Tag Archives: Sermon

Martin Luther King: What Does the Story of the Good Samaritan Teach Us?

25 Tuesday Nov 2014

Posted by in Philosophy, Religion, Speeches

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MLK

“Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness.

One day a man came to Jesus; and he wanted to raise some questions about some vital matters in life. At points, he wanted to trick Jesus, and show him that he knew a little more than Jesus knew, and through this, throw him off base. Now his questions could have easily ended up in a philosophical and theological debate. But Jesus immediately pulled his questions from mid-air, and placed them on a dangerous curve between Jerusalem and Jericho. And he talked about a certain man, who fell among thieves. You remember that a Levite and a priest passed by on the other side. They didn’t stop to help him.

And finally a man of another race came by. He got down from his beast, decided not to be compassionate by proxy.

Martin Luther King Jr. At Home With His FamilyJesus ended up saying that this was the good man because he had the capacity to project the ‘I’ into the ‘thou,’ and to be concerned about his brother. Now you know, we use our imagination a great deal to try to determine why the priest and the Levite didn’t stop. At times we say they were busy going to a church meeting, an ecclesiastical gathering, and they had to get on down to Jerusalem so they wouldn’t be late for their meeting. At other times we would speculate that there was a religious law that one who was engaged in religious ceremonials was not to touch a human body twenty-four hours before the ceremony. And every now and then we begin to wonder whether maybe they were not going down to Jericho to organize a ‘Jericho Road Improvement Association’. That’s a possibility. Maybe they felt it was better to deal with the problem from the causal root, rather than to get bogged down with an individual effect.

But I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me: it’s possible that these men were afraid. You see, the Jericho road is a dangerous road.

I remember when Mrs. King and I were first in Jerusalem. We rented a car and drove from Jerusalem down to Jericho. And as soon as we got on that road, I said to my wife, ‘I can see why Jesus used this as a setting for his parable.’ It’s a winding, meandering road. It’s really conducive for ambushing… In the days of Jesus it came to be known as the ‘Bloody Pass.’ And you know, it’s possible that the priest and the Levite looked over that man on the ground and wondered if the robbers were still around.

And so the first question that the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ But then the Good Samaritan came by and he reversed the question: ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?’

That’s the question before you tonight.”

Martin Luther King Jr. and His Wife

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Martin Luther King, preaching his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” sermon on April 4th, 1968, the night before he was murdered.

The parable of the “Good Samaritan” is mentioned in only one gospel, Luke’s, the sole book of the Bible written by a Gentile.

Keep moving:

Martin Luther King on Conquering Self-Centeredness

04 Friday Apr 2014

Posted by in Philosophy, Religion, Speeches

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MLK

“I look at my little daughter every day and she wants certain things — and when she wants them, she wants them. And she almost cries out, ‘I want what I want when I want it!’ She is not concerned about what I think about it or what Mrs. King thinks about it. She wants it. She’s a child, and that’s very natural and normal for a child. She is inevitably self-centered because she’s a child. But when one matures, when one rises above the early years of childhood, he begins to love people for their own sake. He turns himself to higher loyalties. He gives himself to something outside of himself. He gives himself to causes that he lives for and sometimes will even die for. He comes to the point that now he can rise above his individualistic concerns, and he understands then what Jesus meant when he says, ‘He who finds his life shall lose it; he who loses his life for my sake, shall find it.’ In other words, he who finds his ego shall lose his ego, but he who loseth his ego for my sake, shall find it. And so you see people who are apparently selfish; it isn’t merely an ethical issue but it is a psychological issue. They are the victims of arrested development, and they are still children. They haven’t grown up. And like a modern novelist says about one of his characters, ‘Edith is a little country, bounded on the east and the west, on the north and the south, by Edith.’ And so many people are little countries, bounded all around by themselves and they never quite get out of themselves…

And the way to solve this problem is not to drown out the ego but to find your sense of importance in something outside of the self… This is the way to go through life with a balance, with the proper perspective because you’ve given yourself to something greater than self. Sometimes it’s friends, sometimes it’s family, sometimes it’s a great cause, it’s a great loyalty, but give yourself to that something and life becomes meaningful.”

MLK and family

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From the sermon “Conquering Self-Centeredness”, delivered by Martin Luther King, Jr. at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama in 1957. Dr. King was assassinated on this day in 1968.

More MLK:

  • King’s beautiful and hauntingly prophetic final sermon, given the night before his death
  • King describes the moral imperative to oppose the Vietnam war
  • King tells us when and how we should break the law

(I couldn’t help posting my favorite King picture. Below: King and Karl Barth outside the Princeton University chapel. On a Sunday in April 1962, King preached the morning service and Barth taught the evening’s small group. Not a bad day’s line-up.)

Karl Barth and MLK