My Prayer for the Day After Martin Luther King Day

My conservative friend posted a question on my facebook page tonight in response to the video of King's last speech the night before he died.  He said it makes you wonder how the world would be different if he had lived.

We do have some inklings of course.  At the time he was organizing the Poor People's Movement and was planning on sitting in on the Capitol until the government agreed to eliminate poverty and jobs. Such a movement seems almost unimaginable in the current political climate, even with Obama as President. Had he lived on he would have continued to been a force in American politics, and he would almost have assuredly continued to be attacked verbally and physically by conservatives who stood against him on civil rights and then against him on the war in Vietnam and poverty. Remember he was in Memphis supporting the sanitation workers right to organize a union and to strike if necessary to get fair wages. The unionization rate was nearly a third in 1968 and after a concerted effort of undermining worker organizing, the unionization rate is now its under 10 percent of the workforce.

The truth is the folks on the conservative side of the aisle called King a socialist and every other name in the book, much like they do with Obama who has a much less ambitious progressive agenda. He lived under constant threat for his life fighting for racial and economic justice. In many ways, we've gone forward, but in many ways we've gone backwards.

There's a reason that MLK was fighting on behalf of poor people seeking changes to policy, based on his own reading of the biblical call. Indeed the poor are made referenced to over 2000 times in the Bible. The every half century Year of Jubilee was a legislative way that the Hebrews evened the playing field through forgiveness of debts and a restarting of the economic clock. Jesus himself makes constant calls on behalf of the needy and constantly challenges the wealthy placing pretty low odds of the rich getting into heaven. He even affirms paying taxes!

Perhaps the world's most famous minister dedicated his life to these Biblical principles and sought to make change in both people's hearts and in the policies of our nation, realizing that both are needed for systemic change.

I know many of us on MLK Day intend to offer a warm remembrances about the man, but King challenges us to do much more than remember or even to volunteer.  His is a call not unlike Jesus that demands a fervent attention to the issues of poverty and illness, peace and justice.  I fall short of that challenge all the time, but I also am left frustrated with the day of remembrance when his legacy is misconstrued in something other than radical in its call to loving neighbors so deeply that we working for fundamental policy change so that our government serves the least of these.

My prayer is that our body politic once again becomes passionate about eliminating poverty (and I mean actually eliminating it in our lifetimes), both in US and abroad.  My prayer is that we use every means necessary in the effort, social enterprise and foreign aid, increased entrepreneurship and increased wages, more trade and fairer trade, charity and government policy.  I pray that every person be assured these basics of education, food, clean water, health care and shelter so that a more level playing field creates a more just economics.  I pray that we start with Haiti and move to every corner of the Earth.  The effort required is immense, but it is what King and indeed the Lord calls us to use this Martin Luther Day to move past remembrance to respond to the fierce urgency of now in our own lifetimes.