Martin Luther King Jr

Fifty years on and Martin Luther King Jr is an icon, the Civil Rights hero, the non-violent activist, the man with a Dream who preached from the mountaintop. We respect him, honour him, hold him up as one of the towering figures of our time. My ten year old, born continents and decades away from Jim Crow and Ebenezer Baptist knows who he is, what he did.

But King was a prophet, and so we run the risk of neutering him if we try and freeze him in sanitised amber. He’s an icon now, but fifty years ago many people hated him, firebombed his house, kept detailed FBI files on him. Today we don’t commemorate a man who died peacefully of old age, we remember a man who was gunned down at the age of 39.

He was murdered in Memphis, in town to support a sanitation workers strike, part of his attempts to establish the Poor People’s Campaign against poverty. We tend to see King purely as a Civil Rights leader but that ignores his work against militarism and economic injustice. His legacy is more complex, more vital, more relevant than we find comfortable.

Because we can’t commemorate King’s death without hearing the cries of Black Lives Matter, without being outraged at children going to school hungry, without acknowledging police brutality and cultures of violence. It’s possible to see a long way from the mountaintop.

There are prophets in the world. History teaches us that we don’t always put them on pedestals until after we kill them. May the lesson of MLK50 be that we hear the words of those who see further, who see the truth; hear their words and act on them before we murder another generation of prophets before erecting statues in their honour.

Tombs for the Prophets: A post on Martin Luther King

Look, the last thing the world needs is another white guy talking about Martin Luther King. I get that. But thoughts have got lodged in my head, and I keep going back to words spoken by Jesus in the last few days of his life. In a searing attack on the Pharisees, he yells “You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous”, even though they’re complicit in the acts that put the prophets and the righteous in the tombs in the first place. And Jesus is rightly furious at this, because it’s hypocrisy of the highest order.

Martin Luther King is a towering figure of the 20th Century. “I have a dream” isn’t just a great speech, it’s a prophecy, a glorious, beautiful vision that’s rightly remembered decades later. But the tragedy is that King gets frozen in amber during the March on Washington. He’s considered a Great Man, and we learn about him in schools, and the Americans have a day dedicated to his memory. He’s an icon.

But he was more than that. He was a flawed man who found himself caught up in history, and he made mistakes, and by the end of his life, people were questioning his relevance and noting the tensions inherent in his message. He was also a prophet, but not in the sense of a plaster-cast saint; he spoke words of righteousness, against racism and inequality and violence and war. And so the FBI wanted to destroy him, and people beat him and firebombed his house; he got thrown in jail and, ultimately, he was murdered. We like prophets who talk about non-violence, because they’re less likely to beat us in response to our own violence.

That’s what happens to real prophets. We like them once they’re dead and gone and we can sanitise their message, but while they’re actually running around on earth, we’d much rather just shoot ‘em. Two thousand years ago, Jesus railed against how we treated prophets and just a couple of days later he was nailed to a cross. If we think about it long enough, we can probably come up with the names of prophets who are being persecuted right now.

The worst of it is, we then erect statues to their memory and publish their words in nice little gift books, and the rage and the fire and the Spirit that danced through their words gets extinguished. We praise Martin Luther King for his vision of an integrated word, but we’re still cheering on wars, we’re still a grossly unequal society, we’re still seeing unarmed black people shot by police. And the prophets will still rage, and they’ll still get killed, and we’ll still use them as inspiration porn in an effort to quiet their cries and put out their fire.

Maybe we should just start listening and changing instead

Putting Out The Fire Of The Prophets (Matthew 23:29-32)

Look, the last thing the world needs is another white guy talking about Martin Luther King. I get that. But thoughts have got lodged in my head, and I keep going back to words spoken by Jesus in the last few days of his life. In a searing attack on the Pharisees, he yells “You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous”, even though they’re complicit in the acts that put the prophets and the righteous in the tombs in the first place. And Jesus is rightly furious at this, because it’s hypocrisy of the highest order.

Martin Luther King is a towering figure of the 20th Century. “I have a dream” isn’t just a great speech, it’s a prophecy, a glorious, beautiful vision casting that’s rightly remembered decades later. But the tragedy is that King gets frozen in amber during the March on Washington. He’s considered a Great Man, and we learn about him in schools, and Americans have a day dedicated to his memory. He’s an icon.

But he was more than that. He was a flawed man who found himself caught up in history, and he made mistakes, and by the end of his life, people were questioning his relevance and noting the tensions inherent in his message. He was also a prophet, but not in the sense of a plaster-cast saint; he spoke words of righteousness, against racism and inequality and violence and war. And so the FBI wanted to destroy him, and people beat him and firebombed his house; he got thrown in jail and, ultimately, he was murdered. We like prophets who talk about non-violence, because we can be violent towards them in response.

That’s what happens to real prophets. We like them once they’re dead and gone and we can sanitise their message, but while they’re actually running around on earth, we’d much rather just shoot ‘em. Two thousand years ago, Jesus railed against how we treated prophets and just a couple of days later he was nailed to a cross. If we think about it long enough, we can probably come up with the names of prophets who are being persecuted right now.

The worst of it is, we then erect statues to their memory and publish their words in nice little gift books, and the rage and the fire and the Spirit that danced through their words gets extinguished. We praise Martin Luther King for his vision of an integrated word, but we’re still cheering on wars, we’re still a grossly unequal society, we’re still seeing unarmed black people shot by police. And the prophets will still rage, and they’ll still get killed, and we’ll still use them as inspiration porn in an effort to quiet their cries and put out their fire.

Maybe we should just start listening and changing instead.

