MLK // Ty Gibson

so on April 4th 1968 a single shot was fired in Memphis Tennessee and the body of a towering figure of a man dropped to the ground and began to bleed out he was rushed to the hospital emergency surgery was performed and within an hour from the point at which he was shot he was dead well this Monday is Martin Luther King Jr's day just a few days ago was his birthday he would be 91 years old this week now the question arises at least it does for me and I think it has to for all of us why was that shot fired why was his life taken and I'm gonna suggest to you that simply and profoundly it's because he was saying something he was speaking truth with a level of clarity that many have regarded as prophetic Martin Luther King jr. was a prophet for the times his mind in his heart somehow intersected to produce a level of understanding regarding the situation in these United States of America that led him to rise to the stage and to say things that needed to be said in short dr. King was killed because he was prophesying he was telling us the truth the uncomfortable truth that we vitally needed and still need to hear and I for one I'm thankful that we revisit his memory his history and the work that he did most specifically his thinking every year during this particular segment of time it's important to understand that that Jesus himself was crucified for precisely the same reason that dr. King was assassinated at one point is ministry Jesus got to the very sensitive heart the sensitive nerve of what was going on as sentiment was mounting against him this is one of the most crucial lines in the Gospels where Jesus articulates the psychology the sociology the religiosity of what was going on in the people's minds in John chapter 8 verse 40 you seek to kill me a man who has told you the truth I'm going to suggest to you that truth-telling is a vital function of love it is crucially important that we as human beings undergo the painful process of telling ourselves the truth and if we don't tell ourselves the truth God raises up profits to break through the thin veil of our guilt and our shame and our self-preservation to tell us those things that we find it almost unbearable to process truth-telling is a vital aspect of love now our world has gone way far afield in defining what love is there is this kind of sentimentalism that passes for love in our culture this cotton candy sweet Hollywood kind of love that has reduced the word and the concept to the point that if you and I are made to feel uncomfortable in the face of truth we almost reflexively think we're not being loved but the truth teller is always at the forefront of love it's never in our best interest for our corporate and individual lies to be maintained Jesus in one sense came into this world for the very specific purpose of telling us the truth and why did he tell us the truth precisely because he loves us so can we bear the truth of our corporate history as a nation can we bear the truth of the fact that we have the blood of prophetic martyrs on our corporate hands as a nation can we bear that truth now in order to understand the work of dr. King I find it helpful to pan way out and to take the n.7 very specific developments in the history of this nation we're going to ever so briefly as we come to a more extended series of comments on dr. King himself ever so briefly moved through the Atlantic slave trade which encompassed nearly 400 years of horror that is unspeakable the civil war which was a little less than five years the Emancipation Proclamation a single point of light that penetrated the darkness in American history the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution the Reconstruction era that followed the Emancipation Proclamation the violent reaction legislatively in the southern states that developed into what are called Jim Crow laws and then the civil rights movement the star of which was Martin Luther King jr. so let's briefly look at this history and I mean ever so briefly but I feel obligated as a fellow human being and as somebody who has your ear right now to remind us of things we need to be reminded of if this is history that is uncomfortable for us to revisit I think that we are benefited by that discomfort there is a very real sense in which with regards to this history no pain no gain if I overstep the mark at any point in the process and you feel a level of discomfort that is in the form of disagreement I just ask you to regard me as a fellow human being who's processing these things myself trying to understand and I'm open to conversations any conversation that you may want to have the Atlantic slave trade is a swath of human history that encompasses nearly 400 years of what has gone down in history with the very grisly and horrific language chattel slavery this is a period of time when millions of human beings were treated as and actually referred to on manifests and in language as cargo these individual humans with thoughts and feelings and these human beings with aspirations these human beings with imaginations and skills and talents and many of them families were ripped from the world they knew and treated as if they were mere animals to be sold on the world's market it's almost more than we can bear to process what that must have been like well 1619 which was just last year the 400 anniversary of port Comfort Virginia received its first about 20 to 30 enslaved Africans were delivered to North American Shore now slavery had begun in the Americas with the Portuguese delivering cargo as they called it to the South and Central American segments what we identify now is South in Central America but here in this place we call home that eventually would develop into a nation 16:19 is the year when a ship landed on our