Click here for an archive list of other messages

A Prophet's Calling

As the state of Connecticut prepares to execute its first inmate in nearly forty years, do you search your heart for the right of this action in our name? As our war on Iraq depletes our nation’s resources and costs thousands of lives, do you ask God about the right or wrong of our actions, or do you simply live your life in deference to the violence done in our name all around us?

It was from a jail cell during one of Dr. Martin Luther Kings many arrests that he wrote:

“Many people fear nothing more than to take a position which stands out sharply and clearly from the prevailing opinion. The tendency of most is to adopt a view that is so ambiguous that it will include everything and so popular that it will include everyone.”

If you asked people today, who are the prophets of our life time, Martin Luther King’s name would lead all the rest.

A prophet’s life is hard. It is a prophet’s task to speak out against the tide and the words they speak are meant to make the people of God uncomfortable. It is a prophet’s task to show us the world as God sees it and as God wishes it to be. A prophet’s task is to show us how absorption in self interest comes at tremendous cost to the rest of God’s creation. It is a prophet’s task to show us a true reflection of ourselves and what we do or do not do to thwart Gods’ purpose for us and all of creation. Prophets don’t foretell the future; they show us the painful truths of the present.

Consider the prophets from scripture, how they lived and died. Jeremiah, John the Baptist and Paul, their message rejected, their lives threatened, arrested and executed by their own people, because they would not hear the truth of their words.

In the current era, the same is true: The peace makers who Jesus tells us are the children of God: Mahatma Gandhi, Anwar Sadat, Yitzhak Rabin and Martin Luther King, were all prophets whose word of truth and courage in the midst of a world filled with hate, retribution and revenge have demonstrated to us that love can cast out fear and nonviolent resistance can bring an end to wrong. But they have also shown us that it cannot be done without suffering and sacrifice. We do not want to stand up against the tide. We do not want to be made uncomfortable. We fear and work to avoid suffering at all costs, even for righteousness sake.

When we think of Martin Luther King, Jr., we do not want to remember that he was beaten in our government’s name, that he was arrested over and over again for rights and privileges that we have taken for granted all of our lives. We do not want to remember the crosses burned on his lawn, or that his family barely survived the blowing up of his house. We do not remember that he lived every day with threats to his life. We do not think of him as having sleepless nights in agonizing prayer over the road that was unfolding before him and the task that he writes was thrust upon him.

We focus on what he accomplished in the fight against racism, but we don’t embrace the means he chose to obtain those goals with us and for us. His path was one of nonviolence. Nonviolent resistance was not the way of a coward, but the way of courage and a way suffering. It is a renewed reminder of the greatest act of love, “to lay down one’s live for another.” Not with armed force but armed with love and the belief that love of enemies by the grace of God is the only thing that could and would cast out fear, hate and bitterness.

Is this not fear, hate and vengeance that drive every violent act in every human spirit. Are we then not constantly fighting wars of fear and hate? Are we not creating patterns of self perpetuation when we hit them before they hit us or because they hit us or when we kill them for killing because killing is wrong?

If Timothy McVey justified his act of killing innocent citizens, with federal agents because the federal agents killed innocent people at Waco, how do we separate his act of retribution from our own of killing him for killing them, for killing others. King would ask us what part of our soul is crying out for the execution of Michael Ross, as heinous as his crimes were. Is it the place where we find God? Or is it a dark place filled with fear, bitterness or retribution.

When I was in Junior College in Casper Wyoming, I was surrounded by a white environment. Only the basketball team had people of color who were recruited from far and wide to make the college’s game second to none. Bill Dice was a black student from Chicago and he and I became fast friends. Having our own girl friend and boy friend back home, we enjoyed each other’s company as we ate together in the cafeteria, went to movies together and sat near each other in world history class. But my class mates harassed us for our friendship, writing racial slurs on my door and locking me into my dorm room, by taping a stack of pennies together and forcing them between the door and the jam. They also flooded my room with water by running a hose across the roof and down through my window, destroying some of my text books and papers. I don’t know what they did to Bill, because he never talked about it. But it ultimately drove him away and he returned to Chicago and in the next year was first string on the Marquette Basketball team in Milwaukee. I hated cowboys after that. I hated red necks and hated Wyoming. Cowboy hats and boots, worn by all of those who harassed me became the symbol of everything evil in my heart and mind and the hate poisoned me for many years. Then my sister married a cowboy from Sheridan, WY who held much of the prejudices I loathed, but over time because we were family, he came to know and love my children and his heart was changed. My heart too, was changed. Hate had paralyzed me and darkened my soul. But my enemy became my friend when I put down my sword and let him into my world.

King wrote in his letters from jail, “Hatred and bitterness can never cure the disease of fear; only love can do that. Hatred paralyzes life, love releases it. Hatred confuses life. Love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.”

In 1967, King made a decision very unpopular to those who were leading the civil rights movement with him when he began to speak against the war in Vietnam.

King believed that the root cause of both racial hatred and war was fear. He hoped that the greatest application of the nonviolent methods used in the civil rights movement would be for world peace. "Do we have the morality and courage required to live together as brothers and not be afraid?" he asked. War, he said, had become obsolete, but he knew the danger when he saw the leaders of nations preparing for war while talking peace. If we want mankind to survive, then we must find an alternative to war. He warned that a nation which spends more money on military defense than on social programs is moving toward spiritual death.

If we invade a nation that we fear might someday have the means to attack us and we kill a hundred thousand of its people, create a new training ground for global terrorists, incite a civil war, run 80,000 Christians out of the country and working women back into their homes for fear of the Islamic extremists who now roam and run Iraq’s streets, why does it surprise us that the Iraqi people are not welcoming us with open arms and that insurgents see force and killing as a means to their own justifiable end. How can we not see that violence teaches violence? How can we not see as Gandhi has said that practicing an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth leaves the whole world blind and toothless?

Our modern prophet, who following our Lord Jesus Christ, laid down his life for us, for all of humanity as his friends, calls on us to day to live his dream, to live as peacemakers and children of God. He calls us to lives of nonviolent resistance wherever we find wrong. He calls us to stand up to tyranny wherever we find it and that we defend one another from the perpetrators of violence, in our families, in our streets and in our world, but not by resorting to violence ourselves.

We must remember that until Constantine, some 200 years after the birth of Christ, the Christian people were pacifists, facing persecution, resisting injustice and dying for their faith. King calls us back to our roots in the life of Christ, a life of justice and nonviolent resistance to wrong.

According to King, these six points are what we must understand about nonviolent resistance to injustice;


• First, Nonviolence it is not based on cowardice; although it may seem passive physically, it is spiritually active, requiring the courage to stand up against injustice.
  
  
• Second, nonviolence does not seek to defeat the opponent but rather to win his understanding to create "the beloved community."
  
  
• Third, the attack is directed at the evil not at the people who are doing the evil; for King the conflict was not between whites and blacks but between justice and injustice.
  
  
• Fourth, in nonviolence there is a willingness to accept suffering without retaliating.
  
  
• Fifth, not only is physical violence avoided but also spiritual violence; love replaces hatred.
  
  
• Sixth, nonviolence has faith that justice will prevail.