Agapé and Martin Luther King

 

I was asked to preach at Washington Park United Church of Christ, so I showed how Martin Luther King used agapé as the force to overcome segregation. The scripture I based the sermon on was 1 Corinthians 13.

       I started by pointing out that St. Paul inserted into his letter the verses of 1 Corinthians 13 in order to teach people about agapé. That chapter is all about agapé. So why did he need to teach about agapé  Because, when he first started using the word, almost no one had even heard the word. 

       Agapé became a special word that was identified with Christians. It was a main part of Christian identity. Which is what we read in the Gospel of John, if we leave ‘agapé’ in the original Greek, when Jesus tells the Disciples at the Last Supper that people will know them because of agapé.

For those first Greek-speaking Christians who used the word, it was a main spiritual word. It just was not the commonly used word for love, which was ‘eros.’ 

To bring the way of looking at agape into the modern world, we can look at what agapé meant to Martin Luther King. He talked about agapé because he was trying to explain why it was important to the Civil Rights Movement when dealing with the people who were acting like the enemies of his people. He pointed out that when he used the word ‘love’ when talking about enemies, he didn’t mean what we normally think ‘love’ means, but instead, it was agapé he was talking about.

This was especially obvious when he said things like: “Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.” That’s agapé! He was talking about the power of agapé.

History will always remember that those things actually happened. And it mattered a lot to Dr. King how his people responded when treated that way. He was explaining that they could actually gain power to change things by responding spiritually. That’s the point of agapé: it is a kind of spiritual power, what he called “soul force.” 

That was part of Dr. King’s unique understanding. Another unique aspect of his was the way he could take a very long view of what they had to do. His long view of what had to be done was they had to convince white people to do away with the whole legal and social system of segregation. He knew it was so complex that it would take special effort to get it done. 

When we look back to those difficult times, we remember that segregation was a vast system deeply imbedded in both the legal and social structure of all the southern states. The police and sheriff forces were designed to enforce segregation, to keep black people in their place, suppressed. The court system was designed to back up segregation because the white power structure had made segregation the law of the land. And even para-military organizations, like the Klu Klux Klan and White Citizens Councils, had been formed to force black people to conform to the societal aspect of segregation. So Dr. King saw that special, spiritual force was going to have to be activated in order to win. And that — not violence — was the way to win. Dr. King once said that Agape is humankind’s most potent weapon for personal and social transformation.

So that’s one way how old agape was used in the modern world. And that’s why it’s important to try understanding what agape is.

What all this boils down to is — Martin Luther King was teaching people that we have to treat each other spiritually, and we can do that. Not because of who they are. Or even because of who we are. But because agapé helps us in relating to one another. Our greatest hope for the future well being of the human race depends on everyone having deep within the way to respond to each other spiritually, with the power to change lives, to change human relations, and to change the world. So agape helps everyone with tolerance, and openness to one another, and acceptance of one another, and respect for the dignity of all people.

When all of this is working, and as more and more people learn to treat each other with compassion and respect, we will see more and more amazing developments come into this old world. And it will begin to seem like a new world is coming into being.