Last week I was the storyteller in Godly Play, telling the children in the Green Classroom about the life of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom we count as a saint and a prophet – a person who was so close to God that he knew what God wanted him to say and do. It was a powerful and worshipful experience going through the story with these children. At the end of the story I invited them to reflect by bringing any other stories from the classroom that could connect to the story of Dr. King’s life. The children brought images of Jesus’ life and death to stand by the images of Dr. King’s, and I couldn’t resist the urge to bring the apostle Paul over too, and to share verses he wrote from prison. One of the children carefully set up the story of World Communion, picturing people of all races and ethnicities gathered around the Table.
When I told the story of Dr. King it brought to mind a few places hallowed by his life and work, places of pilgrimage that have become sacred in memory. I have walked the streets of Atlanta and seen his childhood home preserved reverently there. I even briefly stood with appropriately trembling knees near the pulpit at Ebeneezer Baptist Church, as I was stage-managing the Children of Uganda tour, and when the executive director was waylaid by an injury on the day of their performance there, I had to step up and make the opening speech in her stead. I have been to Washington DC and marched on some of the streets where Dr. King led marches, and this past summer with the Youth Group we saw the place of his death in Memphis, Tennessee. Much of the rest of his life, however, was geographically unfamiliar territory to me — except what I saw on the big screen when I went to see Selma.
Selma was a beautifully made movie with much to recommend it. It was not a biography of Dr. King’s life nor a wide overview of all that happened, but a close-up focus on a moment and a place. The Edmund Pettus bridge loomed large in the camera’s eye as the marchers approached and crossed the bridge each time, in hope, in dread, and finally in triumph. Looking at Dr. King’s life with too wide a view can lead to blurred and broad strokes, and children these days may learn in school that he was a nice man who helped people overcome their differences. A friend of mine, the Rev. Aric Clark, asked his son what he had learned about Dr. King at school, and hearing that he “brought peace” Aric responded “No!” On the contrary, “he upset many people because he showed them that there can’t be any peace without justice, and since we still don’t have justice, we also don’t have peace.”
Selma helps us lose sight of the big picture, to focus back in the particular life of a man who was arrested 30 times, who was threatened with death many times before his assassination, who opposed the war in Vietnam, who called us white people out on our racism, who advocated for the government to guarantee employment and income to all, and who shouted at the president. We might prefer not to remember that, and to remember instead his Nobel Peace Prize and a couple of his most repeated speeches. But we need to remember the prophet and the activist. In a nation still sorely lacking justice, where such a movie gets a mere nod at awards ceremonies and is passed over at the box office in favor of mindless action fare, let us pray that, like the Rev. Dr. King, we might know what God wants us to say and to do.
Every Blessing,
Talitha