The Hope in Dr. King’s Last Christmas
By: Meister Käßner
Tags: Equality, Christmas, Racism, Martin Luther King, Hope

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s final Christmas Eve sermon in 1967 provides a poignant example of struggling for hope and justice after years of bitter disappointment and violent opposition. Like Hannah and Mary, he struggled to give birth to a dream of a more just and inclusive country. Like Samuel and Jesus, he faced powerful waves of resistance.

The previous three years were marked by profound struggle and disappointment. Much of the northern Civil Rights Movement had retreated from King’s campaign of non-violent civil disobedience. The Watts Riots in 1964 launched years of urban unrest as growing frustration with systemic discrimination spilled into the streets. The Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee under the Stokely Carmichael embraced the slogan, “Black Power.” The newly formed Black Panthers branched out from their work with food pantries and community services to launch armed patrols shadowing police officers around cities like Oakland. Meanwhile, King’s decision to publicly oppose the war in Vietnam had torpedoed his alliance with the Johnson White House.

Schatzim, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

The deepening crises of the late 1960s weighed on Dr. King as he rose to speak at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta. He opened his sermon with a frank acknowledgement of the state of the country.

“This Christmas season finds us a rather bewildered human race. We have neither peace within nor peace without. Everywhere paralyzing fears harrow people by day and haunt them by night. Our world is sick with war; everywhere we turn we see its ominous possibilities.”

In the face of fear, doubt, and war, King declared that war and violence were impotent to achieve a better world.

“Wisdom born of experience should tell us that war is obsolete.”

King’s pacifism was built on the conviction that we all belong to one human family. Violence against one member of the community is a violation of all.

“Now let me suggest first that if we are to have peace on earth our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world. Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools.”

While King’s failure to use gender-inclusive language may offend twenty-first century sensibilities, his understanding of the interdependence of humankind was as prophetic and countercultural then as it is today.

Dr. King’s dream for peace, prosperity, and racial justice indicted the United States and the world. Despite an increasingly prosperous and interconnected economy, pockets, of poverty, hunger, and homelessness persisted in India and the United States. For King, an increasingly interconnected world economy meant we must enlarge our community of care.

In one of the most quoted sections of the sermon, King declared,

“It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality.”

Global interdependence caused Dr. King to reject unjust means to pursue just ends.

“. . . Means and ends must cohere because the end is preexistent in the means, and ultimately destructive means cannot bring about constructive ends.”

Despite the growing challenges of the late 1960s, Dr. King insisted that love remained the essential ingredient for positive change. But he also expressed gratitude that the command to love does not require us to like our enemies.

“ . . . . I can’t like anyone who would exploit me. I can’t like anybody who would trample over me with injustices. I can’t like them. I can’t like anybody who threatens to kill me day in and day out. But Jesus reminds us that love is greater than liking. Love is understanding, creative, redemptive good will toward all men.”

For King, transformative love could grow stronger in the face of resistance and hatred.

“I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many sheriffs, too many white citizen’s councilors, and too many Klansmen of the South to want to hate, myself; and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear. Somehow we must be able to stand up before our most bitter opponents and say: “We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. We cannot in good conscience obey your unjust laws and abide by the unjust system, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good, and so throw us in jail and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and, as difficult as it is, we will still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities at the midnight hour and drag 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, and we’ll still love you. But be assured that we’ll 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 so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory.”

In retrospect, King’s hopes for a “double victory” appear an impossible delusion. Yet his determination was rooted in his faith in the power of God.

“If there is to be peace on earth and good will toward men, we must finally believe in the ultimate morality of the universe, and believe that all reality hinges on moral foundations. Something must remind us of this as we once again stand in the Christmas season and think of the Easter season simultaneously, for the two somehow go together. Christ came to show us the way. Men love darkness rather than light, and they crucified him, and there on Good Friday on the cross it was still dark, but then Easter came, and Easter is an eternal reminder of the fact that the truth-crushed earth will rise again.”

King’s moral imagination was shaped by his vision of a transcendent God who would overcome darkness. As he concluded, King wove his personal story into his hopes for national redemption.

“In 1963, on a sweltering August afternoon, we stood in Washington, D.C., and talked to the nation about many things. Toward the end of that afternoon, I tried to talk to the nation about a dream that I had had, and I must confess to you today that not long after talking about that dream I started seeing it turn into a nightmare. I remember the first time I saw that dream turn into a nightmare, just a few weeks after I had talked about it. It was when four beautiful, unoffending, innocent Negro girls were murdered in a church in Birmingham, Alabama. I watched that dream turn into a nightmare as I moved through the ghettos of the nation and saw my black brothers and sisters perishing on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity, and saw the nation doing nothing to grapple with the Negroes’ problem of poverty. I saw that dream turn into a nightmare as I matched my black brothers and sisters in the midst of anger and understandable outrage, in the midst of their hurt, in the midst of their disappointment, turn to misguided riots to solve that problem. I saw that dream turn into a nightmare as I watched the war in Vietnam escalating, and as I saw so-called military advisors, sixteen thousand strong, turn into fighting soldiers until today over five hundred thousand American boys are fighting on Asian soil. Yes, I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes, but in spite of that I close today by saying I still have a dream, because, you know, you can’t give up in life. If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of all. And so today I still have a dream.”

In the final section King struggled to maintain his faith through a stream of disappointments. Despite “blasted hopes,” he asserted “you can’t give up in life.” The author of the Book of Hebrews had proclaimed, “Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.” King’s entire struggle rested upon that faith. His reference to “that courage to be” echoes Paul Tillich’s famous work, The Courage to Be. Tillich struggled with the existential challenges of failure, meaninglessness, and despair. For Tillich and King embracing courage in the face of losses and resistance is the heart of the human struggle.

Reading Dr. King’s last Christmas Eve sermon in 2020 remains poignant. The assassination of King just nine days after Easter sparked a wave of grief, anger, and further urban rioting. Soon his long-planned Poor People’s March on Washington had to be canceled because organizers could not maintain the spirit of nonviolence. King gave his life so that his people could be free; however, the legacy of his dream and tactics remain highly contested.

The political advances of the Black community since 1967 have been enormous. Black people from both parties have been elected to high office. Yet widening inequality, aggressive voter suppression, and the slow pace of police reform remind us of how much work remains to be done. The very idea of equality and our shared humanity remains hotly contested in the political sphere. Too many politicians demonize racial, ethnic, and economic others. Whatever harmony we enjoyed as a nation during the Cold War and after September 11th has disintegrated.

Nevertheless, Dr. King insisted that possibilities for renewal abound. Soon the days will begin to lengthen. The Covid-19 vaccine is already being given to the most vulnerable populations. Over the spring and summer a new post-pandemic normal will begin to emerge.

The promise given to Mary and Hannah was that a child would bring hope and renewal. Dr. King’s final Christmas Eve sermon reminds us of his abiding hope in the possibility of nonviolent change. King’s dream still resonates powerfully in the American imagination. Reinhold Niebuhr said, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in a single lifetime, therefore we must be saved by hope.” Niebuhr and King remind us that every generation must recommit itself to working for justice. As we take inspiration from earlier reformers, we must cling to hope, faith, and love as we continue to struggle for justice and peace.