Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Kingdom of God

Scrolling through my social media feed last Monday, on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, it would be easy to assume that King is a universally beloved figure. Nearly every person I follow posted a quotation of King’s, often with accompanying inspirational pictures.

Even in our incredibly polarized political moment, many of those people posting King quotations were from opposing political parties. They were from religious people and non-religious people, from friends and acquaintances of mine not only in this country, but all over the world.

The whole world seems to know and respect Dr. King, and his name is said with honor and veneration all over this country, especially the month of January, especially on the weekend just passed. Indeed, visitors from all over the world visit the MLK memorial in DC, opened 9 years ago in 2011. In the year 2020, King’s legacy seems to be safe; and solid; and strong.

But King’s federal holiday has only been around since 1983, 15 years after his death. And as recently as 2000, state employees in South Carolina could still choose whether or not to celebrate MLK Day or one of three confederate holidays.

In the 1990s in Arizona, the celebration of MLK Day was a political football; the voters were given the chance to decide whether or not to celebrate it, and it was actually voted down. The state lost the chance to host the Super Bowl that year before finally approving the holiday in 1992.

But let’s go back even further for a moment. In a Harris Poll taken in 1968, just a few months before King was assassinated, 75% of white respondents had a negative view of him. Even half of black respondents did, as well.

As the Harris company points out in a recent article on their 1968 poll:

Only a few years earlier, King had been at a zenith: In 1964, he was Time magazine’s Man of the Year and the youngest person to date to win the Nobel Peace Prize. His success in seeing the Civil Rights Act of 1964 signed into law was followed by the Voting Rights Act in 1965.

What happened over the next four years that led to a decreasing reputation for Martin Luther King, Jr.?

Partly what happened, is that once the Civil and Voting Rights Acts were passed, many white Americans thought there was no more need for the civil rights movement. The problem was solved, legislatively, they thought, and once things settled down a bit, everyone would be just fine. The fact that Martin Luther King, Jr., continued to advocate for racial and economic justice just didn’t make sense to those who thought the problem had been neatly packaged and wrapped up with a bow.

But of course things weren’t fine. The issues King had advocated for earlier in his career as a civil rights leader weren’t magically solved. In particular, King continued to advocate for two causes that weren’t nearly as popular as integration in public spaces. He wanted to tackle poverty in our country, especially the disproportionate poverty of urban African-Americans in the north. And he began to speak out vocally against the war in Vietnam, believing that it was a fundamental affront to the dignity of God’s image in every human being, and that the Gospel of the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, called on him and every person of conscience to be a peacemaker.

It is easy to forget--easy to forget that no one of King’s public stature and witness is killed for being inoffensive. King may have advocated nonviolence, but he was anything but inoffensive. His moral and spiritual clarity was what got him killed. It was his status as a prophet of God, a messenger of the Christian ideals of human dignity and worth, that led to his death.

Remember that prophets of God are those who speak the uncomfortable truths that no one wants to hear. They speak those truths to the poor and lowly in order to give them hope, hope that God hears their cries for justice. They speak those truths to those in power in order to puncture their delusions of grandeur. Prophets are necessary because the powerful who exploit the weak and vulnerable must be reminded that their power is limited, and temporary, and that God will judge them for their actions, in this life or the next.

This is precisely the substance of what prophets say in the Bible, as we see in our passage from Ezekiel today. Ezekiel directly addresses the kings of his nation, who were enjoying themselves at the expense of the poor. Ezekiel reminds those leaders that the poor are GOD’s sheep, not theirs. The oppressed peoples of every generation in every nation belong to GOD, who executes righteousness and judgment for ALL who are oppressed, as the Psalm for today says.

When Jesus begins teaching in public, as the Gospel of Luke points out, he, too was “praised by everyone.” Prophets always start their careers fairly well. Yet when they begin to remind the powerful that their power exists only because of the exploitation of the poor, they become less popular, quickly.

Jesus’s message is directly from the prophet Isaiah: God’s spirit gives Jesus the substance of his entire message and mission on earth: to bring good news to the poor, to release captives and the oppressed, and to proclaim the Jubilee, the year of the Lord’s favor, in which ALL debts were forgiven so that generational poverty and destitution would end.

The kingdom of God, according to Jesus, looks very much like a just and peaceful society. In the kingdom of God, there is no poverty. In the kingdom of God, there are no prisoners unjustly accused. In the kingdom of God, no child is afraid to leave their house in fear of the violence outside, or to return from school to violence inside the home. In the kingdom of God, as the Psalmist says, God makes wars cease to the ends of the earth. In the kingdom of God, no one goes a night without a roof over their head. In the kingdom of God, we take care of each other. In the kingdom of God, we are not so anxious that we compete and fight and kill for resources. In the kingdom of God, we trust God to provide our daily bread.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a servant of the living Christ who believed in the kingdom of God. And while he did everything he could to help bring it about, he knew that human efforts alone would never be enough. King believed with every fiber of his being that Jesus is alive today, and that God’s Holy Spirit empowers God’s people and continues to speak through the words and actions of God’s servants to bring about real, meaningful, and lasting change. He knew that we can’t bring about the kingdom of God on our own, that we need God’s help and direction and guidance, especially in the hard times.

Toward the end of his life, in those moments in which his popularity had been waning, and he had been more and more criticized, the reality of King’s faith was what sustained him in those terrible and lonely times. After receiving a death threat, one of many that he received throughout his life, he prayed and wrote:

“And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, ‘Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness, stand up for justice, stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.’

And I’ll tell you, I’ve seen the lightning flash. I’ve heard the thunder roll. I felt sin-breakers dashing, trying to conquer my soul. But I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No, never alone. No, never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone.”

You will have many opportunities throughout your life to follow in the paths of great people. I pray that, with God’s help, you will follow in the path of a great Christian martyr, Martin Luther King, Jr. I pray that you will, with God’s help, find others and unite in the common cause of bringing about the kingdom of God, the kingdom of peace, the kingdom of justice. And I pray that you will know, as Dr. King did, that you are never alone. God goes with you, and before you, and beside you, and within you. If you seek the path of righteousness, you are never, ever alone. AMEN.