Light a Candle for Martin Luther King

By Richard Lischer

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Durham, NC -- When you enter the undercroft of Dexter Avenue King Memorial Church in Montgomery, Ala., you are confronted by an unusual work of art. It is a mural depicting Martin Luther King’s ascension into heaven. He is barefoot and dressed in an oatmeal-colored robe. He is surrounded by the mothers and fathers of the church and other saints. He is clearly on the rise to meet God.

Today, on the fortieth anniversary of his assassination, many newspapers will carry the fateful photograph of King’s body crumbled on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, his friends daubing his wounds or pointing toward the source of the shot and crying for help.

If an outside observer were to ask, ‘Which is the real Martin Luther King? Is it the body on the balcony, or the rising spirit of a great-souled leader?’, today the church of God responds, ‘It is the spirit rising. The spirit of King endures not only in the memory of the nation but, like all the saints, in the kingdom of heaven.’ For the truest end of humankind is not survival but the blessedness that sees God.

Now that he is dead his name must not be co-opted by political parties or special interest groups. Do not loudly claim his name for any and every American cause. Accept him for what he is: a martyr to the Christian vision of a better life. Christians traditionally tell the story of their saints backwards from their perspective of their death. They ask, ‘What was it about his life that made this death necessary?’

King died trying to infuse a racist society with the justice of God and the love of Jesus. He died trying to expand the borders of the kingdom of God, not build a fence around them. He died defending the basic humanity of sanitation workers. He died trying to stop an immoral war. Now he has crossed "life’s restless sea" (as he called it) and arrived on another shore. We should light a candle for him. Because he lit a candle for us.

We don’t contend that his martyrdom eliminated racism or violence from the land. Many of the same problems he faced have multiplied and now bedevil us. A permanent class of impoverished people live in this land of plenty. One out of every four men has been in prison. Guns are everywhere, and even the most enlightened politicians are afraid to oppose them. And another war gnaws at the soul of the nation. If he were among us, perhaps the church would not be silent.

He lit a candle for us all by witnessing to a more excellent way. The word martyr means "witness," the ultimate witness. When he was alive, America sorely needed Martin Luther King’s amazing energy. Now that he is dead, we are nourished by his martyrdom because martyrs give us hope. They remind us that, even though we are mired in violence, there was once a person who was willing to die as a protest against it. They remind us that we don’t have to live with racism as if it were an immutable law of nature, because there was once a man who was willing to die as a witness against it. How terrible for us if we had only victims, but no witnesses. It was not that he succeeded, but that he witnessed. It was not that he survived, but that he achieved blessedness. That is the power of martyrdom.

Martyrdom is God’s continuing project, and martyrs, as an ancient theologian said, are the seed of the church. Which means we don’t have to pretend that one man, now dead more years than he was granted to live, has the answer to every problem of the 21^st century. Because God continues to raise up prophets, we don’t have to anoint another Martin Luther King or lay his impossible mantle on any one person -- not on Mandela, Tutu or Obama.

All we have to do is be faithful ourselves. We are the witnesses now. The torch is passed, and God has given us the task of continuing his work by shining a little light on our own dark century.

But today, please light a candle for Martin Luther King.

Because he lit a candle for us.