wisdom from martin luther king jr.

Second Sunday after the Epiphany ● January 19, 2025

Rev. Jeff Wells © 2025

You can view the full worship video recording at:

https://youtu.be/EGwqZ71EtAY

Scripture Reading: Matthew 5:43-45; Amos 5:21, 23-24 (The Inclusive Bible)
and selected readings from Martin Luther King Jr.

The texts of the readings are in the worship bulletin linked here.

Martin Luther King Jr. was very gifted from a young age. In 1944, when he was only 15 years old and in his junior year in high school, he gave his first public speech during an oratorical contest. In his speech titled, “The Negro and the Constitution,” he railed at the fact that, “Black America still wears chains. The finest negro is at the mercy of the meanest white man.” King won that contest.  He also skipped his senior year of high school because he was admitted as a junior to Morehouse College. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology in 1948 at age 19.

Martin Luther King Jr. was a lively and somewhat rebellious teenager. According to his brother, A.D. King, he flitted and flirted, from one young woman to the next, and loved to dance. When he was 14, in the Sunday School of his father’s fundamentalist church, he declared he did not believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus. Early on, he rejected the fundamentalist Christianity of his upbringing, while always cherishing the determined, justice-seeking, and loving spirit of the church that raised him.

By 1955, King had earned a Bachelor of Divinity from Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania and a Ph.D. in Systematic Theology from Boston University. King was a top notch intellectual. He could have had a very successful career in academia and would undoubtedly have published scholarly works that we would still be reading today. But in his final year at Morehouse, King had determined that he would enter the ministry. And in 1954, at 25 years old, King was called by the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama to be their senior pastor.

If you know the history of the modern Civil Rights Movement, you know that the Montgomery Bus Boycott began in December 1955, when King was very new to Montgomery and to the Dexter Avenue Church and he was just 26 years old. Other ministers in Montgomery pushed King to serve as the spokesperson for the boycott because he was the new guy in town and, perhaps, because they thought he had less to lose. But certainly, a part of it, too, was they recognized his intellect and his gift for speaking.

To understand the source of Martin Luther King Jr.’s wisdom, we have to say first that it is rooted in the teachings and practical ministry of Jesus. King believed the Gospel message of the New Testament stood for love seeking justice, with the ultimate goal of building a beloved community of people of all nationalities, colors, and contexts. In 1960, when he was 31 years old, he reflected back on his education and his first six years in ministry and activism in his famous “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” essay. He wrote:  

“The gospel at its best deals with the whole man, not only his soul but his body, not only his spiritual well-being, but his material well-being. Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not 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 awaiting burial.”

In other words, if you want to be a follower of Jesus, you have to work for fundamental social transformation aimed at eliminating poverty, homelessness, inequality, and all expressions of exploitation and oppression.

King grew up seeing his father and grandfather try to put that into practice. They were both prominent black preachers and both served Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where Martin Jr. himself later served. They were not merely baptist preachers – they were also civil rights leaders and well-known proponents of the black social gospel tradition. While theologically, they were fundamentalist in their beliefs, they exemplified the fierce spirit of striving for justice that existed in many parts of the black church at the time. So, the wisdom King was able to accumulate, convey, and put into practice was rooted, also, in the experience of observing the courage and resilience of his father and grandfather. As one historian put it, “without the black social gospel, King would not have known what to say when history called on December 3, 1955.” King entered the Civil Rights Movement already convinced of the need for a radical social gospel ministry.

Yet, In this period of deep personal and intellectual exploration, King began to doubt the broad applicability of the teachings of Jesus beyond individual relationships. As he looked back in 1960, he wrote:

“During this period, I had almost despaired of the power of love in solving social problems. The ‘turn the other cheek’ philosophy and the ‘love your enemies’ philosophy are only valid, I felt, when individuals are in conflict with other individuals; when racial groups and nations are in conflict a more realistic approach is necessary. Then I came upon the life and teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. As I read his works I became deeply fascinated by his campaigns of nonviolent resistance…. As I delved deeper into the philosophy of Gandhi my skepticism concerning the power of love gradually diminished, and I came to see for the first time that the Christian doctrine of love operating through the Gandhian method of nonviolence was one of the most potent weapons available to oppressed people in their struggle for freedom.”

