Honoring King

Week of Monday, January 21, 2002

This week our country rightly celebrates the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr. It is frightening to imagine where we would be today without his legacy of Christian commitment, moral courage, political imagination and sheer force of will. In honoring King, we also do well to thank God for countless others who helped to rescue our country from the hellish consequences of enslaving some four million African Americans for more than four hundred years. There are the famous, like the rebellious Nat Turner and the militant Frederick Douglass, women like Sojourner Truth, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Harriet Tubman, accomodationists like Booker T. Washington and agitators like W.E.B. Du Bois. And let us never forget the millions of unnamed and unknown heroes whose names never make the history books even though their lives—and deaths—made the history.

Racial reconciliation in its most comprehensive nature—relational, structural, economic, political, educational, etc.—remains an unfinished task. Take, for example, these two items from the news just this week. In the Wall Street Journal, Mark Bauerlein reviewed Philip Dray's new book At the Hands of Persons Unknown, a scholarly study that examines the appalling history of lynchings in America from the 1830s to the 1960s. He raises the deeply disturbing question, “how could church-going farmers and businessmen, fathers and mothers, turn into a murderous mob, commit ghastly tortures and then return to their families and jobs believing they had done nothing wrong?”¹

Then in New York this week, controversy erupted over a planned statue based upon a famous September 11 photograph that pictures three white firemen raising an American flag at Ground Zero of the WTC ruins. In the clay model of the statue, the three white firefighters have been transformed into one white, one black and one Hispanic. Is this a legitimate, symbolic way to honor the supreme sacrifices that public servants of all races made in that tragedy, or is it an insult to the three white firefighters by rewriting history to achieve political correctness? Either way, the dispute shows just how volatile matters of race continue to be in our country.

Racial reconciliation is a central part of the Gospel, and incumbent upon all who take the journey with Jesus. Paul even describes the work of Christ as one of reconciliation between warring factions (in his day, Jew and Gentile): “For He himself is our peace, who has made the two one and has destroyed the barrier, the dividing wall of hostility...His purpose was to create one new man out of the two, thus making peace, and in this one body to reconcile both of them to God through the cross, by which he put to death their hostility” (Ephesians 2:14–16). One of the sharpest rebukes in the New Testament comes when Paul rebukes Peter for his racial hypocrisy in separating himself from eating with Gentiles (Galatians 2:11–13). On a positive note, New Testament images of heaven are nothing if not multi-ethnic: “I looked and before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (Revelation 7:9).

If this is so, then it is frightening to admit how self-serving and self-deceiving our interpretations of the Bible can be. Some Christians, of course, helped to abolish slavery and the subsequent manifestations of racism. The British parliamentarian William Wilberforce comes to mind.² But we were also in the forefront of attempting not only rationalizations but Biblical justifications for slavery. To take but one example, in his fine tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. in his book Soul Survivor, Philip Yancey recounts how the Southern church he grew up in during the 1950s and 60's preached a virulent, overt and unapologetic racism. This is nothing less than calling “evil good and good evil, putting darkness for light and light for darkness, putting bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter” (Isaiah 5:20). May God save us from the many ways we, like the clever attorney in Luke 10:29, “seek to justify ourselves.”

If racial reconciliation is part of the Gospel, then it becomes clear how, at times, the Gospel necessarily has political ramifications. The life and ministry of King and the larger role of the black church are instructive. As Lerone Bennett points out in his book Before the Mayflower, toward the end of the nineteenth century, the black church “quickly established itself as the dominant institutional force in black American life.”³ King himself was a churchman, and there was never a time when he was not a pastor (at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery and Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta). About himself, he said, “I am...the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher, and the great grandson of a Baptist preacher. The Church is my life and I have given my life to the Church.”⁴ As King wisely understood, the power of the pulpit bears a two-fold function: mediation and intercession (to reconcile people to God and to one another), but also prophetic exhortation (to bring the witness of the Gospel to bear on one's contemporary culture). In King, writes Warren, “the man and the moment met; he made a Christian decision in behalf of social, economic and political justice, and the world was changed.” ⁵ Thank God for that.

In addition to the sources I have already cited, let me mention a few resources that God has used on my journey with Jesus regarding racism. For a deeply moving history of the American civil rights movement there is nothing like the seven-part PBS documentary entitled Eyes on the Prize (each video is about a hour long). The Pulitzer Prize winner David Shipler has a moving book called A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America (1997) that plots our country's present-day racial divide. For a readable entree to Martin Luther King, read his book of sermons called Strength to Love (especially the sermon entitled “Transformed Nonconformists” based upon Romans 12:1–12).

Finally, we should pray to God to open our hearts and minds to whatever blind spots we continue to ignore. As I read through Bennett's history of black America recently, I was moved by the warning of Frederick Douglass:

Slavery has been fruitful in giving itself names. It has been called “the peculiar institution,” “the social system,” and the “impediment.” ...It has been called by a great many names, and it will call itself by yet another name; and you and I and all of us had better wait and see what new form this old monster will assume, in what new skin this old snake will come forth next.⁶