A Sermon for the Feast Day of Martin Luther King, Jr.
I’d like to talk this morning about the Epistle, the letter of Paul that he wrote to the Church in Ephesus that we call “Ephesians.” I don’t usually preach on the Epistle, but by the time I conclude this sermon, I hope you’ll see that I’ve chosen to do so to honor our saint for today, Martin Luther King, Jr., and to honor the Gospel of Jesus that he pledged his life to serve.
When I was a kid in the Baptist church, we memorized a lot of scripture, and this passage was one that I have always known very well. I can’t recall the number of Sunday School lessons and sermons that I’ve heard on the “armor of God” over the years, but only recently have I discovered the terrific irony in Paul’s use of this metaphor.
Paul is being deliberately ironic here in recommending that Christians wear some kind of armor. After all, the ones who wore the armor, the Romans, are the military superpower that killed Jesus. The ones who wore the armor are the ones who tortured people to death by suffocation on wooden crosses. So the “armor of God” playsets I remember from my childhood that are still being sold are themselves pretty laughable items. Nothing like stabbing your brother or sister with the “sword of the Spirit,” after all.
No, Paul says that his armor makes one ready to proclaim, not war, but “the gospel of peace.” It is a spiritual armor, defensive rather than offensive, written about by a man who was himself guarded by armored men as a prisoner in Rome as he wrote this letter.
Paul says that he is an “ambassador in chains” of the Gospel of Christ. He seeks for the courage and spirit to declare a message of peace from prison “against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” These spiritual forces of evil, these cosmic powers of this present darkness are not what you would expect from the Bible if your only knowledge of it comes from popular culture or even literature.
They are not devils or demons with horns and tails and pitchforks. No, Paul is referring to humanly-constructed systems of oppression, of corrupt and hate-filled leadership here, to the “powers” of the age that keep people from experiencing the peaceable kingdom, the kingdom of God in which faith, hope, and love reign supreme and in which every human being has dignity, worth, meaning, and purpose.
It’s no accident, then, that this passage is used for the Feast Day of Martin Luther King, Jr., who also was imprisoned for the causes of justice and peace, and who also indicted the spiritual forces of evil, the cosmic powers of this present darkness, which had served to torture, crucify (by lynching), and oppress the African-American residents of America for nearly 400 years. Like Paul, Dr. King called out the military superpower of his own day, often from prison, and recognized that the only way to defeat it was by putting on God’s armor, the militant armor of peace.
Yet we need to remember, if we are truly to honor this man of God, that his message was not merely a dream in which people would not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. His message was not merely that we should try harder to look beyond surface differences in our individual relationships.
Those are important aspects of his legacy, but they are also not the kinds of subversive and controversial positions that get people killed.
What killed Dr. King is the same thing that killed Jesus--fear. Fear on the part of those in power of losing power. When the white supremacist system so deeply embedded in American culture heard Dr. King, they did not just hear a call to be nicer to people who are different from us. They heard his call for structural changes to American society.
They heard him say, in the “Letter from a Birmingham Jail”, in 1963, that while it may have been “unfortunate that demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham . . . it is even more unfortunate that the city's white power structure left the Negro community with no alternative.”
They heard him say, in 1967, as he opposed the war in Vietnam, that we needed a “true revolution of values” that would “soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies.”
They heard him say, further, in this speech, that while “on the one hand we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside . . . [that is] only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see than an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.”
Friends, Martin Luther King Jr., like Jesus, believed that the Gospel message was not one of individual salvation from sin, but of the prophetic necessity for our unjust societies to be restructured, from the ground up, so that justice, opportunity, and peace would realities in the lives of people who needed those in power to guarantee in practice the rights that previously had only been guaranteed in theory. As King often said, “I am tired of fighting for something that should have been mine at birth.”
A society in which people have to fight for their very existence is a sick society. Dr. King diagnosed and fought this sickness, but it resulted in the sacrifice of his very life.
Almost 10 years after Dr. King’s death, his “spiritual father” Benjamin Mays, former president of Morehouse College, said that King’s death was “inevitable in that any man who takes the position King did . . . if he persists in that long enough, he’ll get killed. Now. Anytime. That was the chief trouble with Jesus: he was a troublemaker. So any time you are a troublemaker and you rebel against the wrongs and injustices of society and organize against that, then what may happen is inevitable.”
Dr. King often predicted his own death. He knew that the full assault on the white supremacist power structures of his day would unleash such hatred and fear that it would lash out in violence. And while he uprooted so much evil in the fields of 1960s America, much more remains to be done, as we continue to face the systemic evils of poverty, racism, and injustice.
When we consider Dr. King’s legacy and importance, both as a historical figure as well as a saint in the Church, we must remember that our responsibility is to learn as much as we can about injustice and be willing to have our eyes opened to the ways in which our society continues to make it so difficult for so many people merely to exist, much less to flourish and thrive.
May we echo the words both of Dr. King and of St. Paul, again from our reading: “Pray also for me, so that when I speak, a message may be given to me to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it boldly, as I must speak.” May we all declare this truth--of compassion, of mercy, of love--more and more boldly, for God’s sake and the sake of the health of our nation, which is nothing less than our collective salvation.
Amen.