Sunday, January 19, 2020 | 8:00 a.m.

Unquenchable Fire

Victoria G. Curtiss
Associate Pastor, Fourth Presbyterian Church

Isaiah 49:1–7
Matthew 5:38–48

And then ol’ Bull [Connor] would say as we kept moving, “Turn on the fire hoses,” and they did turn ’em on. But what they didn’t know was that we had a fire that no water could put out.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Last October our church sponsored a trip to Alabama and Mississippi to learn more about the civil rights movement. We were immersed in the terrible depths of hatred and violence that make up our nation’s history of racism. What impressed me even more was the courageous witness of those who resisted such oppression and still do. We were inspired by those who persistently marched, boycotted, sat at lunch counters, registered people to vote, changed laws, and risked their lives seeking equal rights. Faith in God was central in many of their lives.

Churches were key gathering places for activists to boost their morale through preaching, singing, and praying during long weeks and months of working to end segregation and unjust practices. Freedom Riders rode for miles at risk of their lives, singing spirituals on the bus. Hundreds of young adults from around the country went south to fill their prisons. They also sang in the overcrowded conditions behind bars, so much so that the guards threatened to—and did—take away their mattresses, toothbrushes, and more if they kept singing. They kept on singing.

Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968 reflected on the early battles in Birmingham when Bull Connor was sheriff while a crowd protested. Dr. King said, “Then ol’ Bull would say as we kept moving, ‘Turn on the fire hoses,’ and they did turn ’em on. But what they didn’t know was that we had a fire that no water could put out.” That unquenchable fire was God’s Spirit burning for justice.

The centrality of the Christian faith was key to the identity, life, and even strategy of Martin Luther King Jr. Born in segregated Atlanta of a ministerial family; precocious student, pastor, powerful speaker; founder of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference; director of campaigns for racial justice throughout the South and North; catalyst for the Civil Rights Acts; Nobel Peace Prize-winner; opponent of the Vietnam War; “drum major for justice and peace”: Martin Luther King Jr. has been interpreted in many ways. But the key to his life is to be found in his Christian faith.

Consider first the Montgomery bus struggle of 1955 to 1957, where it all started, when Rosa Parks refused to move from her seat. The heart of the Montgomery movement, and of subsequent King campaigns, was the mass meeting, a meeting with all the marks of a revival: preaching, clapping, “Amens,” singing, and earnest prayer. The leaders of the movement were mostly clergy, and the protesters were mostly Baptists and Methodists. The movement was firmly rooted in the Christian church.

Martin Luther King Jr. was born in the womb of the Southern Black church. The religion of the Black church has often been understood in two ways: as a code, or as an escape. It was code when Southern slaves sang “Steal away to Jesus,” “Every Time I Feel the Spirit,” or “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Their captors heard them singing to God, but they really were summons to freedom via the Underground Railroad. The meaning was plain in another song:

O freedom, O freedom, O freedom over me!
Before I’ll be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave,
And go home to my Lord, and be free.

Dr. King often quoted that song to good effect.

Leroy Moore, in an examination of the spirituals, wrote, “The spiritual always has to do with freedom, with salvation, and with escape. . . . I refer to mystical escape, mystical flight, not away somewhere but into the self, into the soul, to God in the soul. . . . ‘My soul’s been anchored in the Lord.’” Through praise, prayer, and song, worshipers discover that God is with us and we are with God, already. We discover the unifying experience of God and self in oneness.

During the Montgomery struggle, this religious experience was central. At the time of Rosa Parks’ arrest, a mass protest meeting was called. Everything hinged on its outcome. Dr. King only had twenty minutes to prepare the opening speech, which he called “the most decisive speech of my life.” So he prayed.

Driven to distraction by vicious telephone threats, he prayed. Our group stood in the very kitchen of the parsonage where Martin Luther King Jr. first lived with his wife and newborn daughter in Montgomery. We heard his voice in a recording of his recollection of praying in that kitchen:

It was around midnight. You can have some strange experiences at midnight. [A threatening caller had rattled him,] “N____, we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren’t out of this town in three days, we’re going to blow your brains out, and blow up your house.” I sat there and thought about a beautiful little daughter who had just been born. . . . She was the darling of my life. I’d come in night after night and see that little gentle smile. And I sat at that table thinking about that little girl and thinking about the fact that she could be taken away from me any minute. . . . And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me, and I had to know God for myself. And I bowed down over that cup of coffee. I will never forget it. . . . I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, “Lord, I’m down here trying to do what’s right. I think I’m right. I think the cause we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I’m awake now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage. And I can’t let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.” Then it happened. And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, “Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world.” . . . I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. (Martin Luther King Jr., January 1956)

When he was gripped by a strong sense of guilt for having provoked the very violence he and his people had suffered, Dr. King stood before them and prayed. Without ceasing to work, without losing his realism, in season and out, Martin Luther King Jr. prayed. These prayers were the strong inward wrestlings of a human being whose final resource was not himself but God. The Montgomery bus boycott succeeded. And its twenty-eight-year-old leader became a national figure.

