The worship team, as a special, did the song “Get Together,” from the 1960s, as a way to celebrate the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. While the band played, a series of photos from King’s life and from the civil rights movement appeared on the screen behind us. Last night, as I searched the internet for appropriate photos, I came across several of King’s speeches, and I was impressed with what I read.
One sermon is called “Loving Your Enemies.” King preached it in 1957 at a Baptist church in Montgomery, Ala. It’s quite a sermon. He quotes the verses from Matthew 5: “Ye have heard that it has been said, “Thou shall love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.” But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you; that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven.”
Then he says the following:‚Ä®
Now let me hasten to say that Jesus was very serious when he gave this command; he wasn’t playing. He realized that it’s hard to love your enemies. He realized that it’s difficult to love those persons who seek to defeat you, those persons who say evil things about you. He realized that it was painfully hard, pressingly hard. But he wasn’t playing. And we cannot dismiss this passage as just another example of Oriental hyperbole, just a sort of exaggeration to get over the point. This is a basic philosophy of all that we hear coming from the lips of our Master. Because Jesus wasn’t playing; because he was serious. We have the Christian and moral responsibility to seek to discover the meaning of these words, and to discover how we can live out this command, and why we should live by this command.
What would happen if we actually lived by this? If we took it as seriously as King took it? What are the implications for us Manifest Destiny Americans? “Jesus wasn’t playing,” King said. And we know from Jesus’ life that he, indeed, lived by this–as did King. So for us to take this seriously, what does it require of us as a nation, and as citizens of the world’s dominant nation?
