Rediscovering the prophetic - MLK
Amos 5:1-24
I watched a BBC programme about Martin Luther King Junior (MLK) a couple of months ago now presented by Oona King a past Labour MP in London (before she lost her Bethnal Green & Bow seat to the controversial George Galloway). She seemed to want to portray MLK as a man who used faith & religion to gain power for himself & to drive forward an agenda of moral change. She was of course driven by her own lack of faith & belief that moral change for the common good did not require Christian belief. By the end I think it would be fair to say that she had to concede King’s faith was not an extra but the driving force the power the moral imperative that caused his ministry to be so extremely effective & powerful.
The documentary which followed MLK’s rallies, demonstrations & work around the US included many testimonies from people who knew & worked with him, & it was excellent & well worth a watch if you see it repeated. It provoked me during my time off after surgery to spend some time rereading some other stuff by King.
MLK was not a perfect man or a sinless man. He was though as we Phil Cook said about ray Tite in his funeral this week a forgiven man.
No MLK was a sinner, but a forgiven sinner, & a man blessed by God with such a ministry – he was a prophet.
The Lord took me back to another prophet - to that most amazing 5th chapter of Amos where God gives His people clear warnings about the value of their worship & offerings if they ignored the primary demands of His for justice, mercy & righteousness.
The Lord challenged me to see that both of these prophets – Amos & King – were called to be prophets for their generations, & that we need to rediscover our prophetic voice because these problems clearly remain for us today.
Yet we are not so passionate indeed one could say we don’t seem to see the Biblical Gospel priorities of Amos & MLK as priorities for us today.
In the Bible God makes it quite clear that He is deeply concerned about justice & fairness in the way society should be organised – there are over 2000 verse about justice & poverty in the Bible – we just need to wake up & see them!
Bishop Shepherd was quite right when he asserted that our God has a ‘Bias to the poor’. In the Old Testament the people of Israel are taught again & again that they should care for the poor & oppressed the alien & the widow. God establishes for them the principle of the year of Jubilee when debts will be cancelled & everyone get the chance not just for nominal redemption but a real life changing new start.
They are told that their priority of care is towards these things & that God expects them to act as He does. Indeed Amos goes as far as saying that their & our worship & offerings are offensive to God if we / they do not go along with our use of our strength to free the weak, if our prophetic voice is not heard in the world.
Yet the Jews & the Church in turn have been unable to follow God’s ways. The alien has been rejected & treated with at best suspicion. The Jubilee dismissed as religious day dreaming nonsense that would never work in the ‘real world’. We have constantly seen a ‘gospel’ preached that promises the poor it’s ok to put up with rubbish today because there will be jam tomorrow in heaven.
The New Testament does nothing that I can see to do away with our God’s priorities for the way society should be governed. Indeed Jesus seems to want to expand the possibilities. We are told that we are to pray for those who curse us & to refuse to deal in violence but instead to turn the other cheek & love our enemies.
When we read these Gospel Biblical imperatives we can do nothing but make the logical deduction that God wants us to be as salt & light & change the world.
King did just that. He heard the voice of Jesus calling him to follow the route of non violence. I came across a quote from him saying ‘Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.’
You know I think the way the UK, USA, Israel et al has behaved in its relations with the Palestinians & the Middle East in recent years it is almost as if those lessons of Jesus have never been heard in the corridors of power. It almost beggars belief that we could be so stupid. How we need to rediscover this kind of prophetic voice to shout loud enough that Brown & Bush & whoever follows in their stead for instance begin to understand as MLK clearly did that it is love not war that will set us & our enemies free.
We do history a huge disservice if we only think of what King had to say about the vile injustice & offence of racism. He spoke with great passion against the US commitment to the horrendous war in Vietnam. He identified like the great prophets in the Old Testament with the people living in great poverty, the under classes, & like the prophet he spoke out against the way society’s passion was to accumulate wealth etc.
In that most monumentous ‘I have a dream speech’ of 28th August 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial he said he saw that the Black people were living ‘on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity’. You could say that in many places in the USA & here in the UK the same is still true couldn’t you.
Yet from the way we live out our faith in the Church today you would think it must have changed. Surely we must have addressed all those injustices of racism, war, poverty etc because we never seem to speak out against the injustice of poverty & debt do we?