In 1963 in Birmingham, Dr. King and several others were arrested for participating in nonviolent demonstrations. In jail, he wrote a letter to eight Alabama clergy who had publicly asked him to desist. He began the letter on newspaper margins and pieces of toilet paper, reciting the evils of segregation that had led to the campaign. He wrote, “You deplore the demonstrations that are presently taking place in Birmingham. But I am sorry that your statement did not express a similar concern for the conditions that brought the demonstrations into being.”

In this remarkable letter, Dr. King defends his tactic of nonviolent direct action. The moderate white clergy of Alabama accused him of inciting hatred and violence. What upset them was that the tactic Dr. King had learned from Mahatma Gandhi was not “passive resistance,” as it was often misnamed. It was truly resistance, powerful and confrontative.

In later years, some more militant leaders of the movement would deride Dr. King as too conservative. What upset them was that the tactic retaliated against hate not with hate but with love. Dr. King was always looking toward a reconciliation after the battle, because his tactic was grounded not so much in Gandhi as in the gospel. Looking back on those days, he wrote that it was the Sermon on the Mount, not a doctrine of nonviolent resistance, that inspired African Americans of Montgomery to social action. “It was Jesus of Nazareth that stirred [them] with the creative weapon of love.”

Love as a weapon—what a powerful principle. To Martin Luther King Jr., the heart of the gospel was to recognize that love could really change a situation of conflict and enmity. Love reaching out toward the oppressor, love forcing negotiation. He recognized the persistence and power of evil yet still had an evangelist’s faith. He really believed that redneck Southern sheriffs and politicians were sheep who had strayed from the fold, who ran the risk of being converted, and that however powerful evil is, love is more powerful still. He publicly condemned the war in Vietnam, arguing that American power should be “harnessed to the service of peace and human beings, not an inhumane power [unleashed] against defenseless people.” “Remember him,” said Coretta Scott King, “as a man who refused to lose faith in the ultimate redemption of [humanity].”

In late March 1968, Dr. King was in Memphis to help striking garbage workers. Violence again gnawed at the heels of the movement. Amid the discouragement of the hour, Dr. King proclaimed, “I’ve been to the mountaintop.” He became another Moses, who had seen from the mountaintop the promised land his people would reach, though he himself might not. Indeed, a few hours later, he was gone.

His speech in Memphis suggests that to understand the faith of Martin Luther King Jr., we need to look to the Old Testament, especially to Moses and the Exodus. When two thousand marchers gathered for the journey from Selma to Montgomery, Dr. King instructed them, “Walk together, children. Don’t you get weary. . . . It will lead up to the promised land. And Alabama will become a new Alabama, and America will be a new America.”

On another occasion, knowing that pharaohs always act the same way, he said, “When the pressure is increased, pharaohs will say, Wait. Then pharaohs will say, Go slower. What the pharaohs mean . . . is, Never. . . . They’d rather risk drowning their own armies rather than to let God’s people go free.”

But even more than the Exodus from Egypt, it was in the Old Testament that Dr. King found two elements of his faith held together in creative tension: human action and God’s action. If he had emphasized the call to freedom only, Dr. King might have been just one more civil rights leader fighting injustice. If he had spoken only of God’s redemptive purpose, he might have fallen prey to the religion of escape. But for Martin Luther King Jr., it was twofold: we must act, and God is acting. He knew that humanity on its own loses its way, gets discouraged, while passive dependence on God alone is disobedience to God. But taken together, they produce a true vision of the purpose of God and the significance of human history.

Dr. King’s dream was a welling up from the secret springs of strength of the Black church, called up by the songs of his childhood:

Precious Lord, take my hand . . .
Softly and tenderly Jesus is calling . . .
There is a balm in Gilead . . .

It is a dream that overflows in a mighty flood of concern for America and beyond America, for all to gain the strength to love. It is a dream that remembers stories of a God who did not desert God’s people on this earthly journey but who went before them day and night. It is a dream that requires voices to cry out and weary feet to march and many a soul to pray.

Dr. King had a dream, one we still desperately need today, as racial bigotry, hate crimes, closed borders, threats to voting rights, and mass shootings are on the rise and as we turn too readily to military retaliation instead of pursuing nonviolent negotiations.

God calls us to carry forth this dream. No matter how impossible the dream may seem, we can—and must—draw hope, courage, and strength from our faith. We are called to allow the unquenchable fire for justice to burn within us. May it be so, to the end that all people everywhere are free. Amen.

With thanks to David Garrow and James McClendon