Happy Birthday, Dr. King

My thoughts move to Dr. King all year, and especially this past year. I have wondered so many times how he might have taught in the time of Trump.

We think of Dr. King as a leader, often, and as a pastor, for those who are more religious. But, I think of him as an organizer and a teacher.

So, for his *real* birthday, I decided to read a sermon that he gave, something new to me.

I chose the sermon about The Man Who Was a Fool.

He describes the issue the foolish man encounters, and how we are in danger of falling into the same trap in this way:

We must always be careful in America because we live in a capitalistic economy, which stresses the profit motive and free enterprise. And there is always the danger that we will be more concerned about making a living than making a life. There is always the danger we will judge the success of our professions by the size of the wheel base on our automobiles and the index of our salaries rather than the quality of our service to humanity. There must always be a line of distinction between the "within" and the "without" of life. [here, Dr. King footnotes The Parables of Jesus, Buttrick].

Dr. King's analyzes of the use of "I" and "my" by the rich man, and ties it back to our need to be more cognizant of our connections to the rest of the world/humanity rather than our own perceived self-sufficiency:

[The Foolish Man] failed to realize the interdependent structure of reality. 

And so often we fail to see this. Something should remind us before we can finish eating breakfast in the morning we are dependent on more than half of teh world. We get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for a sponge, and that's handed to us by a Pacific Islander. Then we reach over for a bar of soap, and that's given to us at the hands of a frenchman. And then we reach up for our towel, and that's given to us by a Turk. And then we go to the kitchen for breakfast, getting ready to go to work. Maybe this morning we want to follow the good old American tradition, and we drink coffee. That's poured into our cups by a South American. Or maybe we are desirous of having tea. Then we discover that that's poured in our cup by a Chinese. Or maybe we want cocoa this morning, and then we discover that that's poured in our cup by a West African. Then we reach over for piece of toast, only to discover that that's given to us at the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention teh baker. And so before we finish eating breakfast in the morning, we are dependent on more than half of the world. [a footnote lets us know that this section is paraphrased from Leslie Whitehead's 1936 publication titled Why Do Men Suffer?]

Surely Dr. King would update these observations, our world is ever more interconnected and dependent within and without our national boundaries. We do less and less for ourselves in this world, and mostly have no idea how what we have in our hands had gotten there.

But, perhaps most important in this sermon is how Dr. King connects this issue to race relations in 1961:

For what is white supremacy but the foolish notion that God made a mistake and stamped an eternal stigma of inferiority on a certain race of people? What is white supremacy but the foolishness of believing that one race is good enough to dominate another race? What is white supremacy but the foolish notion of believing that certain people are to be relegated to the status of things rather than being elevated to the status of persons? There is no greater foolishness than the foolishness that accompanies our inhumanity to man.

Lest you think Dr. King was not considering all angles of this situation, see what he said immediately after the last statement:

And the converse is also true. Black supremacy is based on a great deal of foolishness. It is the foolish notion that the black man has made all of the contributions of civilization and that he will one day rule the world. I am convinced, as I have said so often, that as Negroes we must work passionately and unrelentingly for first-class citizenship, but we must never use second-class methods to gain it. We must not seek to rise from a position of disadvantage to one of advantage, thus subverting justice. Not substituting one tyranny for another, but we must seek to achieve democracy for everybody. God is not interested merely in the freedom of black men and brown men and yellow men, God is interested in the freedom of the whole human race and the creation of a society where all men will live together as brothers and every man will respect the dignity and the worth of human personality. Whenever we fail to believe this, we indulge in tragic foolishness.**

He goes on to talk about our abundance and how we might help others around the world... but I will let you read on. It is beautiful and it very well might have made me more religious if the priests in the pulpit were preaching this kind of truth. *Might* because I have other unresolved issues with organized religion, but I digress.

You can read the whole sermon here. You can search for other things to read here. [Yes, they are published in volumes, but if you click through to the volume, you can also see the PDF to many of the documents.]

**And, yes, we would hope that Dr. King's use of "men" here would have been supplanted with "humans" or "people," but I have faith in Dr. King's sense of humanity.