February 3, 2013
Rev. Mark R. Miller
Mark 3
“Prophets and Prophetic Faith”
Now that he is safely dead
Let us praise him
build monuments to his glory
sing hosannas to his name.
Dead men make
such convenient heroes: They
cannot rise
to the challenge of the images
we would fashion from their lives.
And besides,
it is easier to build monuments
than to make a better world
-Carl Wendell Hines Jr.
The
first celebration for Black History Month I ever attended was in 1986. I was a sophomore in high school. The Black Student Union held a special assembly
early one Monday in February. I remember
being dumfounded and thinking, “Why don’t we celebrate White history
month?” And the only thing I remember
from that assembly was something about a guy named King and hearing the words,
“I have a dream.”
A great deal has changed since that
time, for me personally and for our country.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. has a national holiday, and now even a
national monument. Celebrating Black
history is now part of many schools curriculum – not all, but almost all people
know February is Black History Month. And
maybe one day even those who assume this month is for black folk will find out
that it is everyone’s history.
But I worry. I worry because as well known as the name
Martin Luther King is, and his connection with his “Dream,” I believe his
legacy and his deepest convictions have been whitewashed. Yes, I really just said that. Dr. King and his dream are now more often put
in the service of our consumer economy than used to transform a broken and
unequal nation. Apparently someone
thought it would be worthy of his legacy to sell Coke-a-Cola. And now, the poorest of the poor are arrested
if they show up at his tomb.
In the latest edition of the Washington
University newspaper I noticed something rather disturbing. At their annual celebration of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr, the chancellor began the celebration by tying Dr. King’s
legacy to their current fundraising campaign.
He was able to do this without being laughed off the stage because he
claimed this would help with increasing diversity. This is what happens when prophets are safely
dead. You can turn a man whose final
work was about creating an economic bill of rights and claim he would support
one of the wealthiest academic institutions in the country to build more
buildings and grow their endowment. Yes,
it is a good thing Dr. King is dead or the chancellor would have to answer for
his foolishness.
This is just one of the many reasons why
I believe we need to do things differently this year. Instead of looking at many of the
contributions and achievements of black folks, we are going to do a bit of work
digging deeper into the life of a rather inconvenient prophet. In order to do this we are going to focus on
three of the speeches he gave in the final years before his death, all from
1967.
In those speeches, Dr. King went from
civil rights leader to national pariah.
His struggle for integration and the voting rights act moved to taking a
stand against the Vietnam War and making a clear connection between economics
and militarism. He pointed out how
racism was exploited in the service of capitalism and how militarism was
supporting the entire system. But unlike
today, Dr. King didn’t just become a talking head on MSNBC. He wrote in clear detail with extremely well researched
positions before speaking. And when he spoke even his closest allies
believed he was hurting the cause.
Dr. King was a follower of Jesus Christ
and one of the problems with discipleship is that at some point in our journey
it is going to cost us something. And
before it cost Dr. King his life, it cost him prestige and support from many of
his former allies. Militarism,
Consumerism, and Racism were the three great evils that drove Dr. King to call
us to the love of God. And yet, we are
hard pressed to hear anyone talking about these things when we celebrate Dr.
Kings’ birthday or celebrate Black History Month. Where is the conversation about the Poor
Peoples Campaign? Where is the stance by
the followers of Jesus against the calls for cuts for the poor when the
pentagon’s budget remains sacred? Where
are the followers of Jesus when Universities’ Chancellors steal the legacy of
the drum major for Justice? And where
are the voices of the faithful today which says any economic order which does
not bring life for all is sinful and must be transformed or cast aside?
This is the legacy of the inconvenient hero. But it is a legacy that has been lost. The next generation will not know if we do not go deeper. We won’t know if we do not go deeper. It is time to reclaim his story because it is built on the very foundations of our faith. If you want to get serious in this work, we have first got to go back and reclaim and then get to work making a better world – the world has enough monuments… what we need is a new movement built on an old story. Amen? Amen.
