For the cause of peace, justice and brotherhood

 

Essentially, that’s how Dr. Martin Luther King signed off on his profoundly eloquent Letter from a Birmingham Jail to fellow clergymen in April 1963. (scroll down on that link to ‘Appendices’ and click on it)

I just re-read it on this day honoring the great civil rights leader, and couldn’t help read it in light of the other great civil rights movement of our time, the struggle for the right to life. Dr. King’s niece, Alveda King, is an activist in the pro-life movement, seeing the consistency of the cause and the illogic of not joining the two as fundamentally human rights quests for all persons.

On this day honoring Dr. King, hundreds of thousands of peaceful pro-life workers are traveling towards and assembling near the Mall of Washington, which has a real poetic justice to its timing. They’re there for Tuesday’s annual March for Life, in a peaceful march – just like those Dr. King organized – for the cause of justice and dignity and the rights of a whole class of human persons….the unborn. Tuesday is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade ruling that denied that class of persons their rights, and justified it by distorting the Constitution. The injustice has only been compounded over time, and it’s striking how much similarity there is between staunch abortion backers and staunch backers of segregation back in the day.

Think of that in relation to these quotes from Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.

He answers the question of why he came to Birmingham in the first place.

But more basically, I am in Birmingham because injustice is here, just as the prophets of the eighth century B.C. left their villages and carried their “thus saith the Lord” far beyond the boundaries of their home towns, and just as the Apostle Paul left his village of Tarsus and carried the gospel of Jesus Christ to the far corners of the Greco-Roman world, so am I compelled to carry the gospel of freedom beyond my own home town. Like Paul, I must constantly respond to the Macedonian call for aid.

Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.

This most definitely is true of all discrimination and every instance of justice denied.

I am sure that none of you would want to rest content with the superficial kind of social analysis that deals merely with effects and does not grapple with underlying causes.

We have abundant evidence of the social and personal devastation of racism, and abortion.

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights.

Finally the Civil Rights Act was passed (terribly long overdue), and until Roe, all human persons – every race, gender and age of development – were entitled to those God-given rights.

Dr. King continues:

How does one determine whether a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.

Do we hear the heirs to the civil rights movement today carry on Dr. King’s teaching about eternal law and the natural law? No, not the highest profile leaders, anyway.

Furthermore, he said, …

We should never forget that everything Adolf -Hitler did in Germany was “legal” and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was “illegal.” It was “illegal” to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler’s Germany. Even so, I am sure that, had I lived in Germany at the time, I would have aided and comforted my Jewish brothers.

When you know what’s right, there’s no excuse not to do it.

More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation, We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.

For these teachings and his activism on behalf of basic human rights for a whole class of people, Dr. King was labeled an extremist. But, he said,….

Was not Jesus an extremist for love: “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.” Was not Amos an extremist for justice: “Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.” Was not Martin Luther an extremist: “Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.” And John Bunyan: “I will stay in jail to the end of my days before I make a butchery of my conscience.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…” So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?

And it’s not a question of how you define justice, as if it’s relative.

In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: “Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern,” and I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

Sound familiar? That’s the point. It has a long history, and continues today.

Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christian for being “disturbers of the peace” and outside agitators. But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were “A colony of heaven,” called to obey God rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment, They were too God- intoxicated to be “astronomically intimidated.” By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.

Today’s civil rights leaders have dropped the ‘evils of infanticide’ from their causes.

The Congressional Black Caucus is sponsoring tonight’s Democratic presidential debate. It would be nice to hear some of these points raised, some of Dr. King’s letter here applied to the social issues at stake in this contest. But we won’t, just like we aren’t hearing these excerpts from this famous exhortation quoted at the big celebrations honoring Dr. King. They’re content to repeat the powerfully stirring ‘I Have a Dream’ speech, deserving as that is to be heard again.

But so is this. This letter written under these circumstances reveals the essence of Dr. Martin Luther King’s life, work and core beliefs.

In the end, just before signing off, he says this:

If I have said anything in this letter that overstates the truth and indicates an unreasonable impatience, I beg you to forgive me. If I have said anything that understates the truth and indicates my having a patience that allows me to settle for anything less than brotherhood, I beg God to forgive me.

Amen to that.