Different motivations from this week’s events, but armed forces nevertheless.  I watched King’s speech by myself in my home.  It was the week before my senior year in high school began.  Coming into that speech, I had begun to wander from my bedrock belief in white, male supremacy.  I wanted to see for myself if he was a charlatan and a communist, as I had been told.  I also wanted to see if his followers were all fools, as I had been told.

    When I watched the speech, I was astonished by two things:  first, the size of the crowd – 250,000 – wow!  I told myself that they could not all be fools.  Second, was King’s speech itself.  That powerful voice, the soaring images that he drew from American history and from Christianity, the insistent demands that the great American ideal of equality be brought into flesh in the lives of African-Americans – all of these and more spoke to me.  I wanted to be inspired by this speech;  I wanted to let it flow into me and into those spaces captured by the hideous power of white supremacy.  I did not dare, however.  To let that happen would be to put me into direct conflict with my mother, my family, my church, my school.  Yet, something happened to me on that hot August day – the wall of race, with its hierarchy of superiority and inferiority, that wall began to crack in my heart.

    I continued to encounter Martin Luther King, Jr. over the rest of his life and continue to do so in my life.  I even had a chance to hear him speak in person in his last sermon before he was assassinated, but I chose not to go.  For more on that story, here’s a link to an article that I wrote for The Atlantic about my time in Memphis.  https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/01/doubting-mlk-during-a-strike-in-memphis/550118/.   King’s ideas and his life created great controversy – the sanitized version that we have now of him was not the reality of his life.  The people who stormed the Capitol on January 6 were desperate to deny and destroy the ideas at the heart of King’s life:  we are all children of God.  It’s a dangerous idea.

    As I think about Martin Luther King, I’m thinking  that part of his enduring is his courage and his vision.  It was based in his persistent insistence that we are each – and that we are all – children of God.  He was willing to put his life on the line to seek to weave justice and love together in such a way that we could all touch the reality of the Beloved Community.  That Beloved Community is not merely a gathering together of diverse people.  It is rather a community rooted in the power of equality and equity.  

       As we gather to begin another momentous week – celebrating the life of a great saint among us, observing and participating in the idea of democracy, in the “peaceful” transfer of power despite the efforts of a would-be-autocratic president – let us give thanks for the life and courage and vision of Martin Luther King, Jr.  He reminded us with a persistent insistence of the power of equality in our individual and communal lives, and he invited us to join with him in seeking to make that idea a reality in this country and in so many others.