This sermon was preached for the third Sunday after Epiphany on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, Sunday, January 19, 2025. The texts for this sermon were: Isaiah 62:1-5, 1 Corinthians 12:1-11, John 2:1-11, and Psalm 36:5-10.
A few years ago a friend and colleague of mine, Mother Emily García, wrote a Godly Play story about the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. for the children of her then parish. She had noticed that her very well-educated students could analyze the political motivations of many important historical figures but weren’t being taught about their religious motivations or theology. Sure enough, she writes about telling this story to a group of students at her church, ages 3 to 8. As she laid out the first image of the story, a photo of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., one student said, “Well, we all know him, but what does Martin Luther King have to do with church?”
The story Mother García wrote goes on to answer that student’s exact question. It begins and ends with this simple refrain: “In church, we remember Martin because he lived and died for God.” Mother García’s story connects the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to his namesake church hero, the original Martin Luther, who also studied and loved the Bible. She connects him to Moses - a prophet guiding people ahead to a Promised Land he'd never see, a nation where white and black people would live together in dignity, freedom, and love. And then she simply and poignantly connects Martin to Jesus by placing a small cross in front of the children with the words, “He died because of what he had said and done, and how he spoke up in God’s name. The church remembers him, and we call him a martyr, because he died for God. And now, all of America remembers him too.”
America does remember “MLK Jr.” every year this weekend, but I do find they often do so by dropping his title: the Rev. and the Dr., which of course, refers to his Ph.D. in theology. His identity as a Christian, a pastor, and a theologian - the faith that drove him, the why behind his life’s work and the reason for his death - that’s our job as church to teach to our children, to remember and reflect on as adults.
The climatic moment in Mother García's story is not the “I have a Dream” speech every American child learns at school. It’s a moment Martin has with God, praying at his kitchen table at midnight. The story comes from his sermon called “Our God is Able.”
The sermon recalls a night soon after the Montgomery bus boycott, when King had endured many days and nights of death threats by letter and phone. King describes a moment of despair following one particular late night call, preaching:
“In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had almost gone, I took my problem to God. My head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory.
'I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I have come to the point where I can’t face it alone.'
At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced him. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice, saying, 'Stand up for righteousness, stand up for truth. God will be at your side forever.'
Almost at once my fears passed from me. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything. The outer situation remained the same, but God had given me inner calm.”
But what does Martin Luther King have to do with church? Everything. He has everything to do with church. You cannot understand King, or the Civil Rights Movement he led, without understanding his faith. And when I say his faith, I mean both his why and his how. His belief in scripture, Jesus’ life and teachings, was the reason for all he did. His spiritual practices - his prayer life, his church community, his relationship with God was how he managed to go on, to overcome.
But not just King. His movement was more than just him. This weekend, Groton School, the institution that founded our parish as a mission back in 1892, is reflecting on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to the school in 1963. I'm indebted to the Groton school chaplain and parishioner, the Rev. Allison Read, for transcribing the talk he gave to students there and sending it to me this week. In the question and answer session with students after his speech, a student asked King why communism had not been able to infiltrate the African-American movement for freedom.
King credited two things: organizations like the NAACP and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, but also the spiritual heritage of his people. His people didn’t need to turn to a foreign, atheistic ideology. They already had a spiritual worldview with which to articulate their aspirations for freedom: the words of scripture and the life and teachings of Jesus Christ.
Words like the ones we just prayed from Psalm 36, verse 5-6: “Your love, O Lord, reaches to the heavens, and your faithfulness to the clouds. Your righteousness is like the strong mountains, your justice like the great deep.”
In his speech to the Groton students, King explains the theology that grounds his method of nonviolent direct action: Jesus’ agape love. He says, “This method is not at all new. And those of us who have tried to use it have developed the capacity to stand up before the most bitter and violent opponent and somehow say we will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we will still love you…one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves; we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process. And our victory will be a double victory.”
We will meet your physical force with soul force. You know, you can study the all community organizing principles used by Civil Rights leaders, the logistical brilliance behind the bus boycotts and the march on Washington, and the media savvy that captivated the nation. But you’d be missing a huge part of the how of it all if you stopped there. You’d be missing the spiritual practices that sustained the movement. How the people came together each and every week to remember who and whose they were; to reaffirm that their dignity and worth was grounded in Jesus. How they sang and prayed and swayed together week after week, souls uplifted, faith replenished. You’d be forgetting how the marching feet were fueled by the good food of church potlucks.
You know, Jesus’ first miracle in the Gospel of John is not a healing miracle or a feeding miracle. It’s a replenishing miracle. It’s a miracle about a transformation that sustains a whole group of people in a moment of celebration and joy. The wine at the wedding has run out. Jesus makes more. At the insistence of his mother, Jesus takes ordinary water and transforms it into epic amounts of high quality wine. Jesus’s first act, his first sign, is to provide what’s needed to keep the party going. Fuel for soul force.
The most powerful thing we can do as Church is to remind people of their why - the meaning and purpose behind their struggle - and then give them their how - those spiritual practices that replenish, strengthen, renew. Each Sunday, we come to learn and study the theology that grounds our values and we come to do the practices that replenish our souls: singing, praying, dancing, feasting. We come each week to remember who and whose we are.
Since the beginning of Advent we have prayed in our Eucharistic prayer, “Open our eyes to see your hand at work in the world about us. Deliver us from the presumption of coming to this Table for solace only, and not for strength; for pardon only, and not for renewal.” That’s the key isn’t it - we are here to be strengthened and renewed for the work before us. There is a purpose to this party. We don't rest to stop. We rest to keep going. We pray to hear God's quiet assurance and inner calm.
I am aware, too, of another presumption from which we must be delivered. The last question Dr. King is asked on the recording is from a Groton student who wanted to know about the role of white churches in his movement.
In his answer, Dr. King lamented that white churches of his time had not taken a stand the way black churches had. “In the New Testament, we read about the light of the world and the church, certainly, assumed that it had this responsibility of being the light of the world. But I think that too many churches in the United States felt that meant the taillight instead of the headlight, so we’ve ended up more of an echo than a voice. And this is a great problem and certainly a great challenge confronting the church today.”
So today, I add this prayer for our own church in these times. Deliver us, Lord, from the presumption of being a taillight and not a headlight, an echo and not a voice.
At the end of every Godly Play story, the children are invited to continue the story-telling in their own words - and in their own lives. So that's where Mother García's story of Martin pauses, with the question to all of us, I wonder where you are in this story?
It's up to us to keep telling it, teaching it, and living it.
Amen.
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The sermon continues in the announcements - a sacred part of the Episcopal liturgy! This sermon asks, "How can our church be a headlight and not a taillight, a voice, not an echo?" and "I wonder where you are in this story." It is at the announcements when we hear possible answers to this question through in calls to action in our community. This week, we heard invitations to: Open Prayer Time in our chapel on Inauguration Day, Love Casts Out Fear Inauguration Eve Vigil at the Cathedral, Sacred Ground dialogue on race series, our own Annual Meeting, two community forums on healthcare accessibility and justice following the closure of our local hospital, Climate Change working group, Labyrinth of Light meditation, and ways to support the Stone Soup Kitchen move downtown.
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