Nielsen’s Nook

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is observed by the African- American community and ignored by most everybody else that I know. I would suggest to you that Martin Luther King, Jr. represents, for the United States and even the rest of the world generally, a life and movement of far greater significance than imagined. There is much that can be and should be said, but for brevity I limit my thoughts here to the moral, the societal and the fiducial.

Morally, Dr. King’s legacy has also had great benefit for the Caucasian communities of America.¹ Dr. King said in his famous I Have a Dream speech that the destiny of the white person is inextricably tied to that of the black person. If you are white, you probably have a grandmother or great uncle who still talks about “colored people,” smacking of an era that we all want to leave behind. An era in which human beings treated other human beings in immensely dehumanizing ways. What is the toll on the human soul for such thinking and action? It is a poison that tickles the taste buds of hubris on the way down but fills the bowels with bitter nails that rip and tear the Man-Hater apart. Civil Rights was also about the rightness of the souls of the Caucasian community. There is a liberation from hatred that has been bestowed upon us. Let us not insist on remaining shackled to subtle indifference.

Societally, consider the light bulb that you use to sit and read this blog. You probably know that after 10,000 attempts Thomas Edison invented a light-bulb. Did you know that Lewis Howard Latimer (1848-1928), an African-American, researched a carbon filament that doubled the life of the early light-bulbs and that it was Latimer that sat on the patent boards of Edison Electric (GE) and Maxim-Weston (Westinghouse)? ² Society is always retarded in its growth and progress when we suppress and oppress any segment of it. No one segment can see all sides, and diversity offers opportunity to see more fully what life and society can be. Or to say it another way, the races of this world have been put here with purpose. If we would seek to be the wind beneath the wings of our neighbors, we might find that we ourselves fly higher with them.

Fiducially, King is iconic for me. The Prophet Amos indicted God’s people for their apathy towards their neighbors - the poor, the widow and the alien. God exiled his people because they ceased to be concerned for their fellow human beings in a way that accurately reflected God’s holy character. Do we think that it will be different today? King represents one of the last times that Christians of all kinds of races made a significant difference culturally and socially in the United States.

I long for my brothers and sisters in the Christ’s Church to lay aside the rose-colored blinders that we have conveniently put on our eyes, which keep us from looking at the trouble in this world. As Christians, we are obligated to the betterment of this world and all its creatures. Dr. King understood this. In a very imperfect way, as it is for all of us, Dr. King continued the incarnational work that was instituted by Christ 1,900 years earlier. It cost him his life, but the spirit of that work has continued to this very day. Is it not time that the “sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners sit down at the table of brotherhood” that Christ Jesus has set for us?

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¹ While as of 8:00 AM today the New York Times website did not even seem to acknowledge the federal holiday today, CNN’s website article found it necessary to run an article regarding claims that King had an adulterous affair and a sharp fallout with his colleague, Jesse Jackson. There are three important points here: 1) Adultery and strife are bad. 2) There are many great benefactors of this world who have tragic moral flaws; conversely, there is only One Great Benefactor of this world who has no moral flaw. 3) Is this not really a kind of red herring? In picking apart a man’s life do we not seek to remove the implications of his life’s work from our own bigoted hearts? Can we not imagine forgiveness that great?

² For more information on significant persons in the African-American community, please visit AfricanAmericans.com where I have found the information on Latimer.