What would Martin Luther King say?

Our government likes to revise history. Jeh C. Johnson spoke recently at a Pentagon ceremony honoring the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. on his birthday, a national holiday. He tried to debunk the fierce antiwar message of King, claiming King would understand that Obama's war in Afghanistan is different, more like the mission of the Good Samaritan of Jesus' Gospel according to Luke*. I wonder about this.

In 1962 I was a freshman at Hesston College in Kansas. An African-American safe-cracking felon was converted to Jesus by a Mennonite missionary in the Chicago ghetto. He desperately needed a roommate as a condition of admission, and staying out of prison. Transformed by the power of Jesus, he had convinced the parole board to let him leave Cook County Jail, the Alcatraz of the Midwest, to enter Christian ministry training. The Dean of Students told me it was difficult finding a student willing to room with "a Negro."

An Iowa farm boy, I wasn't easily intimidated. I agreed. He moved in. I quickly got my first impression. He awoke every morning at 5:00 to a prayer and exercise regime including 50 pushups, the last 10 with handclaps. He was several years my senior, the years he had spent incarcerated. We became friends.

One late January snowbound evening he had a request. "I'm a felon. I can't even get a license to drive, and you have a car. I'll pay your gas. Take me to Tabor College to hear this lecture." I grudgingly agreed. I never heard of the lecturer, an African American with a PhD. His topic was the US constitution and the laws of segregation. He was responding to the loud extremist rhetoric in America then that racial segregation was both constitutional and within the laws of God. I questioned my roommate, "Are you sure this PhD Negro isn't a fake?"

We crept and slid my Dad's 54 Studebaker to Hillsboro. I remember little of the lecture, as my farm boy mental capacity strained at the constitutional law vocabulary. My roommate was totally awed by the speaker, and insisted I come back stage to meet this man, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and shake his hand. I grudgingly agreed, my skepticism intact. I couldn't then grasp the passion of the moment.

Spring 1964 on Easter Sunday morning I awoke drenched with dew and covered with a wet blanket on a piney woods hillside in Southern Alabama. We four white boys had not found a freedom school or civil rights group the night before that would take us in. We knew Dr. King was going to deliver the Easter Sunday sermon at his father's church in Montgomery. We had settled for the night on the ground near a closed campground in Taladega National Forest.

A Junior at Goshen College, Indiana, I had become good friends with our guide in the segregated south, Eli Hochstedler. He was a student the previous year at Tougaloo College in Mississippi. He told stories of café and bus sit-ins, police harassment, and his friendship with Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist assassinated with two others and buried in a dam near Philadelphia, Mississippi. With two other guys exploring similar persuasions, we packed our primitive gear into a Ford Falcon and spent spring break visiting freedom schools in Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia.

We four unshaven college boys were immediately welcomed 15 minutes before starting time at the Dexter Avenue 2^nd Baptist Church in Montgomery. The church was packed, standing room only available. But the ushers marched us past rows of elegantly dressed congregants to the front row of the church where four little girls dressed in white with flowers in their hair obediently left their seats to make room for us. I was totally embarrassed. Martin Luther King, Sr., the pastor, Dr. King's father, preached hours, and finally Dr. King, Jr. was invited to the pulpit. He spoke 15 minutes; I timed it. The sermon remains etched in my memory like none other. The hand fans in the heat of that hot Easter Sunday are a distant 2nd.

Afterward my three college friends insisted on waiting in line to shake hands with Dr. King. I refused, explaining that I already shook his hand once. Exhausted, I took a nap in the back seat of our Falcon.

I still don't know why it took me so long to grasp this. Here on the back 40 I struggle to understand the interconnectedness of elements like c, h, o, p, k, n etc. with microbial funguses and bacteria, etc., to facilitate the sun's gift of life for all beings. But I should have understood more of the passion Jesus and King had that's so desperately needed in our world today for human life and security.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was one who facilitated the interconnectedness of all in the human race. He facilitated the Son's gift of life for all. But He was not Jesus. Like most of us, his personal morality fell far short of Jesus. Like St. Paul, he was striving to imitate Jesus. And imitating Jesus is the key. For centuries after Jesus died his followers were derisively called "little Christs" as they sought to imitate Jesus through acts that pundits mistakenly labeled as weakness, irrelevant to the evil they faced in their turbulent times.

Our modern times are turbulent, too. So where is Jesus now? Can we find Him among those needing food stamps because they have no living wage? Are Israeli citizens* really ministering to Him if they repair Palestinians' wells destroyed by settlers? Is He seen in those who lost access to health care because insurance discards them? Is He the alien given sanctuary illegally in our country? Is He the farmers and taxi drivers* incarcerated in Guantanamo? Does Jesus' experience with insurrection, chaos and terrorism in AD 30 have any relevance to America and its wars today?

Is the Pentagon spokesman Johnson correctly understanding what MLK would say? Can true moral strength for America come from killing evil people and breaking their access to basics of life? How sustainable is agriculture that cuts the fragile bonds in the plant roots between decaying funguses and pathogenic microbes?

It took me decades to start trying to figure this out, so I can't fault anyone for getting tired thinking about what MLK would say, let alone Jesus.

* Check out the following sources

Taayush has worked specifically on water issues between Palestinians and the Israeli occupation of Palestinians' land.

http://www.taayush.org/?p=1143

This website has links to Dr. King's speeches in the last years prior to his assassination:

http://www.salon.com/news/politics/war_room/2011/01/13/obama_official_mlk_supports_our_wars

UK article on Guantanamo innocents:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article7092435.ece

The Pentagon speech by Jeh C. Johnson and comments are here in the official defense department news release:

http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=62448

Israeli citizens have organized for peace with Palestinians, many of them joint efforts between Israelis and Palestinians. Most peace groups in Israel are allied with http://www.icahd.org

An important Christian-Jewish organization is Rabbis for Human Rights: http://www.rhr.israel.net

An organization working specifically with farm and water issues with Palestinians is http://www.taayush.org

Christian Peacemaker Teams is ministering in conflict zones all over the world, including the Middle East. http://www.cpt.org/

It's the contention of this columnist that these organizations are doing more than all the US military efforts to make us safe from terrorism, at less than 1% the cost.

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David Graber
Hardin, MT 59034
www.greenwoodfarmmt.org