Martin Luther King and Service

In memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, I focus this year on his message of service.  "Everybody can be great because everybody can serve."

Everybody Can be Great Because Everybody Can Serve
In Memory of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
 
“We have an opportunity to make America a better nation.”[1]
 
So said Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. the day before he died.
 
“We have an opportunity to make America a better nation.”
 
Not through leadership, though Dr. King was certainly a leader.  Not through scholarship or oratory or legislation, though he was a master of those realms as well.  No, Dr. King’s vision of a better tomorrow rested the foundation of service.

In that famous final sermon, in which Dr. King shared what he saw from the mountaintop of his prophetic career, he left us with a lingering and powerful charge: “Let us develop,” he said, “a kind of dangerous unselfishness.”[2]
 
An unselfishness that fosters the desire to help our neighbors, especially the most vulnerable.  An unselfishness that entails putting ourselves on the line for causes we believe in.  An unselfishness that produces an ethic of civic responsibility where each of us does our part to advance the overall good.
 
Dr. King’s success was not in being a singular firebrand, a voice crying alone in the wilderness.  No, Dr. King’s success came through the millions of other Americans who became convinced through him of their own potential to make a difference, to leave our mark on the world, to make it a little bit better for our having been here.
 
/
 
Two months before that fateful day, Dr. King delivered another famous sermon.  On that February morning, he outlined his belief in the ultimate greatness of service.  He taught:
 
Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.  
You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. 
You don’t have to make your subject and your verb agree to serve.  
You don’t have to know about Plato and Aristotle to serve.  
You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve.  
You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve.  
You only need a heart full of grace, a soul generated by love.  
And you can be that servant.[3]
 
/
 
Today as fifty years ago, we are in desperate need of hearts of grace that lead us to service.  Not the service of slavery, of mindlessly discharging our duty and following the lead of others whose motives we do not share.  Rather, we need the sacred service envisioned in the Torah and reinforced throughout our people’s eternal quest for freedom.
 
We all know and can recite by heart the refrain of this week’s Torah reading: Five times Moses delivers God’s command to “Let My people go!” 
 
We may be less familiar, however, with the full quote: “Let My people go that they may serve Me.”  Freedom doesn’t mean getting to do whatever we want; freedom means the ability to live up to the sacred potential planted within us, to embody the divine spark that calls us to holiness through quiet acts of humble service.  God calls us to be a nation of priests, of people who are dedicated to the flourishing of the values of our tradition, to heed the call of our prophets in establishing peace and justice in the societies in which we live.
 
In this, Dr. King’s sermon and the Book of Exodus are one text.  In enlisting us in the struggle for freedom, both demand our dedication to a shared higher purpose.  The Exodus is the greatest story of salvation ever told, and we continually rehearse it as we seek to expand the kingdom of freedom from generation to generation.
 
/
 
If there is one place where one would not expect to find freedom, it would be a jail cell.  And yet, as Dr. King explains in this same sermon, it was precisely during his many stays in jail that he would continue his pursuit of justice.  In his own words:
 
The other day I was saying, I always try to do a little converting when I’m in jail.  And when we were in jail in Birmingham the other day, the white wardens and all enjoyed coming around the cell to talk about the race problem.  And they were showing us where we were so wrong demonstrating.  And they were showing us where segregation was so right.  And they were showing us where intermarriage was so wrong.  
 
So I would get to preaching, and we would get to talking—calmly, because they wanted to talk about it.  And then we got down one day … to talk about where they lived, and how much they were earning.  
 
And when those brothers told me what they were earning, I said, “Now, you know what?  You ought to be marching with us.  You’re just as poor as [we are]. … You ought to be out here marching with every one of us every time we have a march.”[4]
 
Dr. King saw in his jailers potential allies.  He reached out to them, made a connection, and sought to build a relationship based on common experience and concern. 
 
Everybody can be great because everybody can serve. 
 
