Thread by @jeffblack945

RevThread #121
On MLK day

1/ It’s so cold here and the heavy snowfall last night has caused the village to cancel the celebration planned for the day, at which I was to read from Dr. King’s works.

2/ How about warming things up in our winter of discontent, by sharing some thoughts about a truly noble subject. I heard King once. My college roommate and I, in our senior year, went to Riverside Church in NYC and listened to his great sermon on the Vietnam war....

3/..In that vast Gothic space his great baritone voice took us to the fields and tunnels of that war and outlined the war’s essential injustice.

4/ King broke with the President who had championed his cause, because he could not bear the thought of the violence we were visiting on another land, and he had spotted the lies that propped up this slaughter of our own soldiers.

5/ I listened to Dr. King bring to bear the words of the prophets, and realized I was listening to one. My roommate -- the only African American of my class -- had tears on his cheeks.

6/ Later, I saw that that night was part of my own calling. The next year, newly married and living on a Fulbright grant in Strasbourg, France, my wife and I sat on our bed and wept as the Armed Forces Radio covered King’s murder.

7/ Within a few years I was learning about Gandhi and his mentorship of African American preachers during the 30’s and I began to see this amazing transmission of peace force, Satyagraha, running from the crucifixion through the astonishing life and work of St. Francis,...

8/.. the intuitions of Thoreau, the epic struggle in Tolstoy’s life, the influence that Tolstoy had on Gandhi, and the transmission of the force of non-violence into the great struggle for racial justice in America.

9/ I saw, too, the great damage done by Augustine when he turned from the Gospel accounts of peace-making to find a justification for Just War in the writings of Cicero.

10/Then I noticed that virtually every state church has taken their own government’s side in every war, using that rationale for violence in the name of Jesus. We should have listened to the Quakers.

11/ Let’s listen to King’s words from his valedictory, the final speech given in a church the night before he was murdered. The whole speech is about being happy -- just not in the way we usually understand:

12/ “Another reason I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with though history. Survival demands that we grapple with them..

13/"..Men for years have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.”

14/ Whoa. In the swirl of lies that surround us, it’s great to hear Dr. King’s clarity.
In that final speech, Dr. King recalls the epic struggle against law ‘n order folks like Sheriff Bull Connor and his dogs and his water hoses...

15/.. King says, “There was a power which Bull Connor couldn’t adjust to, and so we ended up transforming Bull into a steer and we won our struggle in Birmingham.” Pretty good, no?

16/ I was a boy in the 50’s during that struggle. My dad was the city attorney of our little town in upstate New York, and when the 20-something King would come on, my father called my twin and I to the TV and said, “Listen to him. This man will change America.”

17/ I remember thinking that his way of speaking was beautiful.

18/ As King nears the end of his last speech, he moves into full preaching mode and does a staggering exegesis of Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan. He starts with this: “Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.”

19/ Exactly. The prescription from God for our times is to develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.

20/ As King develops the story, we watch the priest and the levite walk by the man lying beside the road, and then Dr. King says, “A man of another race came by. This man got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy..."

21/ King went on, "Jesus ended up saying, this was the good man, this was the great man, because he had the capacity to project the 'I' into the 'Thou' and to be concerned about his brother.” [King is referencing here Rabbi Martin Buber. This speech is a PhD seminar in ethics.]

22/ King considers why the others in this story didn’t stop: “It was a dangerous road; in Jesus’ day it came to be known as the “Bloody Pass.” The question the priest asked . . .

23"...the first question the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But then the Good Samaritan came by. And he reversed the question: 'If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?'...

24../ King continued, “That’s the question before you tonight. Not, ‘If I stop to help the sanitation workers what will happen to me?’. . .The question is: ‘If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?’ That is the question.”

25/ Think about those disappeared children at the border. That is the question.

26/ Near the end of his talk, King recounts the time of his brush with death when he had been stabbed in the chest, with the blade stopping at the aorta. A girl wrote him a note in the hospital that moved him, and he recited its content:

27/ “Dear Dr. King, I am a ninth grade student at the White Plains High School. While it should not matter, I would like to mention that I’m a white girl. I read in the paper of your misfortune and of your suffering. ..

28.."And I read that if you had sneezed you would have died. And I’m simply writing you to say that I’m so happy that you didn’t sneeze.”

29/ Here’s the speech’s great ending: “Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop. And I don’t mind...

30/...“Like anybody I would like to live a long life. . . . I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up the mountain. And I’ve looked over and I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you...

31/"... But I want you to know tonight that we as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. My eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.”

32/ Fifty years after that day we heard of Dr. King’s death, my wife and I returned to France. We went, in April, to Chartres Cathedral -- to me, the loveliest building ever. There was a service going on, so we stayed in the back. It was the anniversary of Dr. King’s murder.

33/ An African priest was addressing a congregation of other vested clergy and his mike was on, so we could hear King described in African-accented French -- what King had found in the Gospels.

34/ Fifty years after his death, people from all over one continent gathered in another continent 5000 miles from that church in Memphis, considering Dr. King's words and life.

35/ That is real power. Let’s let Dr. King's words about dangerous unselfishness, about the capacity to project the “I” into the “Thou”, about the choice between non-violence and non-existence invite us to the mountaintop.