Other hot topics have taken hold of much of the Church in UK & the USA – a country I love so much. Subjects like abortion or genetic engineering in the news here in the UK this week for instance. Now I am pretty sure that we as Church have much to say about these subjects, after all we have written many millions of words about them, but the Bible says virtually nothing because of course the authors knew nothing of an age where such things would be possible. But ….
• Are they more important than the things Amos & Jesus actually did talk about?
• Is God no longer interested in justice?
• Has He changed His mind about poverty or racism?
• Were Jesus words about love for our enemies & turning the other cheek really only for that particular day & age, or like someone once said to me a spiritual rule that was never to prevent us using violence to get our way & spreading our values around the world? Really?
As I watched the BBC programme it became so clear that my world is very similar to the world of MLK. He had the horrors or segregation especially in the US Deep South. He had the Vietnam War & the horrific poverty & injustice he saw around him.
We have what many would see as the equally illegal war in Iraq. We too have outrageous racism in our society – it is not so long ago that the Stephen Lawrence enquiry made it clear that there was institutional racism in the Police – something most Black people had always known.
There still exists especially in the comfortable middle class areas like this one racism that lies not too far under the surface & even raises its hellish face in Church. I have had said to me things like we don’t do Caribbean food because it is smelly or how Black people are not as suited to high office because they are less responsible, always late or lazy.
We too have a society that seems hell bent on the pursuit of wealth & things while others especially in some of our inner cities seem to be the forgotten people.
But if we truly are serious about our Saviour & our faith then we have to wonder why we have lost our prophetic tongue. Surely we still believe that the scriptures words yet our passions seem different. A simple King Junior quote that has stayed with me is "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter." & you know I think not only is that so true it is true for so much of Church in our generation too.
We have been far too silent or if not silent then speaking with a whisper about the things that matter.
Again from the ‘I have a dream speech’ of 28th August 1963 MLK reminded the people that we cannot continually put these things off for another day. He said to those gathered at the Lincoln Memorial
‘We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.’
You know Church we need to be reminded of that wisdom for our generation too. Now is the time, now. We can no longer sit back & not be prophetic folks – we have to rediscover our voice & speak out to a nation, a world that needs to see what Amos had revealed to him by our God in Amos 5:24 (NIV) namely ‘ let justice roll on like a river, righteousness like a never-failing stream!’ In other words folks start proclaiming & demanding & being good news.
It is time we got our hands out of the air in worship if we do not demand justice with the same passion from our politicians of all parties. Now is the time that we get off our knees in prayer & start working in practical ways for justice in our communities. That amazingly challenging passage in Matthew 25 about the sheep & goats comes to my mind – it is time we got out there & found the people who need feeding, clothing, visiting & actually became good news people.
Now is the time we took the risk of rediscovering our prophetic voices & actually get out there & be salt, light & yeast. The problem is that it is always easier to just give a few pennies to charity & think we have done our bit. It is too easy to think that these are political questions that we need to leave to political people for we are people for faith.
If that is how you feeling you need to take a long cold look at this Book (Bible) for it is the most political challenging demanding book. I will never understand how anyone can meet our Creator here & not see just how pivotal these things are for all who think they are called to belong to His family.
Perhaps part of the problem is we are so busy with our meetings & maintaining Church that we simply do not have time to do & be what I think Amos & MLK are calling us to. Maybe you need to leave a Bible study group so that you can campaign for justice in society. Maybe you need to let go of a meeting or a social thing to get into feeding the poor say at Aston Link as a volunteer feeding the very poor & homeless once or twice a week for example.
I know that this is a challenging message & I make no apologises for that. What we need is to be brave though with what God has given to us today. What we need to do is ask God’s Spirit to continue to challenge us as we leave to have the faith to make the urgent changes in our lives He is demanding today.
I leave you with a final quote from Martin Luther King Junior.
"Cowardice asks the question, ’Is it safe?’
Expediency asks the question, ’Is it politic?’
Vanity asks the question, ’Is it popular?’
But, conscience asks the question, ’Is it right?’
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because one’s conscience tells one that it is right."
May God give us the grace to do what is right now & always, Amen.
