Prophets and Prophetic Faith

WESTMINSTER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH
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.