People sometimes ask why I insist that the word “the” be placed in front of the word “Reverend.” It is partly just grammar OCD, the same reason I use the Oxford comma. “Reverend” is an adjective, not a title, similar to the way a judge is called “the Honorable,” but the title is actually “judge.” My title, in the United Church of Christ tradition, the office to which I was ordained, is Pastor and Teacher.
Of course, we’re all about the priesthood of all believers in the UCC, not particularly fond of hierarchy, so neither the adjective nor the title gets used very often.
But this is just our informality, not an act of intentional erasure. The same cannot be said for the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King Jr., for the adjective is almost always dropped by those who wish to turn King into a secular saint, an analog to Thoreau at best, Gandhi if necessary, forgetting that the latter’s non-violent resistance to British colonialism was rooted in his Hindu faith.
King was not secular. He frequently noted that people thought of him as a civil rights leader, but really he was just a Baptist preacher.
You cannot surgically remove religion from King, from his story, from his legacy. The things he says make no sense outside of the context of Christianity, specifically Protestant Christianity, and especially that beautiful tapestry that is the Black Church tradition.
He could not have said “I have been to the mountaintop” the night before he was gunned down had not the Nile coursed through his veins, had not a bush burned without being consumed in his soul, had not the cries on the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday been echoes of the cries on the night of Passover.
If secularists have tried to ignore the fact that King was driven by his Christian faith, so have defenders of the status quo worked hard to narrow his vision so that his only cause was civil rights, his only position passive non-violence.
Yet he did not believe pacifism was the one and only answer. In 1968, less than a month before he was killed, he said in a speech “I happen to be a pacifist but if I had had to make a decision about fighting a war against Hitler, I may have temporarily given up my pacifism and taken up arms.”
Non-violence was both the ideal and a strategic decision, not an absolute. He may well have been thinking about another great 20th century martyr, the Rev. Dr. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and leader in the Nazi-resisting Confessing Church, who participated in a plot to kill Hitler, even though he believed he himself would be damned for that act.
Then again, if the question we ask is “What would Jesus do?,” then flipping tables is a legitimate answer, for Jesus was not the pacifist those with power have tried to make him either. Their white capitalist Jesus is a fiction, a blue-eyed savior with shampoo-commercial hair.
King’s Poor Peoples Campaign understood that our economic system was warped and destructive, is warped and destructive, for who knows better than an American person of color that wealth does not always come from hard work and talent, and that hard work and talent do not always lead to wealth.
King railed against a losing war in Vietnam run by corrupt politicians, defense contractors, and misguided generals, one that was chewing up those not wealthy enough and white enough to escape the draft.
For the Reverend Doctor King came to understand that oppressions are inter-connected, that evil wears a thousand faces. And while he was a man of his time and culture, he was even willing to receive counsel from a gay black socialist Quaker, Bayard Rustin, another vicim of erasure in the history written by those conformed to power.
In his private writings, he rejected biblical literalism, understanding the Bible as myth, not just fantastical stories like Jonah and the Whale, but even the Virgin Birth. I am convinced that were he alive today, he would be a friend to the United Church of Christ.
I call King a saint, and it is not hard to see why. One cannot listen to his “I have been to the mountaintop speech,” knowing what the next twenty-four hours would bring, and not believe that the Holy Spirit was there, that St. Martin had received the gift of prophecy as described in today’s reading from Paul’s first letter to the church at Corinth.
But he would not be declared a saint by those men who think they can decide who deserves that honor, who define saints as spooky mediators between God and humans, for Martin was not perfect in the ways they demand perfection. Among other things, he was a womanizer. But that’s just it. Those who control institutions of power want their saints to be impossibly perfect to insure we never dare to dream that we too might be called to stand up against oppression, never dare to dream that the empowering story told in scripture, God’s constant rejection of oppression and exploitation, might speak to us, in us, and through us.
They could not destroy Martin with their smear campaigns and FBI psy-ops. They could not destroy him by calling him a Communist. They have not destroyed him by revealing his affairs. And while a bullet from James Earl Ray might have destroyed his body, he has lived on in the heart of every American who longs for a just and caring world, for sometimes the fire in a soul outlives the body, kindled and flaring up in odd places, in sanctuaries and city council chambers, in classrooms and locker rooms.
Imperfectly perfect Saint Martin had a gift for oratory, maybe for terrifying prophecy, certainly for causing good trouble.
Paul gives us a whole list of gifts of the Holy Spirit. And here’s the thing. You have some of them too. And though those with wealth and power insist on a wimpy Jesus and a passive St. Martin, sanitized and manageable, insist on narrowing the scope of righteous concerns, erasing their comments about greed and power and legalism, they cannot cage the Holy Spirit, for it wills what it wills, a world of compassionate and serendipitous creativity, of divine exuberance realized in all of nature, even in a fearful band of erect primates that aspires to eternity.
You may not be called to deliver speeches or march across bridges. But maybe you will. Maybe you’ll be called speak uncomfortable truths. Or to buy less meat. Or to lobby against crypto-currency.
You have gifts. Paul tells us a “A demonstration of the Spirit is given to each person for the common good,” and I believe it. Each person. Not some people.
Paul tells us there are different activities but one God, and I believe it.
If you do not know what you gift is, if you don’t know the activity to which God is calling you, that is when you turn to prayer, to scripture, and to the power of community. That is when you say to Jesus, as Saint Martin so often did, “Take my hand, Precious Lord”…
Take my hand. But wash yours first. And wear a mask. We’ve got work to do, tables to flip, and a weary world that needs love and joy.
Amen.