Listen to the trumpet of Jesus

Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, January 14, 2024

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Listen to the trumpet of Jesus

The Lord called to Samuel, who answered, “Here I am.”

When God speaks, we listen. But where will God’s voice come from?

Jon Meacham writes inspiring American history books. In The Soul of America: The Battle for Our Better Angels, Prof. Meacham tells a story about how Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I Have A Dream” speech almost didn’t happen. The speech as written the night before by committee turned out word-heavy and awkward, and King dropped his notes halfway through.

Meacham writes:

Then, as on Easter morning at the tomb of the crucified Jesus, there was the sound of a woman’s voice. King had already begun to extemporize when the singer Mahalia Jackson spoke up. “Tell ’em about the dream, Martin.”

The voice of God comes alive, rising and falling with the tones of a human voice.

Eli said to Samuel, “Go to sleep, and if you are called, say “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.”

In an hour the Lord once again revealed his presence and spoke intimately to Samuel. Samuel was about to become God’s prophet, God’s voice to Israel.

Now Mahalia Jackson’s words opened the same windows in Martin Luther King’s heart:

King left his text altogether at this point—a departure that put him on a path to speaking words of American scripture, words as essential to the nation’s destiny in their way as those of Lincoln, before whose memorial King stood, and those of Jefferson, whose monument lay to the preacher’s right, toward the Potomac. The moments of ensuing oratory lifted King above the tumult of history and made him a figure of history—a “new founding father,” in Taylor Branch’s apt phrase. He spoke:

“I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character…. I have a dream today.”

I imagine that on the steps of Lincoln’s Memorial in Washington D.C., God was making his voice heard in Dr. King – God’s simple vessel for the Spirit of God to roil the waves of history and rub hope and strength into the soul of America.

Here am I, Lord. I come to do your will. I have waited, waited for the Lord, and he stooped toward me and heard my cry. And he put a new song in my mouth – a hymn to our God.

From Samuel and Dr. King God’s song flowed freely, lifting up the hearts and minds of anyone who had ears to hear:

“I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and every mountain shall be made low. The rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight. And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together. This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”

Tomorrow is our day in America to honor Dr. Martin Luther King. Meacham’s words both describe and honor him as well. Recalling the summer of 1963, the Vanderbilt professor wrote:

Like our more familiar founders (Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson), King was a practical idealist, a man who could articulate the perfect but knew that human progress, while sometimes intoxicatingly rapid, tends to be provisional. Still, though he was in Washington to demand legislative action, King spoke as a minister of the Lord, invoking the meaning of the Sermon on the Mount in a city more often interested in the mechanics of the Congress.

In the spring of the year 1968, Dr. King was killed by an assassin in Memphis. He spoke the night before with a sense of what was about to happen. On these days of mid-January 2024, burrowed in the bleak mid-winter, Paul’s words about all our bodies rise up especially over Martin Luther King’s:

Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, so that you are not your own? For you have been purchased at a price. Therefore,  glorify God in your body.

 (1 Samuel 3, Psalm 40, 1 Corinthians 6, John 1)

(posted at www.davesandel.net)

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