King put this new-found wisdom into practice during the Montgomery Bus Boycott and beyond. Early in the boycott, he received death threats and his home was bombed while his wife and child were inside. They were not injured, but a large crowd gathered outside, some were armed and prepared to take action. King addressed the anxious and angry crowd, “If you have weapons, take them home…. We cannot solve this problem through violence. We must meet violence with nonviolence.” 

King was not just a great intellectual and powerful speaker, he was also a brilliant organizer and strategist. Of course, like all great leaders, he surrounded himself with other smart, effective, and courageous leaders. So, King’s wisdom was always shaped and influenced by the wisdom of those around him. 

He was willing to take risks, too. One of the riskiest actions he pushed for was to send hundreds of children in the the streets to face police dogs and firehoses to protest segregation in Birmingham, Alabama in May 1963. Initially, King faced a lot of condemnation for putting children in danger, even from many of his close allies. But the widespread public outcry at the brutal response of the white police and firefighters helped push forward the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. So, it provided pivotal momentum to the movement.

You can see that King expressed his “wisdom” in many more ways than just through his brilliant writing and speaking. He was wise in how he led the movement, how he led in collaboration with many others, and how he adapted and synthesized in new ways the wisdom he gained from his own black church heritage, from black and white intellectuals and activists, from international struggles for justice, and more. 

Yet, most people know King best by what he wrote and spoke. And we should not ignore the great wisdom available to us in his words. King’s sermons and speeches are full of profoundly wise paragraphs and phrases that have become part of the culture of the black church as well as large parts of Mainline Christianity. Most often, you will see very short quotes that are often repeated, but are also often taken out of context or leave off an important part of what King was trying to convey. You heard some of them at the beginning of worship today, like, “Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Another is the phrase, “Justice too long delayed is justice denied.” A favorite of mine, which I have often quoted in sermons is, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” That resonates with both the South African philosophy of Ubuntu as well as Open and Relational Theology. 

King often expressed the idea that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” He adopted that from 19th century abolitionist Theodore Parker. On its own, that phrase sounds really hopeful, but it can easily be misunderstood to mean that justice is assured, even if it may be a long way off. However, rarely do you see it paired with King’s crucial caveat that, “Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of [men and women] willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.”

While King is frequently quoted, he stood for many things that don’t often get repeated or shared in social media posts because they are too radical or they challenge the powers that be. Here are just two examples: 

“If peace means a willingness to be exploited economically, dominated politically, humiliated and segregated, I don’t want peace…. If peace means keeping my mouth shut in the midst of injustice and evil, I don’t want it. Peace is not simply the absence of conflict, but the existence of justice for all people.”

And, 

“Capitalism does not permit an even flow of economic resources. With this system, a small privileged few are rich beyond conscience, and almost all others are doomed to be poor at some level. That’s the way the system works. And since we know that the system will not change the rules, we are going to have to change the system.”

Just because he was wise, does not mean Dr. King did not struggle internally. Yet, in the face of slow progress, doubts about his own abilities, and frequent threats to his life and the safety of his family, King refused to give up or give in to despair. In his acceptance speech when he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964, King asserted his fundamental stand on the side of hope. He said:

“I refuse to accept despair as the final response to the ambiguities of history…. I refuse to accept the idea that man is mere flotsam and jetsam in the river of life, unable to influence the unfolding events which surround him…. I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality.”

And that unshakable hold on hope remained an essential part of his way of being until the end. In 1967, only a few months before he was assassinated, King wrote, “If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still have a dream.”

I don’t share all of this merely to honor Martin Luther King Jr. or mark birthday. I do it because I believe the wisdom he embodied is crucial to what we are striving to be and do in the Church of the Village. In our own evolving work to build beloved community, we are called to learn from and put into practice the wisdom that Martin Luther King Jr. worked so hard to grasp and so diligently to share with the world in the way of Jesus – in the cause of love and justice.

1 “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” Christian Century magazine, April 13, 1960.

2  Ibid.

3 “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence”

4  “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” 1963.

5  “When Peace Becomes Obnoxious” (1956)

6  Published in Martin Luther King, Jr., The Trumpet of Conscience (1967).