“In a real sense all life is inter-related,” wrote Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, in his Letter from the Birmingham Jail.
He wrote this letter to white clergy who were critical of the strategy of agitation pursued by the civil rights movement. They particularly did not like how the movement would go from city to city to stoke up the fight against the racist laws there: this made them “outside agitators” “disturbers of the peace.”
Dr. King wrote his now famous Letter from the Birmingham Jail not only to defend his movement against these charges, but also to try to persuade these clergy of the justice of their cause.
“In a real sense all life is inter-related. All [people] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be… This is the inter-related structure of reality.”
For this reason, Dr. King argued, “a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” That’s why they had to go out of their way to show up for each other in communities across the country.
In living according to this truth, Dr. King along with many other leaders and participants of the civil rights movement were motivated and sustained by their Christian faith. They embodied a deep commitment to what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.
As we heard in our reading from the Apostle Paul (1 Corinthians 12:12-27), when we say “yes” to following Jesus, this calls us out of our self-contained egos into a greater belonging in a larger “body of Christ.” For Paul, this larger body is the Church. Within the Church, we are challenged and supported into realizing our connections with others beyond tribal boundaries, beyond class boundaries, gender boundaries: “In Christ,” Paul said, “there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female.”
As such, a church can become a school of love, where we learn to live in new ways as new creations in Christ, in communities that are sacred experiments of the Realm of Heaven on earth, where we can be supported and challenged to grow – by fits and by starts, little by little, however humbly and imperfectly – into a new way of life where we witness and honor each one’s belovedness in Christ as children of the Living God. We learn to become more loving, we learn to become more beloved.
Now, that sounds good. But it can be hard, right? It’s hard to get schooled in how to treat each other as fellow members of the body of Christ …
So thank goodness this only pertains to the church, right? Thank goodness that when it comes to those people who are outside the church, who aren’t even Christian, I don’t have to feel like I belong to them and they belong to me, I don’t have to feel responsible, I don’t have to care, I still get to revert to my old habits, the habits the world at large teaches me, to dismiss and distain and deride and dominate when it comes to those people, right?
Right?!
No?!
You’re saying that if I’m Christian, not only do I have to try to care about you all, but I have to try to care about everyone else too?
Aw, c’mon!
But everyone else gets to be mean and nasty, why can’t I? Look out for number one – that’s the name of the game, right?
Plus, c’mon, as Christians we know it’s not by our good works that we’re saved, right? We are saved by grace, right? It’s our faith that counts, right?, not our good deeds.
So, can’t I at the very least just coast a little on this whole caring-about-other-people thing? Especially when it’s uncomfortable? When it’s inconvenient? When it’s unpopular? When it could get me in trouble? When it means I need to go out of my way to show up for people who are getting thrown under the bus?
Sorry, man, that’s just not what it means to be a disciple of Christ.
All the saints and great ancestors of our faith – known and unknown – embodied how the soul-saving grace of Christ breaks out hearts opens, stirs up in us a Spirit of love that pushes us past the boundaries of ourselves and of our social and tribal identities into an embrace of all humanity – in all its beauty and all its brokenness.
When we say “yes” to the way of Jesus and the Spirit of Christ, when we receive that sweet gift of God’s grace into our hearts, we start to see that God is at the center of all things and all people. We are not at the center, our tribe, our religion, our nation, our ethnicity is not at the center. It’s God who is at the center of all things, and through God we are all intertwined.
We can run from it, but we can’t hide. It is simply the truth that, “All [people] are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny… I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be… a threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
The choice is ours to live like this, with compassion and courage.
Thank God we are not alone. We have Jesus to help us. We have the examples of all the saints and great ancestors. And we have each other as a church family, as a school of love, as a community dedicated to helping each other to have a little more love and a little more courage in living out the parts we have to play on behalf of the beloved body of Christ.
Thanks be to God.
Click here for video of this sermon.
Delivered Sunday, January 26, 2025, by Rev. Nathaniel Mahlberg, at the United Church of Christ at Valley Forge
The Dandelion Way 