/
 
Dr. King’s example echoes a similar exchange by another religious leader in jail, Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liady, the founder and first rebbe of Chabad.  Martin Buber tells his story this way:
           
[Shneur Zalman] was jailed in St. Petersburg and awaiting his interrogation when the chief of police came into his cell.  Deep in contemplation, the rabbi was not aware of his visitor. 
 
The chief, a thoughtful man, noted the rabbi’s powerful but serene facial expression and intuited the sort of person his prisoner was.  He began to converse with the rabbi and soon raised several questions that had occurred to him when reading the scripture. 
 
Finally, he asked: “How am I to understand that God, who is omniscient, asks Adam, ‘Where are you?’  [Shouldn’t God know where Adam is?]”
 
The rabbi replied: “Do you believe that scripture is eternal and encompasses every age, every generation, and every person?” 
 
“Yes, I believe that,” said the chief. 
 
“Well now,” said the zaddik, “in every age God addresses every person with the question, ‘Where are you in your world?  Already so many of your allotted years and days have passed.  How far have you come in your world?’
 
“Perhaps God will say, ‘You have lived forty-six years.  Where are you now?’”
 
When the chief of police heard the exact number of his years, he pulled himself together, clasped the rabbi’s shoulder, and exclaimed: “Bravo!” 
 
But his heart trembled.[5]
 

As in so many classic Hasidic stories, we see a tzaddik, a righteous teacher, uncover hidden insights into the human experience.  Shneur Zalman cuts to the quick by asking Ayeka, Where are you?  Given all the seconds that have ticked by in your life, where have they brought you?  Who is the jailer, and who the jailed – and can they really be separated?
 
We are invited to see ourselves in this story, first as the imprisoned rabbi and then, more painfully, as the discovered policeman.  Both are joined in the human endeavor of seeking freedom, and both, as Dr. King would teach us, would do well to grasp one another’s hand in joined service to a cause and a power greater than either of them alone.
 
/
 
Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.
 
Martin Luther King truly was great, and it was because he was a model servant.  So we close tonight hearing his own words, which underscore his message of service.  We’ll hear just two minutes of this sermon as delivered on February 4, 1968, two months before he was killed.  In it, we hear Dr. King’s eerie prophecy of his own death and his statement of the legacy he hoped to leave behind.
 
Listen here to:
 
Every now and then I guess we all think realistically about that day when we will be victimized with what is life’s final common denominator—that something that we call death. We all think about it. And every now and then I think about my own death and I think about my own funeral. And I don’t think of it in a morbid sense. And every now and then I ask myself, "What is it that I would want said?" And I leave the word to you this morning.
 
If any of you are around when I have to meet my day, I don’t want a long funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long. And every now and then I wonder what I want them to say. Tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize—that isn’t important. Tell them not to mention that I have three or four hundred other awards—that’s not important. Tell them not to mention where I went to school.
 
I’d like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others.
 
I’d like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody.
 
I want you to say that day that I tried to be right on the war question.
 
I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry.
 
And I want you to be able to say that day that I did try in my life to clothe those who were naked.
 
I want you to say on that day that I did try in my life to visit those who were in prison.
 
I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.[6]
 
/
 
This weekend, we celebrate a hero.  In so doing, we recommit ourselves to the cause of justice and the pursuit of peace.  In that spirit, may we, like our ancestors before us, free ourselves to service.


[1] “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop,” delivered April 3, 1968 at Bishop Charles Mason Temple in Memphis, TN.  Available: http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/ive_been_to_the_mountaintop/index.html.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid.

[4] “The Drum Major Instinct” delivered February 4, 1968 at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, GA.  Available: http://kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_the_drum_major_instinct/index.html.

[5] Martin Buber’s The Way of Man, “The First Hasidic Tale.”  Trans. Bernard Mehlman and Gabriel E. Padawer (2012, e-reader format).

[6] “The Drum Major Instinct.”