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    The Service, Sacrifice and Faithfulness of MLK Jr.

    By Danny Cardwell on Sun, 01/20/2019 - 10:26pm | Personal, Religion, Social Justice

    Since 2007, I have given close to 20 talks about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Many of these talks have been in churches, but some have taken place in "secular" venues: libraries, a courthouse and an office building. 

    I always approach a talk about Dr. King the same no matter where I may be speaking (or who I'm speaking to). It's not necessary for the audience to believe in the Christian God (or any God) to understand how Dr. King's religious convictions inspired his actions. With that said, I never proselytize, but I do ground his speeches and the actions he took in the Bible. Dr. King's service, sacrifice and faithfulness can all be traced back to the scriptures that shaped his life. 

    Service

    In Galatians 5:1 Paul writes, "It is for freedom that Christ has set us free. Stand firm, then, and do not let yourselves be burdened again by a yoke of slavery." Dr. King often made reference to Paul's letter. Later in verses 13 and 14 Paul writes, "You, my brothers and sisters, were called to be free. But do not use your freedom to indulge the flesh; rather, serve one another humbly in love. For the entire law is fulfilled in keeping this one command: Love your neighbor as yourself." 

    Galatians 5:1-15 were often referred to as the "Christian Freedom papers" by many Black denominations going all the way back to the early days of the abolitionist movement. The same Bible that was (mis)used to justify the enslavement and brutal treatment of Africans in America was also a source of inspiration for Dr. King and countless others. 

    Sacrifice

    It's impossible to serve anyone or anything without sacrifice. Dr. King had a one way ticket to a professional life in the north. Sure he would still be living under a lesser form of Jim Crow, but he could have built a lovely home, pastored a church and raised his children in relative obscurity. He could have done all of those things and been a success in the eyes of his friends and family. In the second chapter of Philippians Paul writes about some of the sacrifices that are necessary to be a humble servant. Philippians 2:1-8 reads as follows:

    Therefore, if you have any encouragement from being united with Christ, if any comfort from his love, if any common sharing in the Spirit, if any tenderness and compassion, then make my joy complete by being like-minded, having the same love, being one in spirit and of one mind. Do nothing out of selfish ambition or vain conceit. Rather, in humility value others above yourselves, not looking to your own interests but each of you to the interests of the others.  In your relationships with one another, have the same mindset as Christ Jesus:  Who, being in very nature God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage; rather, he made himself nothing by taking the very nature of a servant, being made in human likeness.  And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death— even death on a cross!

     

    Dr. King's ministry and the life task he believed he was called to fulfill prevented him from running away to the north. Martin didn't want to be a martyr, but he believed disobeying God would be worse. this leads me to his faith.

     

    Faithfulness

     

    In Revelations 2:10 John writes, "Do not fear what you are about to suffer. Behold, the devil is about to throw some of you into prison, that you may be tested... Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life." 

    Dick Gregory once joked that it would be hard for Dr. King to get into heaven. He said he asked Martin how he planned on explaining all of the time he spent in jails. Jailings, assaults, death threats and government counter intelligence tactics were all things that challenged Martin's faith. Through it all he held to his convictions. 

    Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech ended up being his sermon on the mount. As aspirational and inspirational as that speech was it was also a testament to faith. King was acutely aware of the sacrifices many of the participants of the March on Washington made. He knew all to well the scars he carried with him to the lectern. His faith  made his service and sacrifice possible. We don't have to believe what Martin believed to respect the way his beliefs guided his steps.

     

    Topics: 
    Personal
    Religion
    Social Justice

    Comments

    Trump and Pence spent two minutes at the King Memorial today

    https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-mlk-day-memorial_us_5c45ef7ce4b0bfa693c5fc9c


    by rmrd0000 on Mon, 01/21/2019 - 2:29pm

    Yes, the teaching is directly involved with what he had learned.

