TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER
whose deep commitment to the Christian faith
and unswerving devotion to its timeless principles have
given me an inspiring example of the Strength to Love
Foreword
THE REVEREND DR. RAPHAEL G. WARNOCK
Foreword to the 1981 Edition
CORETTA SCOTT KING
A Note on the Text
Preface
ONE
A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart
TWO
Transformed Nonconformist
THREE
On Being a Good Neighbor
FOUR
Love in Action
FIVE
Loving Your Enemies
SIX
A Knock at Midnight
SEVEN
The Man Who Was a Fool
EIGHT
The Death of Evil upon the Seashore
NINE
Shattered Dreams
TEN
Our God Is Able
ELEVEN
Antidotes for Fear
TWELVE
The Answer to a Perplexing Question
THIRTEEN
Paul’s Letter to American Christians
FOURTEEN
Pilgrimage to Nonviolence
FIFTEEN
The Drum Major Instinct
SIXTEEN
The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life
Sources
Follow Penguin
No one in American history has addressed more eloquently or advanced more effectively the ideals of freedom, justice, and equality than the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. With his voice, he discredited the fallacious doctrine of white supremacy; and through his activism, he changed America, liberating the sons and daughters of “former slaves” and “former slave owners” for the possibility of what he called “the beloved community.” Dr. King bequeathed to all of us a gift of love.
His epoch-making impact on law, public discourse, and culture is all the more stunning when one considers that he was a private citizen who never ran for public office and never held any official role within government. Yet because his legacy and impact were greater than that of most presidents, King is rightly regarded as a modern father of the nation and his memorial now sits appropriately on the national mall. Hailed during his lifetime as a civil rights leader and honored in death with a memorial befitting a president, it should not be forgotten that King was at his core a preacher. In fact, his identity as preacher and prophet was basic to his self-understanding and mission.
King himself said as much when he offered that “[In] the quiet recesses of my heart, I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher. This is my being and my heritage, for I am also the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher and the great-grandson of a Baptist preacher.” In his opening remarks, prior to preaching “The Man Who Was a Fool” at a Chicago church in 1967, he clarifies his sense of vocation in this way:
I did not come to Mount Pisgah to give a civil rights address; I have to do a lot of that … But before I was a civil rights leader, I was a preacher of the gospel. This was my first calling and it still remains my greatest commitment. You know, actually all that I do in civil rights I do because I consider it a part of my ministry. I have no other ambitions in life but to achieve excellence in the Christian ministry. I don’t plan to run for any political office. I don’t plan to do anything but remain a preacher.
So, this volume of sermons, which includes all but one sermon from Strength to Love, is important because here we encounter King the preacher. Also, we encounter King as pastor. All of these sermons were preached at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church or Ebenezer Baptist Church, congregations he actually served, respectively, as pastor and co-pastor while at the same time emerging as preacher, prophet, and pastor to an entire nation that needed to change.
In this way, his civil rights activism was rooted in his sense of ministerial vocation, and both emerged from the black church—the church that has had to be the countervailing conscience of the American churches with regard to racism, America’s original sin. So, as Martin Luther King, Jr., America’s great preacher, stood in the pulpit of Dexter Avenue during the days of the Montgomery bus boycott, and later alongside his father at Ebenezer Baptist Church, he stood well within the historical trajectory of African American prophetic Christianity. With his extraordinary academic training and preparation, King extended it and gave it a global voice such that at its height, the movement was appropriately multiracial and ecumenical, embracing believers across faith traditions and nonbelievers alike in a magnificent quest for human dignity. When the legendary Jewish cleric and friend to Dr. King, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, marched in the movement, he said he felt like his feet were praying! This deep yearning for freedom felt so strongly in Heschel’s feet and heard so clearly in Dr. King’s voice was expressed during slavery by sermons and spirituals that saw the story of black slaves through the lens of the story of Hebrew slaves marching out of Egypt. It was institutionalized by the independent black church movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and embodied in the ministries of King’s preaching forebears, whom he references in the autobiographical statement above.
His maternal great-grandfather, Willis Williams, was a preacher during slavery who well may have played a role in the establishment of a local independent black church. His grandfather, A.D. Williams, the second pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church, was an activist preacher who helped to launch the Atlanta branch of the NAACP, leading the fight, as its president, to establish the city’s first secondary school for African American children. Martin Luther King, Jr., and his siblings attended the Booker T. Washington High School, which existed only because of the activist ministry of his grandfather. Also, few people know that Martin Luther King, Sr., King’s father and Ebenezer’s third pastor, led a campaign for voting rights in 1935 in Atlanta, thirty years before King and others would create the conditions necessary for passing the Voting Rights Act. Moreover, “Daddy King,” as his father was affectionately called, fought for the equalization of teachers’ salaries decades before his son and others would lead a nonviolent war against segregation itself.