shores and said here by these humans if you will and that was the beginning of an economically driven process and I emphasize here that slavery was an economic it was a financially driven endeavor it was all about the money that could be made from the sale of the humans and the labor that could be extracted from them in order to build an economy race theory was created to justify the economic interest not vice-versa race theory was not first in place followed by oh hey we could financially benefit from this know the diabolical darkness of the process was that there was money to be made and so an ideology of philosophy was formulated in order to reduce these human beings to less than human in order to justify the treatment of them for financial purposes this produced generational effects not only economically but also biologically emotionally socially and that generational effect is still with us to this very day I don't have time to get into it but a number of studies have demonstrated for example that due to generational trauma that is rooted in the years the centuries of slavery that the biological process of human beings was compromised so much so that African Americans today are more predisposed to certain ailments and diseases because of the stress in generationally upon the bodies of their ancestors and the scientific data is mounting to indicate that this is not something to be disputed any longer it is scientifically factual that there are generational effects to slavery the American Civil War was that period of time when finally some clear-thinking individuals began to say we need to do something there were eleven slaveholding states well first there were seven and then there were four that joined once the Civil War began for a total of 11 states and their economies were utterly dependent on the owning of human beings and the abuse of their rights in order to keep the cash flowing in 1860 the election of the Republican President Abraham Lincoln caused a shock wave of nervousness through the southern states because Lincoln had had run for president among other promises he made on a ticket that was against chattel slavery so they knew that if this man were to get into office there would be trouble and first the seven states and then the eleven formed what was known as the Confederacy this was a group of states who had the audacity to think that they could form another country and cede from the Union and say you can do whatever you want but we'll be our own country bordering the north and you don't need to have slavery but we're going to continue with it so we have that phase of human of American history where the Confederacy versus the Union developed the the potential right on the precipice of the potential of this nation being divided into two nations one with slavery one without finally in the civil or the Confederate States surrendered but here's the crucial point that I want to bring to your attention most of us have enough historical education to be well-versed in the facts of the Civil War but what we fail to understand oftentimes is that the war was won politically and legally but on the ideology level the war was not won a philosophy and ideology called the Lost Cause was developed and this was basically the idea that while the southern states were brought into legal subjection to the Union States their mental processing did not change and they dug in their heels and we can see that the Lost Cause philosophy was grounded in a philosophy that was developed in order to justify slavery Alexander H Stephens who was the vice president of the Confederate States articulated this ideology when he spoke of the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition this was the kind of thinking that was being peddled upon the public in the south and creeping up through pamphlets into the north in order to try to persuade people to justify slavery on the premise that the people that were enslaved should be enslaved by virtue of the fact that they were inferior in nature if we don't sense the evil in this process of thinking then we need to think more clearly ourselves but I'll go a step further this was a Christian man and almost all of the lost cause ideology was preached from pulpits like this I mean I don't have a pulpit but from stages from podiums from it was a Christian ideology and that's Christian in quote marks well the Emancipation Proclamation soon followed it was what can be regarded as an act of surgical precision because when Lincoln came into the presidency he realized that he was up against a wall and the wall that he was against was that he knew that legally as the president of the United States he could not impose upon the states the states could make their own laws and he could not declare freedom for the people's held in slavery in the individual states but then some point in the process we don't know exactly when something dawned on Lincoln a stroke of political genius came to his mind he realized as the new president of the United States of America that not only is or was he the president of the United States he was also the commander in chief of the American armed forces through consultation with his team and lawyers it became evident that he could intervene if the southern states were sufficiently manifesting rebellion in their contemplations of the formation of the Confederacy and ceding from the States that he could intervene and he did a legal status of freedom for all enslaved persons held within the Confederate States was proclaimed we know this is the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 it was effective on January 1 of that year but still the Emancipation Proclamation because it was signed for only the Confederate States as an act of the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and