God’s dream lives on
If he had lived, Martin Luther King Jr. would be 95 this year. He was assassinated, in 1968, at age 39. Today he is remembered (and therefore most conveniently ignored) as an American saint.
A few racists still vilify him, of course. May they rot in the personal hell they create for themselves and others around them.
If I were a better follower of Jesus, I might wish for their redemption. But deep down I do believe that some people may be beyond redemption. So although I do pray for my enemies, as Jesus instructed, I do not hold out much hope for them. And, I admit, I also do not do much to help redeem them.
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God planted a dream in King’s heart, and King followed it. Here are some signs that this dream is still alive.
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Roeland Park United Methodist Church was the church that “sponsored” me in ministry. I served as an assistant to Pastor Wally Proctor during seminary. My family and I were supported in every way by every church member along the way.
Alas, the church closed last June – too few members, too many expenses. It was a great smaller church while it lasted. But the Great Plains Annual Conference still sees some potential in the location and the building, and the conference hopes to maintain it for future uses.
Thanks to a push by Resurrection UMC, the building has become a day shelter during our recent cold spell. May this church continue to serve our Lord even after its official demise!
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Michele Norris is a respected longtime journalist who is now a columnist for The Washington Post. Since 2010 she has read thousands of responses to a post-card challenge she made back then:
“Race. Your thoughts. 6 words. Please send.”
In 13 years, her “Race Card Project” has collected 500,000 thoughts, many now in electronic form via a website: https://theracecardproject.com/michele-norris/
She says she finds the responses shocking in both their anger and in their grace. She tells more in a new book, Hidden Conversations: What Americans Really Think About Race and Identity. Sounds like a tough but necessary read. I’m already on the library wait list.
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Sometimes welcome but hard truth appears in the most unlikely places, such as a review of a TV series. The series is HBO’s anthology series “True Detective.” The reviewer is Nina Metz of the Chicago Tribune.
Here is part of what she says. Wait for it.
There’s a compelling story buried in here, about the town’s indigenous Iñupiaq women, and how and why they operate on the margins. “True Detective” mostly keeps them on the edges of the story, as well. The finale suggests a more interesting story that could have been front and center.
But then, “True Detective” isn’t designed to go against the grain. Over its four seasons, we watch as problems are caused (or ignored) by individual cops. But existing structures go unchallenged – the proverbial bad guy is always external, rather than baked into the system itself.
Did you catch it? She’s talking about the “powers and principalities” that the Apostle Paul warned us about 2,000 years ago. These “bad buys” who are “baked into the system itself” happen to be the system itself.
They are far harder to root out that the individual racists we might encounter, such as those I mentioned earlier, who are so hard to love. If we despair of individuals being redeemed, what hope must we have for redemption of the system that creates and supports such twisted human beings?
Racists are not born, you know. They are created. They are groomed, to use a right-wing bogey-word. The system creates and grooms them. We must fight the system while loving them and working to redeem them.
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Finally, a cheerful note from Stephanie Bai, as associate editor at The Atlantic. This appears in a weekly kind of potpourri column in which an Atlantic writer talks about things that interest them. Bai writes:
I’ve been reading the Bible several times a week since I became a Christian at 19, which means I have read certain Psalms or Gospel stories dozens and dozens of times. And yet, I’m still struck by things I didn’t see on earlier readings.
Just last week, for example, was the Feast of Epiphany, which celebrates the story in Matthew 2 of the wise men coming from far away to visit Jesus. And reading the passage again, I noticed a connection I hadn’t made before: These foreigners worshipping Jesus were the first beneficiaries of the exhortation Jesus would later give his followers to “make disciples of all nations.” Jesus’s “Great Commission” was already being fulfilled when he was just a baby.
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Great observation! Thanks for sharing it in a secular magazine!
I noted at the beginning that Martin Luther King Jr. would be 95 this year. As was said of Lincoln, now he belongs to the ages. Now he is eternal, for he lives with Jesus Christ his Lord.