The activist tradition of a church born fighting for freedom, philosophically grounded in the other sources he cites in his “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence,” including Walter Rauschenbush’s Social Gospel, help to explain why, for King, preaching and activism were inextricably connected. In fact, in his work the two are so seamlessly connected that it is difficult to see where one ends and the other begins. The two feed and inform each other. Hence, at the heart of the sermons printed here is a view of the gospel that rejects any truncated or interiorized spirituality that seeks to save souls while ignoring bodies or focuses narrowly on matters of private morality while ignoring the moral implications of our public policy. In “Love in Action,” he laments that:
One of the great tragedies of life is that men seldom bridge the gulf between practice and profession, between doing and saying. A persistent schizophrenia leaves so many of us tragically divided against ourselves.… How often are our lives characterized by a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds! We talk eloquently about our commitment to the principles of Christianity, and yet our lives are saturated with the practices of paganism. We proclaim our devotion to democracy, but we sadly practice the opposite of the democratic creed. We talk passionately about peace, and at the same time we assiduously prepare for war. We make our fervent pleas for the high road of justice, and then we tread unflinchingly the low road of injustice. This strange dichotomy, this agonizing gulf between the ought and the is, represents the tragic theme of man’s earthly pilgrimage.
In positive terms, Dr. King prescribed what he called in another sermon printed here, “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life.” Herein is the clarion call of a spiritual genius and sober-minded sentinel who insists that we pray with our lips and our feet, and work with our heads, hearts, and hands for the beloved community, faithfully pushing against the tide of what he often called “the triplet evils of racism, materialism and militarism.” In a divided world and amid religious and political pronouncements in our public discourse that erroneously divide the self, we still need that message. The scandal of America’s prison-industrial complex that is disproportionately black, brown, and poor and continues to grow irrespective of actual crime rates, the yawning chasm between the haves and the have nots and the political maintenance of an unwieldy and costly Cold War–era military-industrial complex, decades after the death of Dr. King and the death of the Cold War, all suggest that we are mired in a continuing spiritual crisis that requires us to be vigilant in struggle against the triplet evils the preacher aptly identified so long ago. We need love in action. The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s gift of love, embodied in word and in deed, points the way.
THE REVEREND DR. RAPHAEL GAMALIEL WARNOCK,
senior pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church,
February 2012
If there is one book Martin Luther King, Jr. has written that people consistently tell me has changed their lives, it is Strength to Love. I believe it is because this book best explains the central element of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philosophy of nonviolence: His belief in a divine, loving presence that binds all life. This belief was the force behind all of my husband’s quests to eliminate social evil, and what he referred to when he preached of “the interrelated structure of reality” in his sermon “The Man Who Was a Fool”:
All men 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.
Martin Luther King, Jr.’s theological belief in the interdependence of all life inevitably led to methods for social change that dignified the humanity of the social change advocate as well as his adversary. “Christ gave us the goals,” he would often say, “and Mahatma Gandhi provided the tactics.”
It was in his first post as minister of the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, that Martin Luther King, Jr., first actively combined theology with social change. When the now-legendary 381-day nonviolent bus boycott began in 1955, Martin was chosen head of its organizing network, the Montgomery Improvement Association. Even then, Martin’s vision transcended time and place. He articulated for us not only the boycott’s immediate goal—the desegregation of city buses—but, more importantly, showed us its ultimate goal of healing and regenerating an entire population:
The basic conflict is not really over the buses. Yet we believe that, if the method we use in dealing with equality in the buses can eliminate injustice within ourselves, we shall at the same time be attacking the basis of injustice—man’s hostility to man. This can only be done when we challenge the white community to reexamine its assumptions as we are now prepared to reexamine ours.
Noncooperation and nonviolent resistance were means of stirring and awakening moral truths in one’s opponents, of evoking the humanity which, Martin believed, existed in each of us. The means, therefore, had to be consistent with the ends. And the end, as Martin conceived it, was greater than any of its parts, greater than any single issue. “The end is redemption and reconciliation,” he believed. “The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the Beloved Community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness.”
Even the most intractable evils of our world—the triple evils of poverty, racism, and war which Martin so eloquently challenged in his Nobel lecture—can only be eliminated by nonviolent means. And the wellspring for the eradication of even these most economically, politically, and socially entrenched evils is the moral imperative of love. In his 1967 address to the antiwar group Clergy and Laity Concerned, he said:
When I speak of love I am not speaking of some sentimental and weak response. I am speaking of that force which all of the great religions have seen as the supreme unifying principle of life. Love is somehow the key that unlocks the door which leads to ultimate reality. This Hindu-Moslem-Christian-Jewish-Buddhist belief about ultimate reality is beautifully summed up in the first epistle of Saint John: “Let us love one another; for love is God and everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God.”
If love is the eternal religious principle, Martin Luther King, Jr., believed, then nonviolence is its external worldly counterpart. He wrote:
At the center of nonviolence stands the principle of love. The nonviolent resister would contend that in the struggle for human dignity, the oppressed people of the world must not succumb to the temptation of becoming bitter or indulging in hate campaigns. To retaliate in kind would do nothing but intensify the existence of hate in the universe. Along the way of life, someone must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate. This can only be done by projecting the ethic of love to the center of our lives.
