Facebook can be such a time waster if you let it but
now and again, a real gem appears. Recently celebrated in the US (and further)
was Martin Luther King Day, and one of the posts I thought too good to keep to
myself. It was just in time for Lent. This is what he said the year before his
assassination.
“You may be 38 years as I
happen to be. And one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls
you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause.
“And you refuse to do it
because you are afraid … You refuse to do it because you want to live longer …
You’re afraid you will lose your job, or you are afraid that you will be
criticized, or that you will lose your popularity, or you are afraid that some
one will stab you, or shoot at you or bomb your house, so you refuse to take
the stand.
“Well, you may go on and
live until you are 90 but you’re just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90. And
the cessation of breathing in your life is but the announcement of an earlier
death of that spirit.”
Martin
Luther King, jr (1929-1968)
In Lent, so my lectionary card tells me, the Church
remembers the life and ministry of Jesus and renews its commitment to him in
Christian discipleship. That’s the short version of it. However, I’ve been told
that the Church, as an organisation, must have a poor marketing strategy
because its founder and head neither became a billionaire through the market
nor lived to a great age.
Martin Luther King was killed, aged 39, as was
Dietrich Bonhoeffer over 20 years before him. And we are called to follow Jesus
Christ who two millennia ago also was killed in the prime of his life. Lent
includes that fact otherwise why are we here committing our lives to one
believed by so many not to “have made it”?
This is where MLK (for short) has a point. Would we
be here at all had Jesus put his safety first and survived to a great age with
descendants all around him? Would he be anything more than a bare footnote in
historical memory, if that?
We are here because Jesus Christ is the source of
what Dietrich Bonhoeffer and MLK and many nameless persons have said and done
since that first Good Friday two thousand years ago. And Jesus Christ is the
source of all that because he saw the great cause of the Kingdom of God and
called upon those near and far to come out of the darkness into that light.
Yes, he might have made a lot of money and settled down with a loving family.
Instead, he saw need and gave a hand up. He saw
despair and gave hope. He saw sheep without a shepherd and lay down his life
for those sheep.
When we talk
about his “life and ministry” it’s not about our own which has been comfortable
by his standards. It’s about a life and ministry cut brutally short because he
put himself in peril that we might be spared that peril.
But whoever follows Jesus may be
called to take those same risks he took, like Bonhoeffer, MLK, and the host of
others before and after them. While we often wonder why the world around us
doesn’t seem to “get the message”, the spirit of this Jesus Christ enables us
to be the message.
Lent calls us to remember the life
and ministry of Jesus, yes, but more than that, we are called to keep that
spirit alive to inspire those yet to come.
