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The Church's Year: Lent

DYING TO TELL THE STORY
Martin Luther King

He was born in 1929, the son of a Baptist minister in Altanta, Georgia. As a boy he saw first-hand the violence of racial hatred, and the daily oppressions of African Americans. He was himself ordained and took charge of a church in Montgomery, Alabama. He became involved in the fight for desegregation on the buses and formed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. He was sent death threats and his family was harassed, but he held to his vision of non-violent protest, offering love in the face of hate. Through the work of the Civil Rights Movement, a civil rights act was passed in 1964, and in 1967 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Only a year later on 4th April 1968 he was shot dead in Memphis. He is widely regarded as one of the great prophetic leaders of the 20th century.

In one of his sermons, he spoke these words:-

In these days of worldwide confusion, there is a dire need for men and women who will courageously do battle for truth. We need Christians who will echo the words John Bunyan said to his jailer when, having spent twelve years in jail, he was promised freedom if he would agree to stop preaching:

But if nothing will do, unless I make of my conscience a continual butchery and slaughter-shop unless, putting out my own eyes, I commit me to the blind to lead me, as I doubt is desired by some, I have determined, the Almighty God being my help and shield, yet to suffer, if frail life might continue so long, even till the moss shall grow on mine eyebrows, rather than thus to violate my faith and principles.

We must make a choice. Will we continue to march to the drumbeat of conformity and respectability, or will we, listening to the beat of a more distant drum, move to its echoing sounds? Will we march only to the music of time or will we, risking criticism and abuse, march to the soul-saving music of eternity? More than ever before we are today challenged by the words of yesterday, “Be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind.”