Reverend Marci Scott-Weis, MDIV

This weekend we celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King, and honor his teachings, his work, his struggles and his life with and for God. Dr. King’s writings and teachings informed our understandings of justice, of love, of equity, of welcome, of accountability, of action and of church. His theology called for the loving liberation of all people. He preached against the demonization of the poor, against unfettered capitalism and predatory debt; and he connected the struggle of Black Americans to the struggle of oppressed peoples all over the world.

Dr. King was a pivotal leader in the Civil Rights moment, a movement that was centered on the ancient calls of the prophets that we hear in the Hebrew Scriptures. Prophets who called on their nations and held them accountable for the care of the weak, the poor, the outcast, the other. Prophets who cried out for justice and peace and right relationships. Prophets who rallied against leaders who did not show that care for justice to their citizens. Dr King preached and led from that foundation and that tradition.

The two passage that we just heard were from the prophets Isaiah and Amos and were frequently used by Dr. King in his speeches and his writings. The first one was the Prophet Amos from a book of the bible that is focused on reminding people of their true covenantal obligations to each other and to God. And then in the Isaiah passage we heard of a dream of the realization of the glory of the Lord. Dr. King quoted both of these passages in his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech when he gave voice to his own dreams of social justice and racial equality and demonstrated how those dreams were in harmony with God’s dream.

In addition to aligning with the ancient prophets, Dr. King also lived out many of the teachings of Jesus. He loved the poor. He worked tirelessly for justice regardless of the personal cost. He was willing to break an unjust law for the greater moral good of love, saying in his 1963 ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’, ‘any law that degrades human personality is unjust’. And also in that tradition of the prophets, Dr. King’s battle to make our nation more Christian was a battle against injustice and a dream to create a national community defined by Christian ideals of equality and respect for human dignity.

Dr. King was a minister, a preacher and a leader of a social movement that held up a mirror to our country and asked us to live up to our own professed Christian values. For that he was feared and despised by many who viewed themselves as both good Christians and good Americans.

In a 1967 sermon, Dr. King said, ‘I had to know God for myself. I’m weak now. I’m faltering. I’m losing my courage….it seemed at that moment I could hear an inner voice saying, stand up for truth! Stand up for justice!…I heard the voice of Jesus saying, fight on and he promised to never leave me’.

At that time, FBI files showed that there were hundreds of threats against King’s life, from bomb threats targeting the planes he was flying on to the KKK hiring a hit man. A contract was put out on his life, a cross was burned on his lawn, his house was bombed and just a year after that sermon where he said that ‘Jesus promised to never leave me’, Dr King was killed.

Dr King had many dreams. So many of us are familiar with his ‘I have a dream’ speech where he says, ‘I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.’ Dr. King dreamed that true patriotism and true Christian ideals would converge and result in a world where all could live with safety, justice and peace. And it is that dream that we honor and hold sacred this Sunday.

And it is also that dream that currently lies in peril as our nation continues to struggle with the rise of Christian Nationalism. Christian Nationalism is the belief that our country, the United States, was established as an explicitly Christian nation and most alarming, that our country is a nation by and for Christians alone. The term, though much contested, simply defined, refers to the belief that a nation’s systems of laws, customs, educational systems, and government should be aligned to support a specifically Christian way of life.

Dr. King fought tirelessly for our country to become more Christian in its beliefs and practices, but Christian Nationalism of 2024 is a far cry from Dr. King’s dream of justice and equity. Today’s Christian Nationalists believe that the close relationship between Christianity and the government needs to be protected at all costs and that there is a God-given destiny for our country. Christian Nationalism of 2024 demands that Christianity be privileged in this country and implies that to be a good American, you have to be Christian.

At its core, the principles and beliefs of today’s Christian nationalism threaten the separation of church and state and have the potential to result in discrimination, and at times violence, against religious minorities and the nonreligious. And perhaps most worrisome, todays Christian Nationalism is both dangerous and deadly.

Christian Nationalistic beliefs inspired the shooter who killed nine people, including three children, at a mall outside Dallas. They were the impetus that sent a shooter in rural New York on a killing rampage in a Buffalo grocery store where he’d researched where he would have the highest probability of killing the most Black victims. Christian Nationalistic beliefs were the inspiration of 21-year-old white man Dylann Roof, who went into a Bible study prayer meeting at a historic Black congregation in Charleston, where after being warmly welcomed to join the group, proceeded to kill nine of those Bible Study participants who welcomed him in, all of whom were Black.

Christian nationalistic beliefs are showing up in many ways right now beyond those examples of violence. They range from support for laws that codify specific interpretations of Christian morality (say around abortion, or use of the word ‘gay’ in schools, banned books or medical care for trans youth) to the defense of religious displays on public property, to the support for public prayer in schools, to the crosses on display at political rallies and at the insurrection on January 6th, 2021.

The most violent expressions, such as the shootings that I mentioned earlier, get most of the attention. But the more subtle ones—like state legislative efforts to promote the teaching of the Bible in public schools or to require the posting of “In God We Trust” in public schools and other public places—are also dangerous in that they perpetuate the false narrative that to be a true American you have to be Christian—and often a very certain type of Christian.

The Reverend Dr King once wrote that ‘the church must be reminded that it’s not the master or the servant of the state but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state and never its tool.’ Dr. King taught that church and our understandings about God and Jesus were not to be in the driver’s seat of our government but instead to be the guiding principles.
And those principles should be centered upon the teachings of Jesus. Teachings that remind us that we are called into radical love, acceptance, justice, equity and welcome. Teachings that remind us that we follow in the way of a humble servant of the poorest of the poor, who had an affinity for the outcast and the down trodden and lavished healing and mercy wherever he went.

Guiding the state as Dr. King suggests means that Christians have a special responsibility and opportunity to both understand and dismantle Christian nationalism and demonstrate what Christ’s teachings look like in our families, in our communities and in our world. It means that we all try to find ways to demonstrate Christian beliefs and ideals of justice, peace, and love where we live. It means that we speak out and condemn Christian nationalism as a distortion of the teachings of Jesus. And it means that we are called to continue to do the hard work of bringing about Dr. King’s dream of equality and justice for all.

We all have a role to play in bringing that dream and hope of justice and equality to fruition. It’s critical that all who follow the teachings of Christ speak up in all manner of ways for the way of equality, justice and love. Because we follow the teachings of the one who preached radical welcome for all, who demonstrated gracious healing and transformation for all and who, like Dr King, dreamed of a world where all are created equal.

And so I close today with Dr. King’s dream…

“And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!”

May we be the bringers of that world and that dream!

May it be so, may it be so, may it be so. Amen