Martin Luther King Jr. and me

By Jonathan Marlowe

Martin Luther King was 39 years old when he was assassinated in Memphis, Tennessee. This January, I am turning 39 years old. What have I done with my life, compared with what Martin Luther King did with his?

Well, not much. But that’s OK.

Rowan Williams once said that when he gets to heaven, God will not ask him why he was not Martin Luther King; God will ask him why he was not Rowan Williams. I figure when I show up at the pearly gates, there’s a good chance that God will ask me, “Why weren’t you Jonathan Marlowe?”

God will ask: why didn’t you do the things I called you to do? Why didn’t you do the things that I uniquely equipped you to do?

I may not lead a civil rights movement, but I can help one person find a job. I may not win a Nobel Peace Prize, but I can live peacefully with my neighbor. I won’t give a speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but I can do my best with next week’s lectionary. We sometimes focus on the great movers and shakers of history and forget that God usually works through ordinary people like you and me.

I know that faith isn’t private—God works through communities and churches and even nations. But Martin Luther King Jr. did not set out to be a great American hero. He set out to be faithful to God one day at a time, and found himself the leader of a nation-wide movement for freedom and equality. We too should begin with the little things—being faithful to our spouses, patient with a friend, gracious with an enemy, merciful with those who need our help, and generous in giving.

I doubt I’ll ever spend the night in a Birmingham jail, but I can visit someone in a Salisbury jail. I will never organize a bus boycott, but I can make a friend of one of the school bus drivers here in Rowan County. I won’t integrate a school system, but I can be a big brother to a child who needs a kind person to eat lunch with at the school. I need the church to help me be faithful in these ways, so that God won’t have to ask me, “Why weren’t you Jonathan Marlowe?”

Jonathan Marlowe is pastor of Shiloh United Methodist Church in Granite Quarry, North Carolina.

Comments

[rick brand]

When I am asked why I did not live a life as big as the Rick Brand that God wanted me to be, I will have to confess that I did not think I could stand the criticism.

[Debra Dean Murphy]

Even as we commemorate his life, legacy, and his death, we forget how despised King was in his own time by many on the right and the left, by many within the church and outside it. As his public speeches increased toward the end of his life so did his visible rage; as his preaching evolved over time, he moved from what Richard Lischer has described as a “homiletics of identification” to a “homiletics of confrontation.” The radical politics King envisioned—in the church and in the nation—did not endear him to either; it got him killed.

Jonathan’s point here is well-taken: each of us needs to live fully into our own identities, our own callings. Yet we never do this by ourselves. Those saints and martyrs whom we hold up as exemplars of the faith must be seen in all their humanness—their moral frailty and their exquisite courage, and we must not suppose that the call to wholeness of life for all that they died for is any less our calling, too.

[Rhology]

I'm quite fearful that Dr. King will not be in heaven, given his seriously heretical beliefs. Those questions would thus probably be irrelevant in heaven.

It's a real shame, that is for certain! But hopefully he repented of such before he was murdered.
And of course (this should go without saying), this doesn't take anythg away from his wonderful accomplishments. It's just that those accomplishments (just like anyone's) are not enough to get into heaven apart from the Gospel.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/publications/papers/vol2/530515-A_Comparison_and_Evaluation_of_the_Theology_of_Luther.htm
http://theologica.blogspot.com/2005/02/martin-luther-king.html

[rick brand]

I take it the Rhology has a list of those beliefs that got Martin out of heaven. I suspect he would not mind telling us all what they are so we can repent.

[Rhology]

Got Martin *out* of heaven?
No, my friend - Jesus said that He is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. He's the only way INTO heaven.

And He said "Unless you believe that I am (He), you will die in your sins."

Dr. MLK's written, stated beliefs were heretical, a very wrong Christ, a completely wrong idea of salvation.
I hope that he repented and changed his views before he died, believe me! But at the same time, it's instructive to remember that great accomplishments on a human/societal scale is less than nothing compared to Jesus' perfection, which we desperately need to have eternal life.

Does that make sense?

[Jason Byassee]

Rick there's a saying in blogland: don't feed the troll.

[Rhology]

And don't respond to his statements either. You might reveal your willful ignorance.