"Behold, the dreamer cometh. Let us slay him...and see what becomes of the dream." -- Genesis 37:19-20. This month marks the 25th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination.
On April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was gunned down by an assassin's bullet -- Martin Luther King Jr. delivered a speech at Riverside Church in New York City. The war in Vietnam was nearing its peak. More than 6,000 U.S. soldiers had already died, and hundreds more were dying every week. Vietnamese military casualties were even higher. How many Vietnamese civilians had already died was anybody's guess. The final figure would be close to four million, 10 percent of the population of Vietnam.
The war had also taken its toll at home. The poverty program that began the decade -- and which quickened its pace under a president with a genuine commitment to the poor and to full racial equality under the law -- was irrevocably and permanently derailed by the spiraling cost of military conflict half a world away. The man whose leadership gave the war on poverty its birth would soon be forced from office, after serving only one full term, by the opposition of large segments of American society to the war. And the great society he envisioned became, and still is, an idea that failed, a buzzword for the unrealistic dreams of people who just don't understand how the marketplace works.
We never returned with the same energy and hope to the issues of social justice in our land. A cynical spirit descended upon us with the war's end. We learned to expect corruption from public officials. Worse, we learned to tolerate it. Sometimes we even rewarded it. The same selfish spirit that we accepted in our leaders we also accepted in ourselves. It became entirely legitimate to allow the bottom line to dictate our ethics. "What's in it for me?" became an appropriate moral inquiry. And if the poor couldn't make it in this brave new world -- well, that was their problem.
Martin Luther King Jr. looked out at the congregation in Riverside Church that day in 1967, and he saw the future, the one we're living in now. And he named it:
I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.
I remember that speech. And I remember the barrage of criticism it provoked. He had "hurt his own cause," as the saying went. He had challenged his government on a field other than the domestic one on which it was willing to deal with him, and he had confronted a president who didn't take kindly to opposition. He had confronted other workers in the civil rights movement who were already fearful of the militance of the next generation.
When Martin Luther King Jr. began to question tenets of American society that were more basic than its mere refusal to allow African Americans full membership, the powers invested in things remaining as they were moved against him. Equality in a society which is itself toxic is not enough, said Dr. King. The dream that gave America its birth, that dream of which racial and ethnic minorities longed to be a part, the dream itself was in danger. America, the refuge of the tired and poor from their oppression, had become the oppressor. And it fueled its oppression in battle, with the blood of young people who were denied their part of the dream.
IT IS TIME NOW to ask ourselves with prayerful seriousness this question: Are not we as a nation reaping a crop we have sown ourselves? It turns out that there really is no such thing as a free lunch. It turns out that what goes around really does come around -- for us as well as for other people.
Short-term corporate profits built upon a foundation of enormous corporate debt are now being revealed as houses of cards. The national deficit, which seemed such a distant thing when times were good, is now an unwelcome guest at every dinner table in America, even those households whose members don't know what the national deficit is. And the army of those who cannot sustain a decent life in the present economy is growing.
King saw the intimate relationship between our materialism and all our other ills those many years ago. I look at our world now and see that little has changed. Have we learned nothing from our national heartbreaks? From Vietnam? From Desert Storm? Did we not learn that racism begets war and war begets racism, and that the sterile materialism which has become our god enables them both? Did we not learn that we cannot on the one hand decry the violence in our streets and on the other export violence to the streets of faraway places and get away with it?
Martin Luther King Jr. was a powerful preacher. He was a fearless leader of people. He was a champion of the long struggle of African Americans for justice. He was a Nobel laureate. But none of those distinctions are sufficient reason why he lives on so persistently in the hearts of those whose struggle he touched and still touches. There have been many who were great and good who do not live in us that way.
King lives in us because he was a prophet for our time. Not just for his own time, but for our time. Like the prophets of the Old Testament, he saw the spiritual crisis of his society in the political and social struggles of which he was a part. Like those prophets, he called his people -- all of his people, black and white -- to return to their God-given dream of the Promised Land. The spiritual crisis was bigger than lunch counters and county jails, bigger than city buses, bigger than entire school systems. These things were signs of a nation's spiritual apostasy, of our refusal to give an honest answer to just one simple question: "Are you children of a loving God, brothers and sisters of one human family, or are you not?"
This is our question. We are the church. It is our job to prophesy to people. It is also our job to model in our own common life the brave willingness to examine our own consciences without shrinking from what we see there.
We of all people cannot wait any longer to answer God's question. Are we brothers and sisters, or are we not? We must answer now. Now, when hatred of the immigrant, hatred of the minority, hatred of white for black has become respectable enough to command significant electoral power, when it erupts daily in our streets, killing innocent people unwise enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. We cannot wait to begin healing the sin of racism, which snakes its poisonous tentacles into every corner of American life and grows there, choking off the God-given respect for one another upon which civilization depends. Here is what Dr. King said:
Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter -- but beautiful -- struggle for a new world. This is the calling of the children of God, and our brothers and sisters wait eagerly for our response. Shall we say the odds are too great? Shall we tell them the struggle is too hard? Will our message be that the forces of American life militate against their arrival as full [human beings], and we send our deepest regrets? Or will there be another message, of longing, of hope, of solidarity with their yearnings, of commitment to their cause, whatever the cost? The choice is ours, and though we might prefer it otherwise we must choose in this crucial moment of human history.
And now, let us begin. The first Gulf War is over. We won. But what did it mean that we "won"? What did we win? Did we win the chance to become friendly with another Saddam Hussein, another leader who we can support because we think he will support our appetite for oil? Do we win the chance to embark upon another decades-long campaign of hatred and suspicion, this one of Islam, to replace the four decades of hatred of the Russians during the Cold War?
Did we win the chance to pick up our lives and carry on exactly as before, having learned nothing about the role our own greed played in those events? Saddam was the more colorful villain in this story. But he was not the only one. I think of the long war during which Martin Luther King Jr. conducted his questioning of the inequities in our own system, and I thank God for the courage he had to do so.
Until we address the spiritual crises that our worship of our own prosperity has thrust upon us, there will be no lasting peace. Peace is at bottom a spiritual thing, not just a political one. And the province of the Spirit is our concern. Healing the sin of racism is a spiritual task. Let us begin, then, trusting in the power of the Spirit to guide our hearts and transform our lives.
Edmond L. Browning was presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States when this article appeared. This article is excerpted from a speech Browning gave on January 19, 1992, at New York City's Trinity Church.
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