It was bitterly cold and much too snowy as we gathered this year to remember the legacy of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. For many years now we have gathered at Cedar Community to worship, sing, and pray as we remember a dream that would call our nation ever forward toward greater love and unity. I have often been outspoken about our remembering that MLK was an ordained Baptist minister, the son of a minister, with an exceptional theological education. The reason I am keen to point that out is that the teachings of Rev. Dr. King were deeply rooted in religious teachings. Even his adoption of methods of non-violent protest were rooted in the practices of Mahatma Ghandi who saw the practices of satyagraha (truth-force, active non-violence) mirrored in the example of Jesus. At the roots of our faith is this extraordinary call to let love and truth and justice roll down like mighty waters in the transformation of the world. These days it seems that it’s cold enough that all water is frozen… and in many ways that call to ongoing transformation is also deeply challenged.
We have entered the Season of Epiphany when we celebrate the revelation of God's love living among us in the flesh. Our church year once again begins with the proclamation that God's kingdom has come near, that we are to repent and believe the Good News. Those words are so familiar and perhaps comfortable to us as Christians without our thinking about what they mean. For us to repent, for us to live in the Kingdom that God proclaims, should really be continually challenging us be as motivated as Rev. King. He understood that his salvation was intertwined with that of every other child of God. That is no small challenge. Jesus’ teaching was not merely feel-good spiritualism, it was a challenge to reshape the way that God's love was manifest in the world. We have to remember that it challenged the power structures in ways where they felt threatened enough to feel the need to execute him.
Is it any wonder that between Jesus’ baptism and the start of his ministry that the Holy Spirit thrust him into the wilderness to be tempted and forced into a state of prayer and reflection? Those forty days in the desert will be woven into our journey again soon enough as we begin the Season of Lent. This year Ash Wednesday falls on Valentine’s Day, what an appropriate time to begin a journey of pondering what God's love would look like if it governed our lives and our world.
Rev. Dr. King, Epiphany, Lent, Love… each calls us to reexamine our lives – to look at politics and the news, the ways that we treat our neighbors and our families, the ways that we vote and how we spend our money, the ways that we listen to those with whom we may disagree and love them. Our faith is a call to live our lives differently, to live as God invites us knowing that to love extravagantly changes both ourselves and our world for the better.
There was a graphic that was shared at the MLK day teach-in that I found compelling. It was created by the Interaction Institute for Social Change and The Center for Story Based Strategy by Artist: Angus Maguire to be freely shared. It looks like justice, and to me it looks like faithfulness.
I believe that the weather will change, the snow will melt, and the waters will once again flow in mighty ways… and I believe that God's justice can roll down upon us and through us as witness to the world.
Epiphany startles us with the love of God and Lent gives us the challenge of praying about how we might make it real in our lives so that we too might be ready to faithfully follow in God's radical, challenging, example of love made real in Jesus.
May God bless us in our boldly turning ourselves to God's kingdom ways!