Just as Martin Luther King, Jr., sought the integration of the eternal and the temporal, he sought the integration of the spiritual and the intellectual. In the sermon “Love in Action” he preached that “one day we will learn that the heart can never be totally right if the head is totally wrong. Only through the bringing together of head and heart—intelligence and goodness—shall man rise to a fulfillment of his true nature.” To rise to this fulfillment, Martin believed, took not only the integration of the eternal and the temporal, or the spiritual and the intellectual but, most deeply, the integration of the visionary and the practical.
If Martin Luther King, Jr., was an apostle of love, he was no less an apostle of action. “The fierce urgency of now” stood as his cardinal impetus for social change. His friends and coworkers in the civil rights movement still joke about Martin’s seeming impatience at their extended, all-night discussions, which could bog down action itself. Then, Martin would tease about “the paralysis of analysis.” At heart, though, Martin was deadly serious. In The Trumpet of Conscience, he wrote:
In a world facing the revolt of ragged and hungry masses of God’s children; in a world torn between the tensions of East and West, white and colored, individualists and collectivists; in a world whose cultural and spiritual power lags so far behind her technological capabilities that we live each day on the verge of nuclear co-annihilation; in this world, nonviolence is no longer an option for intellectual analysis, it is an imperative for action.
And so we come full circle. The struggle to eliminate the world’s evils—evils so flagrant and self-evident that they glare at us from every ghetto street and rural hovel—can only occur through a profound internal struggle. By reaching into and beyond ourselves and tapping the transcendent moral ethic of love, we shall overcome these evils. Love, truth, and the courage to do what is right should be our own guideposts on this lifelong journey. Martin Luther King, Jr., showed us the way; he showed us the Dream—and we responded with full hearts. Martin was an optimist. I am too. I do believe that one day our strength to love shall bring the Dream to fruition and the Beloved Community to earth.
CORETTA SCOTT KING
January 1981
The following sermons by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., have been compiled largely from Strength to Love, first published by Harper & Row in 1963, reprinted by Pocket Books and Fortress Press. Two sermons have been added in accordance with the desires of the King Estate, including “The Drum Major Instinct,” delivered at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on February 4, 1968, and “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life,” delivered at the New Covenant Baptist Church in Chicago on April 9, 1967. The sermon “How Should a Christian View Communism?” was omitted because of its dated nature and lack of relevance to a contemporary audience. That sermon is available online for interested readers at the King Legacy website, www.thekinglegacy.org/giftoflove.
In these turbulent days of uncertainty the evils of war and of economic and racial injustice threaten the very survival of the human race. Indeed, we live in a day of grave crisis. The sermons in this volume have the present crisis as their background; and they have been selected for this volume because, in one way or another, they deal with the personal and collective problems that the crisis presents. In these sermons I have sought to bring the Christian message to bear on the social evils that cloud our day and the personal witness and discipline required. All of these sermons were originally written for my former parishioners in the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church of Montgomery, Alabama, and my present parishioners in the Ebenezer Baptist Church of Atlanta, Georgia. Many of the sermons were later preached to congregations throughout the nation.
All of these sermons were preached during or after the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, and I have drawn a number of illustrations from that particular movement, some of which were included in my book Stride Toward Freedom. Three of the sermons—“Love in Action,” “Loving Your Enemies,” and “Shattered Dreams”—were written while I was in Georgia jails. “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence” is a revision and updating of material which previously appeared in The Christian Century and Stride Toward Freedom. Although it is not a sermon, it has been included at the end of the volume at the specific urging of the publisher.
I have been rather reluctant to have a volume of sermons printed. My misgivings have grown out of the fact that a sermon is not an essay to be read but a discourse to be heard. It should be a convincing appeal to a listening congregation. Therefore, a sermon is directed toward the listening ear rather than the reading eye. While I have tried to rewrite these sermons for the eye, I am convinced that this venture could never be entirely successful. So even as this volume goes to press I have not altogether overcome my misgivings. But in deference to my former congregation, my present congregation, my close associates in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and my many friends across the nation who have asked for copies of individual sermons, I offer these discourses in the hope that a message may come to life for readers of these printed words.
I am happy to express my deep gratitude to many helpers. I am indebted to my close friends and executive assistant, Wyatt Tee Walker, a fine preacher in his own right, for reading the entire manuscript and offering valuable suggestions. I am also indebted to my teacher and friend, Samuel W. Williams, for helpful and stimulating suggestions. Charles L. Wallis gave valuable editorial assistance on the final manuscript. My thanks also go to my efficient secretary, Miss Dora E. McDonald, who constantly offered encouraging words and transferred my handwritten pages to typewritten copy. Most of all I must thank my devoted wife, Coretta, who has read the complete manuscript and given invaluable suggestions and inspiration. Her love and patience enabled her to be understanding in the face of my increased absence from her and our children while completing this volume.
MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.