    It is hard to keep up.


    by moat on Mon, 01/21/2019 - 7:43pm

    Being in the presence of unique greatness, even for only a few minutes, changed my life.


    by Peter (not verified) on Tue, 01/22/2019 - 12:20am

    Too bad you couldn't rub some of it off on us. Maybe you ran out.


    by PeraclesPlease on Tue, 01/22/2019 - 1:57am

    Mike Pence on MLK

    “One of my favorite quotes from Dr. King was, ‘Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.’ You think of how he changed America. He inspired us to change through the legislative process to become a more perfect union. That’s exactly what President Trump is calling on the Congress to do,” Pence, 59, remarked.

    “Come to the table in a spirit of good faith. We’ll secure our border, we’ll reopen the government and we’ll move our nation forward as the president said yesterday to an even broader discussion about immigration reform in the months ahead,” he added.

    https://splinternews.com/pence-compares-trump-to-martin-luther-king-jr-1831911347

    MLK did not support walls.

    http://time.com/5504826/martin-luther-king-wall-history/

    The NRA On MLK

    “Today, the men and women of the NRA honor the profound life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” the pro-gun advocacy group tweeted Monday. “Dr. King applied for a concealed carry permit in a “may issue” state and was denied. We will never stop fighting for every law-abiding citizen’s right to self-defense.” 

    https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/martin-luther-king-jr-nra-gun_us_5c469950e4b0bfa693c66e21

    King was denied a permit. Soon after, he rejected carrying arms. King died because of gun violence.

     

    Sarah Sanders on MLK

    Today we honor a great American who gave his life to right the wrong of racial inequality. Our country is better thanks to his inspiration and sacrifice

    https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sarah-huckabee-sanders-mlk-day-tweet_us_5c4640f9e4b027c3bbc480ea

    King didn’t give his life, he was murdered.

    In other news

    The Library of Congress commemorated the birth of Confederate Gen. Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson in a tweet it later said was pre-scheduled. And the Mississippi Department of Revenue, last week, notified Mississippians that it would be closed Monday “in honor of General Robert E. Lee’s birthday and Martin Luther King Jr. Day.” Mississippi and Alabama are the only two states that still officially celebrate the general’s birthday on the same day, the AP reported.

    Both FSU and the Library of Congress apologized. The Mississippi Department of Revenue deleted its tweet, saying nothing.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2019/01/22/irony-flogs-itself-steve-kings-mlk-tweet-was-worst-number-tributes-gone-wrong/?utm_term=.3eae54057e2

     

    Peter’s tribute does not stand alone.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 01/22/2019 - 10:03am

    Magatts are liars and frauds. Hate is what they relish, and live for, in their miserable lives.

    The MLK "he gave his life" is particularly Orwellian "Ministry of Love" material.

    The Ministry of Love enforces loyalty to Big Brother through fear, buttressed through a massive apparatus of security and repression, as well as systematic brainwashing.


    by NCD on Tue, 01/22/2019 - 10:32am

    We are not in a both sides do it world. Pence and Sarah Sanders will not correct their statements. Buzzfeed is openly criticized for its article on Cohen. As more information comes out, the incident with the Catholic students and the indigenous American activist is re-evaluated. Because humans are involved, mistakes are possible. You try to minimize mistakes and correct the mistakes that you recognize. So far, only one side of the major parties seems to take that message to heart.

    Steve King made a supposed MLK quote yesterday that was inaccurate. No one is surprised. 


    by rmrd0000 on Tue, 01/22/2019 - 10:59am

    Can you point to where your often repeated ideas intersect with those of King?
    For instance, he said the following:

    The second evil that I want to deal with is the evil of poverty. Like a monstrous octopus it spreads its nagging prehensile tentacles into cities and hamlets and villages all over our nation. Some forty million of our brothers and sisters are poverty stricken, unable to gain the basic necessities of life. And so often we allow them to become invisible because our society’s so affluent that we don’t see the poor. Some of them are Mexican Americans. Some of them are Indians. Some are Puerto Ricans. Some are Appalachian whites. The vast majority are Negroes in proportion to their size in the population … Now there is nothing new about poverty. It’s been with us for years and centuries. What is new at this point though, is that we now have the resources, we now have the skills, we now have the techniques to get rid of poverty. And the question is whether our nation has the will …

    How does that fit into your oft repeated diatribe that all moves toward improvements of peoples' lives are the work of Bolshevik slave masters? 