not of the President had to be ratified and expanded to include all of the states in the Union so in December 1865 the Emancipation Proclamation encompassed all the states in the Union it was at this point that it was illegal to hold human beings as slaves throughout the United States of America the 13th amendment to the Constitution was the crucial document that was formulated in order to abolish slavery in the United States and it was ratified December 6 1865 but there was a clause that in a future message I'm hoping to have time to develop with you and that is that the 13th amendment to the Constitution said that slavery was abolished except as punishment for a crime which led and I don't have time for it today to the development of a prison system essentially that put African Americans back in to a system where forced labor was legitimate under even the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution the Reconstruction era involved not only the 13th amendment but the 14th amendment to the Constitution which gave citizenship rights to those who had previously been enslaved and were now free by the abolishing of slavery the 15th amendment which gave voting rights which was extremely crucial so at this point in the process of the Reconstruction era the effort to legally and ideologically bring the 11 Confederate states into harmony with the Union States was the objective the goal here was reconciliation between the north in the South the effort was not merely by the way to impose laws upon the Confederate states but to remonstrate with the consciences of those in power to persuade them to change their ideological perspective on the matter well that wasn't done and so Jim Crow laws developed in the southern states in the form of legal resistance and the formation of laws enforcing enforcing by law racial segregation this was applied to all public facilities and was enforced until nineteen that's not 18 1965 I myself grew up in Los Angeles California and during the period following 1865 I was one of the kids that was bused from white schools to black schools and black kids bused to my school certain days of the week were designated and there was this bussing program that went on this isn't that long ago there are people in this room who lived through in fact we have and I'm not where he is today but I know that David Wallace is here David Wallace lived through and actually marched with dr. King is so good to see you my brother and this period of history is not remote I mean I grew up in the school systems of Southern California where I witnessed firsthand the hatred and the racism that was the generational aftermath of the slavery era so Jim Crow laws were developed and throughout the southern states in every public place restaurants water fountains public transportation it was mandated by law that blacks and whites remain segregated separate the civil rights movement was essentially this is a definition of the civil rights movement was was the struggle to end racial injustice by nonviolent protest and resistance to secure protections by federal law that was the goal somebody said to me recently in a conversation we were I mean they said Todd we shouldn't be talking about politics in this kind of thing we need to just preach the gospel and and we shouldn't be involved at all in speaking on these subjects well a friend of mine an african-american friend of mine in response to that at one point said hey ty he pulled me aside because that was said in both of our presents he said listen if Christians had not gotten involved on the front lines in articulating their understanding on these issues he said I would still be a slave so I for one he said him grateful that people didn't cowardly pull back from the conversations that needed to be had well Rosa Parks December 1 1955 and there were others before her and many after her but she was as it were the catalyst that that kind of tipped the balance in people's thinking when she refused to vacate a seat in the colored section of the bus for a white man to take that seat she just simply said in so many words I'm not getting up I'm not moving have a great day well Martin Luther King jr. about that time began to step up to the plate and he had been active of course before this but now he became a voice and the voice was a voice of prophetic clarity combined with non-violence and this was the recipe that brought such force to the movement without the employment of force this was the powerful combination I just listened over the last week to a number of his sermons I want to encourage you to take the time just google go to youtube and google the I have a dream speech for example is only 17 minutes long you as an American should listen to that beach you should listen to it more than once I listen to it at least once a year just to remind myself of this history 17 minutes of your time and you will be blown away at the level a prophetic clarity that this man was achieving he was speaking on a level that few human beings have ever achieved in my opinion on December 24 1967 he delivered a Christmas sermon for peace this is a little bit of a long reading but this is an educational time and I just hope that you will bear with me as we just hear just one part of that Christmas sermon in 1967 we shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering here's the prophetic clarity combined with a very overt and clear non-violent message we will meet your physical force with soul force do to us what you will and we will still love you we cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system because non-cooperation another point of prophetic clarity non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good do you hear what he's saying here in order