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Dundalk Church of the Brethren Pastor's Page
I
wonder sometimes whether there are things that I forgot to do that I
should
have done. Well actually most of the time I’m pretty sure
there are things that
I forgot to do that I should have done. Right now for instance
I’m wondering if
I shouldn’t have said something Sunday (yesterday) about
Martin Luther King Jr.
Day. I have often wondered what is the best way to celebrate this day.
I have
had trouble finding celebrations around First
let me tell you that Dr. King
is one of my faith heroes. As I became more aware of my leanings toward
pacifism and more aware of Dr. King’s same leanings I would
go to the library
while in seminary and search the catalogue for information about him.
The most
interesting things I found were tapes of a few sermons he had preached
at our
seminary chapel services. In these full length sermons he went a little
more
deeply into explanations of his concepts of non-violent direct action,
the law
of love and the beloved community than we often hear in the shorter
speeches he
made at large national event that are so often quoted.
Drawing
from Ghandi and Jesus he
explained that to do violence to another person was dehumanizing to the
victim
and the perpetrator. So, that both in essence were victims of a
different kind.
So, pointing out to another person how their actions which kept you in
poverty
and as a second class citizen and demanding they stop was restoring to
them their
humanity as well as yours. The goal, the end game, was the beloved
community
where all people as he would say, “are judged not by the
color of their skin,
but the content of their character.” In one sermon he talked
about the New
Testament words for love. I’ve heard this sermon in other
contexts also or at
least similar ones. Agape he said was creative, uplifting and affirming
of the
basic human dignity of another person even if you didn’t like
them. He followed
this by the story of the Good Samaritan and reminded us that the people
who
passed by on the other side were not bad people. They had their
reasons, they
were in a hurry to get to church, would have been ritually unclean if
they’d
touched a dead body, were worried about more thieves lurking about or
maybe
they were late for a meeting of the Jericho Road Improvement Committee.
They
were in fact a lot like us, but the law
of love, agape,
was carried out by
the Samaritan who stopped and helped. All
the other stuff needed to be
done, none of it was bad, but it wasn’t what was most needed
then. The
Samaritan man saw the humanity, the human dignity of this man even
though he
didn’t know him and was of a different race. This, King said,
was the essence
of Jesus’ teaching to love our enemies. This
teaching about agape meaning to
creatively affirm the basic human dignity of each person was the reason
he also
worked on issues of poverty for all people no matter what race they
were.
Poverty was for him an injustice whether it was white folk in Sometimes
in our celebration of the Martin Luther King Jr. our media portrays to
us once
a year on MLK Day we miss the basic substance of his message and life.
It gets
watered down, deradicalized. What I would point out about Dr. King is
that he
was also Rev. King, a Baptist minister drawn into the civil rights
movement
reluctantly at first. The principles which he espoused were thoroughly
Christian and grew out of the struggles of his faith in the face of
profound
suffering.
This is where I relate
to Dr.
King now. How do I, how do we struggle with our faith in the face of
the
suffering of our time, whether personal or societal? We could do worse
than
looking at how the principles of agape love and the beloved community
apply for
us.
Pastor
Rusty
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