Editor’s Note: The following is an excerpt from a sermon that was read at the eighth annual MLK Shabbat service, hosted by Sixth & I Synagogue in conjunction with Turner Memorial AME Church on Friday, January 13, 2012.
I am ambivalent about Martin Luther King Jr. being frozen in stone not far from where we are sitting tonight. Although a resident of Prince George’s County, I have not visited the memorial complex. Like the Laodiceans in the book of Revelation, I am not hot about the monument nor am I cold. I have driven past it on numerous occasions rubbernecking to sip its serene beauty. But I have not been close to the soaring statue. My eyes have not beheld it up close. My hands have not touched it. I have yet to drink deeply from the monument designed to remind humanity that it is possible to hew a stone of hope from the mountain of despair.
As a child I was given a bust of Dr. King. When I got a little older I was given Stephen B. Oates’ magisterial biography of Dr. King. Even now I am reading Clayborne Carson’s edited volume entitled “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.” and Taylor Branch’s elegant trilogy on America during the King years. I wanted to go to Morehouse College because that is where King earned his undergraduate degree. I considered attending Boston University’s School of Theology because that is where King earned his doctorate. I guess I assumed that I would be endowed with his unswerving commitment to God’s just reign and towering intellect by osmosis if I walked the hallowed halls that he once walked.
The first church trip that I was privileged to lead as a pastor was a pilgrimage to the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta. And I can say that I am a pastor today largely because of King’s ministry. A ministry that proved that preachers don’t have to check their brains at the door of the sanctuary nor abandon the ministry of justice while serving the flock of Christ. I have been challenged by the legacy of King, soaked in his words, and baffled by his unswerving commitment to justice. Some people are bibliophiles. Some are anglophiles. I am a Kingphile.
But I remain lukewarm about King in stone. Why? Americans are people stricken with amnesia. We forget history, especially when it is convenient to do so. We banish suffering and strife and violence from our collective memory without realizing that our struggles become more intractable when wed to silence. Why am I lukewarm? Because Americans would rather glaciate our Martin Kings in monuments surrounded by flora and fauna than deal with the harsh, prophetic realities that made them both attractive and repulsive to the body politic. I am afraid that if I cling too closely to the monument, King’s heart of flesh that often offended us will become a heart of stone that comfortable middle-class blacks like me and Democrats and Republicans and others can manipulate and smash into pebbles of convenience.
Cornel West talks about the santaclausification of Martin Luther King. According to Dr. West with our vapid celebrations of King, “He just becomes a nice little old man with a smile with toys in his bag, not a threat to anybody, as if his fundamental commitment to unconditional love and unarmed truth does not bring to bear certain kinds of pressure to a status quo. So the status quo feels so comfortable as though it's a convenient thing to do rather than acknowledge him as to what he was, what the FBI said, "The most dangerous man in America." Why? Because of his fundamental commitment to love and to justice and trying to keep track of the humanity of each and every one of us.” West also says, “[I]n the market-driven world in which celebrity status operates in such a way that it tries to diffuse all of the threat and to sugarcoat and deodorize what actually is rather funky.”
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