Across our nation this weekend, millions of Americans will be celebrating the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. King’s name has become virtually synonymous with the major achievements of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s, ranging from the Montgomery bus boycotts of 1955, which led to the integration of that city’s public transportation system; to the dramatic demonstrations in Birmingham, Alabama, which exposed to the world the injustices of America’s most racially segregated city; to the March on Washington in 1963, which galvanized a nation, and played a pivotal role in leading to the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.
It was King’s methods, of course, as much as his outcomes, that were his real gift to us. While others advocated for freedom by “any means necessary,” including violence, King resolutely refused the temptation to strike back with force, using instead the power of words and the embodiment of nonviolent resistance to achieve seemingly impossible goals. Drawing on Gandhi and the gospels in equal measure, King demonstrated what the gospel’s teaching about loving one’s enemies really looks like, and the power such love has to transform even the darkest of hearts.
Yet, King was so much more than just a civil rights leader. People tend to forget that in the last three years of his life, the focus of his work shifted from racial injustice to economic injustice more broadly considered. His work in these years culminated in the “Poor Peoples Campaign,” an ambitious effort to assemble a multiracial coalition of impoverished Americans to advocate for economic change. In these years, too, he became an outspoken critic of the Viet Nam war and of our national obsession with military power and spending.
As important as King’s legacy is in all these areas—as a champion of racial equality, in solidarity with the poor, and in opposition to war-making—he also has much to teach the church about its mission. When I served as a chaplain in elementary and secondary schools years ago, I was always struck by how few of my students knew what King’s vocation was. They could quote his “I have a dream” speech by heart, but only a handful of them would know that King’s first and primary calling was as a minister of the gospel.
My former students can be forgiven perhaps for not knowing about King’s identity as a pastor because, when you think about it, nearly all the iconic moments in King’s life story played out on a public stage rather than within the confines of Dexter Avenue Baptist Church or some other church sanctuary. The images that we most remember are of King on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963, or sitting pensively in a Birmingham jail, or being arrested in Montgomery during the bus boycotts, or marching with other freedom fighters in Selma, or sitting at LBJ’s side in the White House as the President signed the landmark civil rights legislation of 1964. So few of the really memorable photographs of King are in the pulpit or within the four walls of a church building.
This is no accident, I think. For one of King’s core teachings is that the church is not a building, or some event that takes place on a Sunday morning. Rather, the church is you and me—the Body of Christ at work in the world. King puts it bluntly in his autobiography when he writes: “It is my conviction that any religion that professes concern for the souls of men [and women] and is not equally concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion only waiting for the day to be buried.” King reminds us that our vitality as Christ’s church depends upon our willingness to engage meaningfully and consistently with the world and its problems. To be sure, we gather in church on Sundays to immerse ourselves in the Word that defines us and in the sacraments that feed us; but the real work of the Church happens on the other six days of the week. Let it be so with us at Holy Trinity.