    And when you get together with your fellow Trumpeteers, do you all start by agreeing with the following observation?

    Now they often call this the white backlash … It’s just a new name for an old phenomenon. The fact is that there has never been any single, solid, determined commitment on the part of the vast majority of white Americans to genuine equality for Negroes. There has always been ambivalence … In 1863 the Negro was granted freedom from physical slavery through the Emancipation Proclamation. But he was not given land to make that freedom meaningful. At the same time, our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the Midwest and the West, which meant that the nation was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with an economic floor, while refusing to do it for its black peasants from Africa who were held in slavery two hundred and forty four years. And this is why Frederick Douglass would say that emancipation for the Negro was freedom to hunger, freedom to the winds and rains of heaven, freedom without roofs to cover their heads. It was freedom without bread to eat, without land to cultivate. It was freedom and famine at the same time. And it is a miracle that the Negro has survived.

    If so, please tell us where this kind of respect is happening.

    Or here is a simpler task. You align yourself with those who have suppressed minority voting since it was possible. Do you acknowledge that has been going on as King did? If not, why and how?

    Without some connection to what was actually said and thought, the experience you report sounds more like a stoner at a Blue Oyster Cult concert than a transformation of personal values.


    by moat on Tue, 01/22/2019 - 8:19pm

    It's too bad you can read what MLK wrote but not comprehend what he said. King made the crucial point that poverty has been part of human existence forever, Most everyone lived in poverty before civilization began and many remained in poverty after it developed. Only when we developed capitalism and industry did we begin to bring masses of people out of poverty even with the abuses, faults and failures along the way. In the last 40 years half of the world population in extreme poverty escaped that terrible state and most of them are in China and India where capitalism replaced socialism as their economic system.  There is still much work to be done  and many of these people are still poor but they are moving in the right direction.

    The socialist left tries to convince people that capitalism and its' winners. are the cause of inequality/poverty but that is false the cause is much older and deeper. Their solutions of redistribution and collectivism have been tried and always failed as seen in Brazil and Venezuela most recently. The earlier failed examples also show that socialism tends to degenerate quickly into murderous tyranny.


    by Peter (not verified) on Tue, 01/22/2019 - 10:36pm

    You haven't been to Europe lately, have you, fella. Redistribition combined with productivity combined with liberal democracy works fine. Having Trunp act like a South American tin horn dictator, as you obliquely note, doesn't.

    Again, less pontificating, mire thunking. You're surrounded by intellectual equals or betters here, not your starry-eyed GOP neocon-youth.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 01/23/2019 - 1:19am

    In the speech I linked to, the cause of poverty is about inequality and racial division, Those are conditions your team supports and preserves.

    We won't have to play Twister to figure out what King thought about capitalism since he spoke directly to the matter.

    I could quote the precise passage but it is better appreciated after listening to what comes before.


    by moat on Wed, 01/23/2019 - 9:38am

    You're partly wrong and partly right. Inequality of outcome is a result of many forces not the cause of poverty and inequality of outcome exists even without racism or we wouldn't have so many poor white people. Inequality of opportunity OTOH was a factor along with racism that increased poverty but we have made great strides to increase opportunity for everyone that have resulted in producing the most powerful, wealthy and free western civilization in history.

    The democrat party maintained inequality of opportunity in the South but also in the North from after reconstruction until the Civil Rights movement and Act which was supported by a higher percentage of republicans than democrats. FYI the state of Alabama, the heart of Dixie was controlled by the democrat party until 2010 and only one Dixiecrat ever joined the republican party. The republicans should be criticized for not offering better solutions to inequality of opportunity and the degrading welfare dependence offered by the democrats that has kept minorities and others poor. Trump is correcting  that mistake and improving opportunity for everyone and that is why we are seeing the lowest unemployment numbers for minorities in history.

