Dear Beloved Community,
One spiritual practice that I revisit through the years is reading Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail each MLK Jr. Day in January. “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” is among the greatest essays in American history and perhaps the greatest theological essay put to the page. It was written longhand while King was in jail in Birmingham, Alabama for nonviolently protesting the injustice black folk faced in the segregated South. The letter is a response from Martin Luther King, Jr. to criticism he received from white moderate clergy.
Most of us know these people well. If we’re honest, many of us are those people. Though outwardly against racism, the white moderates urged King and others to slow down. King’s response in his direct and memorable prose was that “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” How long shall we “wait” when those around us suffer? King’s vision of beloved community meant that each of us is bound to together. I am not truly free if my neighbor is not fully free.
In this land of liberty and individual freedom, it can be easy to think of King as an individual icon. We love to celebrate the unique individual whose creative genius let them stand out from the crowd. Genius as he was, MLK’s legacy was not one of the singular individual but of the beloved community. King may have written this letter in a lonely jail cell, but he is surrounded by a beloved community, a great cloud of witnesses ranging from personal, historical, and biblical lives. His letter is a testament to the power of Christian community when lived out in the fullness of truth and love.
On this MLK Jr. Day while the youth are snow tubing in the Appalachian Mountains, a couple hundred miles northeast of us, Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated as the 47th President of the United States. Some in our country, families, and churches will celebrate this as a return to American greatness. Others in our country, families, and churches will lament this as yet another setback to justice. The wisdom needed as people of faith in this deeply divided time will not be found in the demonizing of the other, but in embodying an alternative vision of the belovedness of each body. King fiercely critiques the inaction of white moderates while still reminding them that they are brothers in Christ and thus invites them to see “the other” as sister or brother. Near the end of his letter his words ring prophetic for us today:
“If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.”
God grant us a sacrificial spirit for the days ahead.
Kyle