A Reflection for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Weekend January 18,
2015 All Saints’ Episcopal Church,
Southern Shores, N.C. Thomas
E. Wilson, Rector
Exodus
3: 7-12 Luke 6:
27-36
Loving
Enemies
This is the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday
weekend. I have taken the liberty of transferring the lessons from the “Holy
Women, Holy Men, Celebrating the Saints” resource of the Episcopal Church to
the Commemoration of Dr. King which is usually celebrated on April 4th,
the day of his death, but allows for an alternate date of January 15, the day
of his birth. He was born Michael King, Jr., but later his father, a Baptist
preacher, was so influenced by the teachings of Martin Luther that he changed
his, and his son’s, names to Martin Luther King. Luther taught “simul
iustus et peccator,” that a Christian is “simultaneously
justified and a sinner,”
This holiday had a hard time coming to North
Carolina. In 1983 our two then-senators led a filibuster to block the recognition
of a federal holiday in honor of Dr. King, but in November 1983, President
Reagan signed the bill. Even then, not all states wanted to go along with it,
and in 1990, there was a referendum on a King holiday in Arizona, which the
voters voted down. As a result of the outcome of that vote, the NFL moved the
site of the Super Bowl from Arizona to the Rose Bowl in California, and after
the state lost $500 million in that move, the 1992 referendum passed easily. In
2000 South Carolina became the last state to make it a state holiday but gave
workers the option to take that or one of three Confederate holidays.
In Bible Study this week, one of the participants
suggested that King was not a good man. However, Saints are not always “good”
people. There are a whole bunch of them in “Holy Women, Holy Men’ that I am not
sure I consider good. For instance, January
10 was the commemoration of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury who was
executed by Parliament in 1645, four years before they got around to executing
Charles I. He tried to do a lot of High Church innovations in a high-handed
manner, and the Presbyterians of Scotland and the Puritans of England joined
forces and got their revenge. My mother’s family, who were Old Covenanter Presbyterians,
would tell the story of how one of our ancestors had been executed by the order
of the Archbishop for opposing Laud’s “papist”
tendencies. My mother’s family had been raised on a steady diet of seeing Roman
Catholics as the enemy, and my father’s family had been raised on seeing
Protestants as the enemy. But my parents’ parents loved their children and
learned how to love people who were once considered enemies. My parents raised
us as Episcopalians as a way to split the difference.
I was reading, Pastrix:
The Cranky, Beautiful Faith of a Sinner & Saint, (Jericho Press) a
theological memoir written by Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran Pastor who, while
she was still in seminary, founded a Lutheran Church in Denver called Home For
All Saints and Sinners, which meets in the Parish Hall of an Episcopal Church. She was, and is, a person with a whole host of
problems, but God uses her and she holds on to the ideas of Martin Luther that
we are simultaneously both Saints and Sinners. A Saint is a person who God
loves and a sinner is one who does not always return God’s love or pass on
God’s love to others. We are sinners who are continuously called into living
into being a saint and passing on and returning God’s love. Pastor Nadia knows
how to love her enemies; she doesn’t always like them or agree with them, but
she tries to love them.
Today we remember the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther
King, Jr., not because he was a good man but because he, sinner as he was,
tried to live into the calling of being a saint by loving his enemies. To love
your enemies is not a sentimental burst of sweetness, but a spiritual awareness
that your enemy, the person who hates you, is a fellow image of God and who is
ruled by fear. Their fear creates a living hell for them, and a saint wants to
help sinners out of the hells of their own making. King, a Southern Black man
living under second-class citizen status in a country that feared black people
had every right to hate white folk. The white fear was that Black people might
exact revenge for centuries of oppression and violence where lives, families,
property, and hopes had been systematically stolen under the guise of law and economic
systems of exploitation backed by the threat of violence. This was the South
where the phrase “separate but equal” actually meant “always separate but never
equal”. King looked at the soul of the power
structure and saw the fear at its core.
He wanted to free those in power from that fear and, at the same time,
free his people from their bondage to this unjust economic, social, and
political system.
There were two ways that Black people could respond
to the power structure. The first was to rise up against it and try to exact revenge,
and in which case they would lose and die as a result of their own hatred. The
second option was to give in and shuffle obediently under the abuse, in which
case they would hate themselves and their oppressors even more. There was a third choice - to do what Jesus
was talking about in the Gospel lesson for today and turn the other cheek. In
an abusive culture, when a person of the dominant group wants to show a person
of the oppressed group contempt, they usually use a backhand slap to get that
person out of the way. Turning the other cheek does not mean swallowing the
dismissal, but standing up and presenting yourself saying, “I am not someone
who you can so easily dismiss; I am your brother or sister in Christ, fellow
child of the most high, as Jesus says in this lesson, and I offer you the opportunity
to treat me like a full human being and strike my other cheek. I do not take
your abuse but I offer you my cheek in love.” The power then shifts from being a victim to
being a person who makes a choice to love, and to give love to the enemy. The
abuser then is lovingly confronted with his or her sin and has to make a choice
of consciously living with the knowledge of her or his sin of fear, or
repenting, turning around. The first step of the journey to wholeness,
forgiveness, is the awareness of our own brokenness. It is only when we can see
our own sins that we are able to begin to repent and escape from the hells of
our own making. The first steps are always to recognize that our lives are out
of control and that we cannot continue to live in that way, and that there is a
power greater than ourselves who loves us and gives us strength to enter a
different future.
Jesus says since we are all children of the Most
High and the Most High is kind to the ungrateful and wicked, then we should be
merciful as our heavenly parent is merciful. Jesus’ ministry is to put into
daily life and demonstrate God’s mercy, which does not ignore but confronts us
in love. Dr. King’s ministry was to confront the ungrateful and the wicked in
love and, in the end, he gave his life for the sake of love.
Saint and Sinner; they are two sides of the same
coin. Today I am aware that I am a saint, in that I am loved by God who calls
me to live fully into that love. I am also aware that I am a sinner in that
each day I do or think things that show my ungratefulness when I hoard that
love and mercy and fall short of returning God’s love or joyfully passing on
that love to others. I am aware that I am in a room full of saints and sinners
who are loved.
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