Listen to this sermon reflecting on the life and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr.
Scripture Reading–Isaiah 49: 1-7
As a child, the famous Scottish novelist Robert Louis Stevenson would be put to bed by his nanny. One night when she came into his nursery to tuck him in, she found him looking very intently out the window. The nanny was curious as to what had captured the little boy’s interest, so she looked over his shoulder to see. It was very dark outside, but she soon saw the source of fascination. A lamplighter was walking down the street lighting one street lamp after another. In his excitement, the young Robert exclaimed, “Look, Nanny. I’m watching as that man puts holes in the darkness.”
On this weekend each year, we celebrate the life of one who put “holes in the darkness.” In looking out the window of time that this weekend opens before us, I believe there are at least three different ways in which we can more fully appreciate the scene in front of us. First, we can begin by simply appreciating the inspiring and uplifting quality of the light that comes from each lamp. King’s life is often portrayed to us as a highlight reel of great speeches and sermons—each one giving off a special, remarkable glow. All these years later we continue to witness and feel the power of his words. We continue to be moved and, hopefully, challenged by what he had to say. A number of insightful writers encourage us not to sanitize, minimize, and trivialize the legacy of King. He did more than paint oratorical pictures of white and black boys and girls holding hands in an idyllic promised land. He also called for a fundamental reorganizing of society. He also called upon us to combat poverty and militarism in ways that would still be considered strikingly radical for our time. With an eloquent boldness, King’s words continue to put holes in the darkness.
Another way to fully appreciate the scene outside our window is to consider just how bleak and despairing the night becomes without the light. Consider the history of the civil rights movement with an eye toward the children who lived in its wake: Think of the first black children to integrate all-white schools as angry white mobs heckled them. Think of the children as young as first and second grade who served as demonstrators in Bull Connor’s Birmingham with its water hoses and police dogs. Think of the three children who stayed up late to celebrate Kennedy’s historic speech on civil rights with their father Medgar Evers only to rush to the door as he arrived home and see him shot through the chest. And, then finally, think of the four young black girls who died in the Birmingham church bombing. In what would seem the darkest of times, it was King who was called upon to eulogize the girls at the funeral. One might wonder whether under such circumstances it is even possible to put holes in the darkness, and yet it was to King who people turned to do the seemingly impossible.
Once the full weight of the darkness sets in, then I think the final aspect of the scene outside our window quickly comes fully into view. Now that we have considered both the light and the darkness that surrounds it, the remaining place for us to cast our attention is upon the one lighting the lamps. For King, there was the perpetual danger of nighttime winds and storms that threatened to blow out the light altogether. The movement brought with it ups and downs, pressures and constraints, death threats and harassments, that would push him into bouts of deep depression and morbid speculation. At one point in 1965, a colleague believed King should consult a psychiatrist. A biographer describes him as at that time suffering from “a bone-weary paralysis.” At a board retreat for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, King surprised everyone by interrupting the agenda with the request that they consider who would succeed him if he were to die. This period of depression in King’s life followed the FBI’s delivery of surveillance recordings of his sex life along with an unsigned letter stating, “Your end is approaching…You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy, abnormal fraudulent self is bared to the nation.” Among FBI agents the recordings and the letter became known as the suicide package. At times, the light in King’s possession came perilously close to going out.
Some of you may have heard of the name Alvin Poussaint. He is a black Harvard psychiatry professor who for many years was a consultant for The Cosby Show as they sought to keep the script clean of racial stereotypes. As a young doctor, Poussaint worked in the South and was active in the civil rights movement. With a trained eye, he saw the mental stress that those involved in the movement experienced, especially as they kept their anger bottled up inside. When he returned to Boston after two years in Mississippi, Poussaint himself had to go into therapy in order to deal with the rage and anger he felt. He recalls on one occasion in 1966 witnessing the police tear-gas a crowd in Canton, Mississippi. The police ran across a field beating and pummeling everyone in their path, women and children included. Some of the children ran around believing that they had become blind. Among those present was Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Poussaint recalls Carmichael reaching a breaking point. He ran into the field approaching the police yelling, “You’re killing my people! We’re not gonna let you!” Poussaint remembers, “He had just totally lost it.” Movement workers had to tackle Carmichael and bring him back to safety so that his life wouldn’t be in danger. The next day at a press conference Carmichael would make history as he raised his fist in the air and chanted “Black power!” A phrase that had been in the movement for sometime suddenly became public and suddenly terrified white people who knew nothing of the source of Carmichael’s visible anger but instead felt only threatened by it.
While King would oppose the rhetoric of black power, it would be a mistake to think that he didn’t at times feel himself the kind of rage and anger that Carmichael felt. Historians have now documented how that anger and rage surfaced in sermons and speeches the public often does not hear about at this time of the year. King’s final unpreached sermon before his death, for example, was entitled, “Why America May Go to Hell.” The psychological and spiritual life of those who punch holes in the darkness is not always one of romantic sentiments and warm fuzzy thoughts. To bring light to the darkness requires a fierce energy. It requires fire.
As such, King stood in a line of prophets whose fire has put holes in the darkness. Our scripture for today represents part of the origins of that prophetic legacy. Isaiah doesn’t speak in soft, soothing tones. He says, “God made my mouth like a sharp sword.” He avers, “The Almighty made me a sharpened arrow.” As his people suffered in a time when they were ruled over by others, Isaiah spoke with a voice of indignation and fire. I am not saying this morning that we should all get angry just so we can be like the prophets. My point is that I think there can be a danger of over-sentimentalizing our image of prophets like King. When we do that, we do a disservice to both their memory and ourselves. We can’t punch holes in the darkness if we can’t figure out how and why the match gets lit in the first place.
And, I do believe that on the issue of race the match still needs to be lit. There can be a tendency to deny that we still live in the darkness in part because of the quiet and subtle nature of racism today. As an NPR show noted earlier this year, “virtually no one today in America admits to being prejudiced.” Yet, some interesting studies have been done to show how racism can and does exist despite this. At Massachusetts General Hospital, researchers once did a study in which physicians were asked to evaluate patients. They didn’t actually see the patients. Sometimes they were told they were evaluating a white patient, and sometimes they were told they were evaluating a black patient. What they discovered is that physicians who previously scored as having high levels of unconscious racial stereotypes were more likely “to not prescribe the black patient with clot-busting drugs for a heart attack.” The physicians didn’t have any animosity toward black patients, and they were later horrified to learn that they treat black patients worse. Lots of other studies have been done, and researchers now know with some confidence that our culture as a whole holds anti-black racial biases. Black police officers, for example, “can be shown to act in biased ways” toward black motorists. Racism in our society is so pernicious, so insidious, and so pervasive that even if everyone took a pledge to not be racist, racism would still happen. And yet contrary to what such studies show us about racial outlooks and contrary to the racial disparities seen in our economy and criminal punishment system, a recent study indicates that many whites now view anti-white bias as a bigger societal problem than anti-black bias. We live in a time when there continues to be a desperate need to punch holes in the darkness.
While the darkness can at times be difficult to bear, part of what motivates me is knowing that the next generation is watching us. They are looking out the window, and every time we put a hole in the darkness it brings that much more light into their own lives. It is this light that holds their attention, that captures their interest, that introduces them to the divine itself. In a myriad of different ways, each of us can be a prophet, each of us can be a lamplighter, each of us can help put a hole in the darkness. It simply requires holding true to our calling. As our scripture says, we are called to be a light to the nations for this is what ultimately promises to save us all. Amen.