to be on the side of good versus evil it is not sufficient to simply say I'm not a racist and go on your merry way in fact the only way to truly be on the side of good is not to not be a racist but to be anti racism to be deliberately and specifically one of the human beings on this planet and in this nation who is vocally and demonstrably against it non-cooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as cooperation with good so throw us in jail and we we'll still love you bomb our homes and threaten our children and as difficult as it is we will still love you CIND you're heard puddin perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and dragged us out on some wayside road and leave us half-dead as you beat us and we will still love you send your propaganda agents around the country and make it appear that we are not fit culturally and otherwise for integration but we're still going to love you but be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer and one day we will win our freedom we will not only win freedom for ourselves we will appeal so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory this is the prophetic clarity combined with the nonviolent message that we love you and we'll keep on loving you even in the face of your hate and violence that made Martin Luther King jr. such a formidable figure that could not be resisted and then April 3 1968 I've been to the mountaintop was a sermon that you must hear read access in some form in this sermon he tells the story of a little girl that wrote him after ten years earlier he had been stabbed and nearly lost his life he had told the story and it had been in the newspapers that the medical people said that the knife was very close to his vital artery and he could have died if he were to merely have sinned he tells in the sermon the story of how he received after being stabbed and hospitalized and as he was recovering he received letters from the president the vice president governor's people and he says in the sermon it's delightful to hear he says I can't remember what any of those letters say but I remember one letter from a little girl and the letter said dear dr. King while it should not matter I would like to mention that I am a white girl and I am simply writing to say that I am so happy that you didn't sneeze I love that and he goes on in the message to talk about how he also is glad he didn't sneeze and lose his life but then he becomes sober and he says well I don't know what will happen now we've got some difficult days ahead this is when he had made the flight after bomb threats to the plane he had made the flight to Memphis but it really doesn't matter with me now because I've been to the mountaintop and I don't mind like anybody I would like to live a long life longevity has its place but I'm not concerned about that now I just want to do God's will and he's allowed me to go up to the mountain and I've looked over and I've seen the promised land now in his context the promised land is freedom and equality for all this is the promised land in his context I may not get there with you but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land so I'm happy tonight I'm not worried about anything I'm not fearing any man mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord and the next day he was assassinated Martin Luther King jr. in combining the two factors of prophetic clarity and nonviolent protest and resistance is a key figure in American history that we need to continually be revisiting revisiting revisiting what precisely was going on in this man's mind and heart what gave him the courage to step forward and what was it precisely he was fighting well he was fighting a deeply rooted guilt that drives our hostility and I'm going to suggest you that only a deeply rooted love can heal us as human beings dr. King understood that the gospel is the only answer because it reaches human beings at the deepest possible level Jesus understood the deep dark root structure that is involved in human hostility and hatred and anger and violence and Matthew 23 starting with verse 29 when he explained to those who were planning and plotting his death what sorrow awaits you teachers of religious law and you Pharisees you're hypocrites then you say if we had lived in the days of our ancestors we would never have joined them in killing the prophets really I just have a probing question for you and for myself if we the very people in this room had lived during these periods of American history when human beings were degraded dehumanized and treated as cargo as property to be bought and sold brutalized beaten raped traumatized over and over again are we fundamentally better than those people would we have not joined in with them well Jesus says to those in his day but in saying that you testify against yourselves that you are in the descendants of those who murdered the prophets go ahead and finish what your ancestors started by which he means his upcoming crucifixion snakes sons of vipers how will you escape the judgment of Hell therefore I am sending you prophets one of which was Martin Luther King jr. and wise men and teachers of religious law Jesus is saying listen you're about to crucify me but I'm going to be sending one person after another to speak the truth with clarity but you will kill some by crucifixion and you will flog others with whips in your synagogues in your religious contexts amazing chasing them from city to city as a result you will be held responsible for the murder of all godly people for all time hold on to that language from the murder of righteous abel to the murder of zechariah the son of berechiah whom you killed in the temple between the sanctuary and the altar i tell you the truth jesus says which is an expression