EARLIER THIS YEAR, I almost did not finish writing the sermon I was scheduled to preach at a special Martin Luther King Jr. Day Social Justice Shabbat service. Usually, I am able to bring sermons to a close without problem; this time, I struggled. Really struggled. Instead of focusing thematically on racism, poverty, war, or any number of issues King spoke out against, I had decided to preach on fear. I felt called to name fear as the root issue beneath so many others, something we struggle with individually and collectively. Fear of scarcity, fear of the unknown, fear of the “other”: the immigrant, the unarmed black person, the queer, the Sikh, the Muslim, the Jew, or the white person now encountering you in your queer, black, immigrant, brown, Muslim, Sikh, or Jewish body.
I found that once I started being honest about the fears we hold and the fears we face, I could barely turn the corner, in a manner of speaking, toward hope.
Eventually, I was able to theologically pivot my sermon and conclude positively. However, that experience of being spiritually stumped with writer’s block said more to me than any happy ending ever will. Rather than yielding answers, my sermon gave me questions, which continue to resonate in the midst of a global pandemic.
What is the line between realism and despair? What is the place of fear in the life of faith, particularly for “we who believe in freedom,” as Ella Baker put it?
Growing up, I saw King as an eternal optimist whose dream of justice forbade fear and precluded despair. Today, I understand King’s justice as inviting in those realities and the humans who struggle with them. Current conversations on the sanitization of King’s politics might also extend to our King-inspired theologies of justice. Visions of justice and faith inattentive to fear and untroubled by despair ignore our humanity and the lived theology arising from people’s actual engagement with King’s legacy.
Two years ago, I joined a group of college students at Clark Atlanta University for a book discussion hosted by the office of religious life. In the novel Dear Martin, by Nic Stone, high school student Justyce writes letters of outcry to King against an unfolding backdrop of killings of unarmed black teens. To close the discussion, we wrote our own letters to King, echoing Justyce and a professor I had in seminary who, for decades following King’s death, annually wrote King on his birthday to wrestle with developments in racial justice.
Over the past year, I have turned repeatedly to “The New Dark Ages,” a poem from Alice Walker’s 2018 poetry collection. Although the title initially drew me (what a refreshingly precise statement of our times!), I revisit the poem’s narrative journey. In this poem dedicated “for Martin,” Walker puts King in conversation with our wayward, winding, unforeseeable future, which she describes as a “darkness” that “we may not emerge from ... in my lifetime.” Yet, in this darkness, despair is not a dead end to faith or justice, but a starting point. It is here that King’s path appears, beckoning our doubting, fearful selves on with the reminder (evoking John 1:5 and a certain Sunday school song made famous by the civil rights movement): In times of darkness, we are the light.
Jeania Ree V. Moore is a writer, United Methodist deacon, and doctoral student in religious studies and African American studies at Yale University.
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