    The commie democrats have nothing truly progressive to offer so they double down on divisive Marxist identity politics virulent hate and phony charges of racism and victimhood as we have just seen with the Catholic school boys in DC.  They have no policy other than disruption. diversion and a demand for submission to authority to sate their hunger for power so they can impose the globalist mandates that serve their agendas.


    by Peter (not verified) on Wed, 01/23/2019 - 1:34pm

    We were discussing what in Martin Luther King Jr.' teachings related to your thinking. There is nothing in your reply that corresponds to what I know of that teaching. You avoid the issue of civil inequality altogether.

    By the way, it is called the Democratic Party. Look it up while you absorb the links you have been given.

    Maybe you won't like your hero any longer after you find out what he actually said.


    by moat on Wed, 01/23/2019 - 1:49pm

    You are the one with the reading comprehension problem

    King on capitalism 

    https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/01/21/11-most-anti-capitalist-quotes-martin-luther-king-jr


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 01/23/2019 - 10:28am

    I recall that a few years ago you rejected my comment that King was a Marxist. Dr King was a wise man in many ways and correct about many things but he was also human and dead wrong about socialism. If he had survived he might have come to realize he was naive to believe that socialism could be separated from totalitarian Marxism or that that ideology that despises the religion he loved could produce anything to correct inequality.

    Almost daily we are seeing the left's hate for religious people and Christianity grow and it is a mystery to me why so many religious leaders are in bed with these democrat commies.


    by Peter (not verified) on Wed, 01/23/2019 - 2:22pm

    Frame your objections to specific texts written by him. You are not representing his views correctly.

    Only listening and reading can help you at this point.


    by moat on Wed, 01/23/2019 - 2:28pm

    Peter, the more you post, the more uninformed you appear.

    Here is Martin Luther King Jr. on Marxism

    “During the Christmas holidays of 1949 I decided to spend my spare time reading Karl Marx to try to understand the appeal of communism for many people. For the first time I carefully scrutinized Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto,” he wrote. “I also read some interpretative works on the thinking of Marx and Lenin. In reading such Communist writings I drew certain conclusions that have remained with me as convictions to this day.”

    Then King listed the three reasons he could never accept Marxism.

    “First, I rejected their materialistic interpretation of history. Communism, avowedly secularistic and materialistic, has no place for God,” he wrote. 

    Marx’s theory of “dialectical materialism” (and the conjoined theory of “historical materialism”) instead envisioned the human race as a one-dimensional economic creature.

    “Second, I strongly disagreed with communism’s ethical relativism. Since for the Communist there is no divine government, no absolute moral order, there are no fixed, immutable principles; consequently almost anything – force, violence murder, lying – is a justifiable means to the ‘millennial’ end,” he wrote.

    The second point, closely related to the first, recognizes that anyone who rejects transcendence and revelation must, by extension, deny any universally binding morality. The world then becomes a patchwork of competing moralities, begging the strong to impose their will upon the weak. King consistently disownedthose who spoke of prevailing in their political cause “by any means necessary.”

    “Third, I opposed communism’s political totalitarianism. In communism, the individual ends up in subjection to the state. … And if man’s so-called rights and liberties stand in the way of that end, they are simply swept aside,” King wrote. “His liberties of expression, his freedom to vote, his freedom to listen to what news he likes or to choose his books are all restricted.”

    “Man becomes hardly more, in communism, than a depersonalized cog in the turning wheel of the state,” King concluded.

     

    https://acton.org/publications/transatlantic/2018/01/15/3-reasons-martin-luther-king-jr-rejected-communism

    The question for Christians who call themselves Evangelicals is why they support a white supremacist who kidnaps children.

     

     

     

     

     


    by rmrd0000 on Wed, 01/23/2019 - 2:40pm