Can We Listen to Martin?

Chip has let me borrow an interesting book on tape: A Knock at Midnight, sermons of Martin Luther King, Jr. Audiotapes of his sermons—unbelievable. In school you read his letter from the Birmingham Jail, you learned about his role in the Civil Rights Movement. But we never listened to his sermons! They are definitely too dangerous for a society that wants to forget about God. You can’t understand what he was about without knowing what God meant to him, and these sermons are hard-core gospel sermons.

Well, I listen to these in the car, and even the boys are getting into it. John, especially, wants to know more. The boys studied about him in school during African-American history month.

John will say, “Can we listen to Martin?” He has drawn a few pictures of him, and they show the innocence of childhood—“Martin is a brown man.” A few days ago, John said, “I am going to preach like Martin.” All of a sudden, he started a sermon, but done in his imitation of Martin Luther King. The interesting thing was, it was John’s own sermon, about Zaccheus, about how happy Zaccheus was that Jesus was going to stay at his house.