The Mission to Which They Call Us is a Most Difficult One

Today we celebrate the national holiday of Martin Luther King Jr. This holiday remains an enduring legacy to the work and witness of Dr.King. And it is an invitation to us – all of us – to take up his witness in our own lives. I want to say more about King for sure, but I want to do this by first referencing today’s readings.

The first reading from 1 Samuel 15 is the story of Saul who is instructed (by God through the prophet Samuel) to destroy Israel’s enemies – the Amalekites. Just before the passage we read today, Saul is instructed to, “Go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys (1 Sam 15:3).”

The Amalkites had previously attacked Israel – quite mercilessly – as the Jewish people were making their way to the promised land. So this passage is essentially a passage about violence and revenge.[1]

I know that I can be inclined to skip over passages like this and think that they are no longer relevant in the world. Yet this story from 1 Samuel represents a reality that we witness time and time again in our world – especially at this present moment in Gaza and many other places – the problem of addressing violence with even more violence. 

Now I don’t have any easy answers to global conflicts, but the words of the great Maya Angelou come to mind when she said that, “Hate, has caused a lot of problems in the world, but has not solved one yet.” Substitute the word violence and the quote is pretty much the same!

Fast forward to the gospel, and we witness Jesus and his followers getting pushback from the crowds because they don’t act like religious people are supposed to. Jesus says his famous, ““No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth on an old cloak…[and] no one pours new wine into old wineskins.“ Jesus says that he’s trying to do something different in the world because the status quo isn’t working. Or, maybe I should say, the status quo is working exactly as it was designed to operate and this status quo demands violence against one another. That’s not the way of Jesus.

Back to Martin Luther King.

What I deeply appreciate about King is that he – like any prophet – cut to the heart of the matter. Of course he saw war and violence and revenge and hate as problematic. He spoke often and clearly on this. To this end, I would highly recommend we all read and keep reading his Beyond Vietnam speech (delivered on April 4, 1967) which I find as relevant today as it was back then. As I recently re-read it, I was amazed at how easily one can substitute the names of other countries into a good part of the speech, and it will sound like it could’ve been written today.

But beyond the overt violence of war and aggression, King also recognized and named that depriving people of rights, or food, or freedom, or opportunity, etc. were other manifestations of that violence. So to anyone who might look around and say, “We have peace here,” King would ask, “Is there state oppression, poverty, unemployment, inadequate housing, or discrimination? If so, then you do not have peace. You still have violence.”

King, like Jesus, always paid close attention to those who had the least power and were thus subjected to the violence most directly. As a Black man living in the United States under our own form of apartheid, King knew all too well the realities of violent systems. He also pointed out that our ability to notice and clearly name violence and oppression is often impacted by our proximity to privilege – meaning the more privilege you have, the LESS likely you are to be able to see and name the violence.

King, also like Jesus, was trying to find “new wineskins” and a way out of what King called “the madness” of war and armed conflict. He knew that the path of violence and revenge was not a foundation upon which one can build a solid future. When all is said and done – when homes and crops are destroyed, when people are killed and families are torn apart – “there is little left to build on, save bitterness,” he said.

On this holiday and remembrance of Martin Luther King, I would invite us to pause and think about the armed conflicts that the United States is currently involved in (or supporting) and how our tax dollars help to sustain those conflicts. I would invite us to think about our budgets as moral documents that reflect our priorities as a nation. I would invite us to reflect upon our language and metaphors that may be steeped in the language of war and aggression. I would invite us to reflect critically on our scriptures and interrogate how they may be used to support violence and revenge. I would invite us to reflect on the many ways that violence gets built into our economic, judicial, educational and social systems. And I would encourage us to reflect on the many voices in this community and around the world who are telling us about the violence being done to them (and what they hope we will do about it).

There are no easy answers to any of these questions, but there are steps we can take today, tomorrow and the next day that move us closer towards nonviolence. May we, as King says, “break the silence” and recognize that “the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one,” but one we must take up.

[1] In fact, this passage made the news recently because it was invoked by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a speech he gave on October 29, 2023 related to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza. In his address, he said, “You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember.” His remarks added fuel to an already volatile situation between Israel and Palestine.