of love this judgment will fall this judgment will fall on this very generation now as difficult as this is to say I'm just gonna go ahead and say it I'm not suggesting that it applies to you and not me it applies to me this is me processing out loud trying to come to terms with the reality each of us according to what Jesus just said each of us is responsible for all of us it's not possible for us to separate ourselves from our history as a nation it's not good enough to say I didn't live back then I had nothing to do with that I'm a good person may I confront you with the reality that none of us are fundamentally good people all of us are capable of the most heinous evil that we've ever condemned in anybody else if left to ourselves given the same historical placement given the same circumstances there's nothing that you've ever seen another human being do that you yourself that I myself would not do if given the same pressures and circumstances our repentance yes needs to be for our own sins and shortcomings and mistakes but we bare I'm gonna suggest to you a corporate responsibility as human beings in fact the New Testament will go so far as to say to confront me as an individual in you as an individual by confronting us with the idea that I don't love anyone unless I love everyone love is a principle that takes in the whole being or it takes in none of our hearts and minds at all the fact is that I only love God himself as much as the person I love the least and it is right there that we need to make sure that we don't confuse fondness with love you remember my my my earlier statement distinguishing between love and the sentimentalism of Hollywood when I say that you and I are called upon to love our neighbor when Jesus says love your neighbor as yourself he's not saying hey feel warm fuzzy feelings toward everybody simultaneously all the time or you don't love them it's not an emotional charge it is a charge to live toward all others with fairness and equality and righteous relational dynamics I can love you and you can love me while simultaneously we don't necessarily have to like each other one of my african-american friends said to me not long ago he said listen Tai African Americans aren't asking white people to feel feelings of warmth toward them we're asking for something far more significant than that we're asking for justice we're asking for fairness how you feel toward me is beside the point at Martin Luther King jr. himself said at one time he said listen enforcing laws of justice may not change your heart toward me but those laws can keep you from lynching me and I'll settle for that right now the point is a crucial one we don't love anybody unless we love everyone and we're not talking necessarily about fondness we're talking about justice and righteousness in the way we treat one another the systems that we implement in order to make sure that nobody is wronged in the process one of the major features of our falling condition as human beings I'm going to suggest to you is that all of us to a man to a woman were all pathological liars if you doubt it read Romans chapter 3 we constantly pivot and bob-and-weave in order to prevent ourselves from feeling the very feelings that it would be in our best interest to feel yes there's guilt in our history as a nation and that guilt has had a generational effect on human beings actual human beings and we should feel it at least for a moment at least for one day each year we should pause to soberly think through the reality of that history that has defined so much of the vitriol and anger and hatred that is seething under the surface in our nation even now as followers of Jesus if we're called to anything at the most basic level we're called to at very least tell ourselves the truth the new Coldplay album is amazing it is basically a lyrical commentary on the history of civil rights it's a stunning insight - what it looks like for a human being to tell the truth everyone hurts everyone cries everyone tells each other all kinds of lies and isn't that the truth how in the world am I going to see you as my brother and not my enemy that's the probing question how is it that we can get to the place where we we we see one another and every one another as our brother and our sister to whom we owe the highest level of respect not only in our attitudes and in the way we interact with individuals but in the systems that we condone and allow to operate at first light at first light throw my arms out open wide and this is amazing you have a rockstar shouting hallelujah hallelujah yes hallelujah which is to say praise the Lord well we allow the light to penetrate well Chris Martin is trying in a prayerful song to let the light of justice penetrate his heart and mine are we open as followers of Jesus to hear and to process some very difficult things in order to become better people who love like Jesus loved first and foremost with principles of justice and righteousness in all our dealings happy MLK Day hey thanks so much for watching we hope that message was a blessing to you God's Word is powerful it penetrates into our minds into our hearts brings about transformation in every aspect of our lives listen we don't want you to miss any content so again we want to encourage you to click on subscribe and track with the content that's going to be coming out week after week and if you'd like to partner with us in this global Ministry of taking the gospel of Christ to the whole world we want to invite you to become a partner in this ministry click give and join with us

Channel: Storyline Church

Views: 3,451

Rating: 4.9012346 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: M-qaVXAqlCg

Length: 42min 34sec (2554 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 23 2020