Martin Luther King Day 2016: Tombs for the Prophets (Matthew 23:29-32)

Look, the last thing the world needs is another white guy talking about Martin Luther King. I get that. But thoughts have got lodged in my head, and I keep going back to words spoken by Jesus in the last few days of his life. In a searing attack on the Pharisees, he yells “You build tombs for the prophets and decorate the graves of the righteous”, even though they’re complicit in the acts that put the prophets and the righteous in the tombs in the first place. And Jesus is rightly furious at this, because it’s hypocrisy of the highest order.

Martin Luther King is a towering figure of the 20th Century. “I have a dream” isn’t just a great speech, it’s a prophecy, a glorious, beautiful vision casting that’s rightly remembered decades later. But the tragedy is that King gets frozen in amber during the March on Washington. He’s considered a Great Man, and we learn about him in schools, and the Americans have a day dedicated to his memory. He’s an icon.

But he was more than that. He was a flawed man who found himself caught up in history, and he made mistakes, and by the end of his life, people were questioning his relevance and noting the tensions inherent in his message. He was also a prophet, but not in the sense of a plaster-cast saint; he spoke words of righteousness, against racism and inequality and violence and war. And so the FBI wanted to destroy him, and people beat him and firebombed his house; he got thrown in jail and, ultimately, he was murdered. We like prophets who talk about non-violence, because we can be violent towards them in response.

That’s what happens to real prophets. We like them once they’re dead and gone and we can sanitise their message, but while they’re actually running around on earth, we’d much rather just shoot ‘em. Two thousand years ago, Jesus railed against how we treated prophets and just a couple of days later he was nailed to a cross. If we think about it long enough, we can probably come up with the names of prophets who are being persecuted right now.

The worst of it is, we then erect statues to their memory and publish their words in nice little gift books, and the rage and the fire and the Spirit that danced through their words gets extinguished. We praise Martin Luther King for his vision of an integrated word, but we’re still cheering on wars, we’re still a grossly unequal society, we’re still seeing unarmed black people shot by police. And the prophets will still rage, and they’ll still get killed, and we’ll still use them as inspiration porn in an effort to quiet their cries and put out their fire.

Maybe we should just start listening and changing instead.

Swords into Ploughshares (Isaiah 2:3-4; Micah 4:3)

“Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.” Martin Luther King

Sitting on a mountainside one day, Jesus wove a story of love for enemies and turning the other cheek, a picture of a world dominated not by the sword of Rome but the love of God, a vision that engages with two ancient prophets who saw swords beaten into ploughshares.

It’s easy to get caught up in the majesty of this vision and not think about the implications. There’s an obvious contrast between war, which brings death, and agriculture that produces life, the warrior and the farmer, but let’s not stop at imagery and metaphor. There’s a practicality to this message.

The current budget of the British Armed forces is £37.5 billion; in 2012, the military budget of the US was around a trillion dollars. Isaiah’s vision effectively sees all this pumped into feeding people; Micah’s messianic world completely rewrites the economic rule book. And yes, this is a future age, not tied to the structures and brokenness of our world, but what if we prayed till our knees bled that we’d see just a taste of this, a foreshadowing, instead of school shootings and wars? Is it possible that, despite the visions, despite the commands of Christ, we don’t really believe that such a world is possible?

“Swords into ploughshares.” It’s a phrase that shatters one of our most ancient idolatries. In Isaiah 31, he warns us not to put our trust in chariots horses, in Predator Drones or aircraft carriers. We think they make us strong, but let’s not kid ourselves, their power pulls us away from the Lord; it becomes easier to trust in our arsenal and not in our God. We’re called to take our idols and turn them into something more productive. We’re called to take our resources and use them as a blessing, not as tools of intimidation, fear, violence, anger. And that’s way bigger and more spiritually demanding than just the percentage of our taxes that goes on defence or the money a shooting fan may spend on their hobby.

This demands a change of heart; it’s not just about an absence of weapons, it’s about an absence of the desire to use them. And maybe that’ll be easy to achieve in the future messianic age, but achieving it now, in a society that seemingly loves to turn us against each other? That’s when we see the true power of this idea.

Today is Martin Luther King Day, on which we celebrate a man faced with a choice – to lead a revolution open to the idea of violence, or to inspire a movement driven by love and non-violence. Given how African-Americans were oppressed in the sixties, it would have been simple to do the former; instead he chose the latter and created a legacy of non-violence that persists to this day. King was rooted in these biblical ideas, with his own dream of mountains, unity and peace.

It’s a dream of wholeness and shalom, living in a fundamental, divine state of grace. And in the now-and-not-yet Kingdom of God, Christ’s call to turn the other cheek tells us to live like this now, in a world where conflict is real and recourse to weapons – words, guns, ‘God Hates Fags’ banners – is still an instinctive reaction. What if we took all the effort and resources we put into those weapons, into all that spitting hatred, and used it to feed our ‘enemies’ instead, to invite them to a banquet? To take seriously the words of Jesus and actually love our enemies, both real and imagined?

There’s a beautiful article over at SheLoves about a woman who has seen the power of taking this literally; today we celebrate a man who did this too, even under a starless sky. Dare we take these example’s of Christ’s love in action and use them to look at our weapons, to see how we can transform them into tools of radical blessing? Maybe that’s why the farming metaphor is so potent; tied up with ideas about the healing and restoration of the world, it invites us to share its produce with those around us, mending communities and forging fellowship as we do.

One future day, when war and death are broken, swords will be beaten into ploughshares. Let’s be revolutionary and begin this transformation today.

Update: It turns out that someone has coined a name for a gun that’s been transformed into a guitar – Escopetarra. Invented by Columbian peace activist Cesar Lopez, there’s a video of his work over at Cultures of Resistance.