The Christian disciple prays to be an instrument of God’s peace. Dr. King knew how hard that could be. “I don’t care who you are, I don’t care where you live, there is a civil war going on in your life,” he said, in a sermon at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church on March 3, 1968, a month before hate cut him down. “Every time you set out to love, something keeps pulling on you, trying to get you to hate.”
Writing about the sermon, his friend and colleague Vincent Harding said that in his last year, he “looked more beleaguered, harassed, and desperate than I had ever seen him before.” Think of the racist hatred white America ladled over him like lava, especially the attempts on his and his family’s lives before April 1968. History drove no American now broadly recognized as being great down a harder road than we did Dr. King.
That kind of hate still flows in our veins. I posted last week about misogyny and the killing of Renee Good. About a dozen people leaving comments, no one I knew, found savage ways to prove the point. Two posted pornographically violent images. They didn’t say they regretted what happened or even what Renee did. They celebrated that she was dead, her spouse alone, their children bereft. “Every time you set out to love,” Dr. King said, “something keeps pulling on you, trying to get you to hate.” As with those who danced on the graves of martyrs of African descent such as George Floyd and Treyvon Martin, these are people whom hate has hollowed out.
But Dr. King was preaching to the church, not the critics. Since he knew the human heart, he knew we are all hate prone. When I visited Ebenezer several years ago and sat in the pews, listening to his voice on the sound system, I wondered what it had felt like to be under his teaching. The prophet was also a devoted pastor. HIs friend Harding thought he may have had a premonition of death and decided to reveal some of his own struggles, that we might be healed in ours. “In the final analysis, God does not judge us by the separate incidents or the separate mistakes that we made, but by the total bent of our lives,” Dr. King said. “Salvation is being on the right road, not having reached a destination.”
So we disciples of the Risen One have to stay on the right road, even if our country won’t. As the sun rose on Dr. King’s day, news came of the president threatening to destroy the Atlantic alliance in a fit of pique and continuing his lawless assault on Minneapolis. He’s a comic figure, it’s true. The Nobel Prize and all that. Then you think about everyone at risk around the world and those who are mourning the ones he’s already killed or murdered. News reports noted in passing that he killed scores of people of color while kidnapping Maduro. Since it had nothing to do with lifting the weight of oppression from the shoulders of Venezuelans, just controlling who gets their heavy crude, history has yet to decide whether these were deaths in combat or more Trump murders.
So not laughing is easy. Not being angry is hard. It’s hard to resist when something tries to get us to hate. Sometimes only prayer helps. Here is mine, as I sit this morning at the knee of Dr. King.
I pray that I will judge not lest I be judged.
I pray for those most at risk, especially people of color at home and around the world and our trans and non-binary siblings.
I pray that the better angels of heaven will reach Trump and those with the constitutional authority to constrain or stop him.
I pray that our God in Christ will watch over all who resist unjust authority.
I pray that the United States will survive to see its 250th birthday.
I pray from my place of privilege for those who have never known a government that took their interests to heart.
I pray for the wisdom to understand that our problems run deeper than Trump.
I pray the Holy Spirit will lift up leaders devoted to the divine law of the universe, the Golden Rule, who will pledge to do all they can for all of our people.
I pray over these words of Dr. King in his sermon: “It will be dark sometimes, and it will be dismal and trying, and tribulations will come. But if you have faith in the God that I’m talking about this morning, it doesn’t matter. You can stand up amid the storms.”
And I pray, “Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.”
(Photo: Donald Uhrbrock/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images)