News and Views

"Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low;
the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain.
And the glory of the Lord will be revealed,
and all people will see it together.
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken."

–Isaiah 40: 4-5 

Beloved, 

We have arrived at the birthday celebrations of The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was pastor, prophetic preacher, civil rights activist and ultimately martyr. In honor of this great patriot there will be breakfasts, prayer vigils and worship services, marches and other memorial observations. And deservedly so. Yet I wrestle with the conundrum that we ritually invoke the name of Martin Luther King Jr. too easily, as if citation were the same as courage and memory were the same as obedience. King did not give us words to admire; he gave us a life that disrupted the false peace of empires. He did not ask permission of unjust systems to challenge them. He placed his body where the lie was most exposed and trusted God more than the outcome.

We now live in a moment that tests whether in all our remembering, we have learned anything at all.

Democracy and the oppressed groan under the weight of authoritarian desire. Authoritarianism desires to concentrate power in the hands of the few without regard to the rights and welfare of others. Further, authoritarians appropriate the language of scripture to sanctify cruelty, exclusion, and control. This is antithetical to the words, actions and life of Jesus the Christ. The message of Christ is clear, the oppressed are to be liberated; the stranger is to be welcomed and the vulnerable are to be protected. Therefore, what we are experiencing is not merely a political crisis; it is a theological one. Followers of Christ cannot be silenced. When power demands silence, neutrality becomes complicity. When injustice becomes law, patience becomes sin.

As articulated by Bishop A. Robert Hirschfeld in his address to New Hampshire leaders, the time for carefully worded statements may have well passed. Words without cost have become a form of moral evasion. The opportunity before us is not just to remember King but to embody his call. The call is to place our bodies, our institutions, our reputations, and our comfort between empire and those it would crush. Anything less is sentimentality masquerading as discipleship.

To be a follower of Christ in this hour is to accept that faith is costly. It means refusing the safety of abstraction. It means not succumbing to the pitfall of argument and accusation. It means choosing solidarity with the poor over popularity, truth over timidity, justice over institutional preservation. It means showing up where policies wound flesh, where fear governs law, where evil is enforced with violence. It means being prepared, as King was, to be called divisive, irresponsible, and dangerous for insisting that God’s reign cannot be reconciled with domination.

Let us not be guilty of reciting King’s dream while betraying his discipline. We are called to live his insistence that love is not passive, that nonviolence is not weak, and that justice delayed is justice denied. The question before us is not whether democracy will survive, but whether the Church will be recognizable as the Body of Christ if it does. 

And may we always remember that the Body of Christ is empowered by Almighty God. The God of truth, love and liberation will never leave us nor forsake us. That irrefutable truth gives us the courage to walk with resilience and never, ever grow weary in well-doing. Our unwillingness to relent will be the catalyst that commissions personal integrity into communal transformation. We will then be found faithful not in our statements, but in our witness.

Blessings and peace,
Bishop LaTrelle Miller Easterling