January 16, 2011 | 9:30 and 11:00 a.m.

The Radiant Star

Calum I. MacLeod
Executive Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Psalm 27:4–9
Isaiah 9:1–4
Matthew 4:12–23

“On them light has shined.”

Isaiah 9:2 (NRSV)

I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

Martin Luther King Jr.
Letter from a Birmingham Jail

A week ago as we gathered for morning worship, we were numb with the news of the violence that had occurred in Tucson the day before, and in the week since there has been much conversation in the media discussing events, discussing the perpetrator. There has been much noise, attempts to lay blame, calls by our president for civility in our discourse. And so this morning I wanted for us as we gathered here in God’s presence and in God’s house to do something a little out of our ordinary rhythm and that is to hold silence together and in this silence to invite you perhaps to pray for those who mourn a loss through a violent act or to pray for those who are still recovering from injuries, perhaps simply to hold silence and clear all the noise and open yourself to God’s spirit. Following the silence we will hear the gospel. So let’s hold silence together.

· · ·

I was on the phone this week with a friend and colleague of mine who is a minister in Philadelphia. He knows this church very well and likes to joke with me. When I told him that I would be in the pulpit this morning, he said, "Oh, that’s great: the good people of Fourth Presbyterian Church are going to get a big white Scottish guy preaching on Martin Luther King Jr." That was dripping with sarcasm, of course. He knows that Martin Luther King’s legacy is not bounded by race or by nation. In fact, it gave me an opportunity to share with him a little story of my own. When I was probably about fifteen years old, I was at a weekend-away camp retreat with a Christian youth group that I was active with at home in Scotland. At one of the programs we were asked to share people who had been an influence on us or kind of a hero to us, and I shared—I remember very well—that Martin Luther King Jr. had become a very important influence in my own life and faith. I think the very first book I ever purchased that had some theological content was the collection of King’s sermons called Strength to Love. And in learning about King and reading King’s own words, I was really brought to a new understanding, a new encounter, a new image perhaps, of God. I was brought to an understanding of Jesus as one whose gospel is of love and peace and justice and concern for those on the margins and the oppressed. King spoke of a God who was both tough-minded and tenderhearted. In many ways I believe that that encounter, as a young man, with King’s story and writings was a part of what brought me to discerning a call to ordained ministry.

Martin Luther King’s legacy, of course, continues on down through the years following his assassination. It is ironic that this day, a week after the shootings of a politician in Tucson, we are remembering the assassination of Martin Luther King. We know only too well that the chasm between rich and poor in our world and in our nation and in our city yawns more these days than it ever has, and therefore we must never forget that part of King’s legacy was about fighting poverty. It was not just about civil rights for a racial ethnic group in the United States, but about economic rights for all people, about concern for the poorest. And, of course, King was the apostle of nonviolence. It does as well to remember that last year there were 448 homicides in our city, many of them coming from the use of guns.

As we enter the season of remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., I have been picking up on what has become a practice of mine this time of the year and that is to read the Letter from Birmingham Jail that King famously wrote when he was incarcerated in that city for participating in a protest for which there was no permit. A great new volume out of Harvard called A New Literary History of America is a collection of short essays on important literary moments in the history of the country, and an English professor from Indiana, George Hutchison, writes about the Letter from Birmingham Jail. He says, "Few works of public writing have embodied a social movement as powerfully in American history as Martin Luther King’s Letter from Birmingham Jail." The letter was written on scraps of paper that were smuggled to King in his cell, and it was written as a response to a letter that was published in a newspaper and signed by eight white, southern clergymen—seven Protestant ministers and a Jewish rabbi . While empathizing with the struggle, they were saying that this was not the time and the protest was not the way to go forward. The Letter from Birmingham Jail really is a broadside not just to the eight signers of the original letter, but to the whole church. Hutchison says that, "It remains an enduring reply to questions about the timeliness of insubordinate protests for justice in the public sphere."

Martin Luther King Jr. evokes as precedence for this the prophets in the Old Testament. He invokes Paul, and many people have seen the Letter from Birmingham Jail as a kind of modern Pauline epistle: as Paul wrote to a divided church in 1 Corinthians, so Martin Luther King writes to a broken church in the Letter from Birmingham Jail. Robert Veron, in the Atlantic Monthly, says that the Letter from Birmingham Jail is the tide-turning document of the American civil rights movement. In it Martin Luther King picks up an accusation that the civil rights marchers are extremists and agrees to that. He says, "The eighth-century prophets were extremists in their contexts. Jesus was an extremist in his own context. Paul, an extremist in his context." He does this litany of famous figures in religious history who were seen at their time as extremists, and then he asks the church, "What kind of extremists will we be? Will we be extremists for hate? Or will we be extremists for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of justice, or will we be extremists for the cause of justice?"

There’s another biblical figure that Martin Luther King Jr. resembles, although he doesn’t personally invoke it in the letter. And that is another who was seen as an extremist in his time, John the Baptizer. As we read in our Gospel, John’s role is always to get himself out of the way and to point to Jesus. You’ll have seen in the Art Institute these huge medieval canvases of Jesus and John the Baptist, and often John has got this kind of long bony finger, because his role in this story is to point to Jesus. (One commentator on the passage, a Presbyterian minister called Jennifer Johnson, says, "Perhaps his nickname shouldn’t be John the Baptist, but John the Finger.") He is always pointing, pointing to Jesus.

In the close of the Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. writes this: "Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear-drenched communities and in some not-too-distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty." He points to his master, to the Lamb of God, in whom is the fullness of love and brotherhood and sisterhood.

Tomorrow is a holiday, and I’m sure we’ll do holiday things with the day off and go have a look at the sales and see what we can pick up in town. But I exhort you this morning to take some time tomorrow, on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, to pray, and in your prayer give thanks for King’s legacy to the church and to the nation, for his faithfulness to the cause of nonviolence, his care for the poorest and most marginalized, and I exhort you to pray as well for our country, to pray for civility in political discourse, for what David Brooks in the New York Times called "the roots of civility, humility,” humility among those whose voices are often the loudest. Pray for a sense of unity, of purpose in our communities, in our nation. Maybe pray for better and stronger support for people who struggle with mental health issues in our world. You may want to pray for strong political will around tighter regulations on gun ownership. But at least I exhort you to pray, as Martin Luther King did, for “the radiant stars of love and brotherhood and sisterhood to shine upon our nation in their scintillating beauty.” All in the name of love and the King of love, even Jesus Christ our Lord, whom to know is life eternal and whom to serve is perfect freedom. Amen.