I have a dream
Fifty years ago this week, Martin Luther King delivered his famous “I have a dream” speech in Washington DC. I learned that, although he had used those words in previous speeches, he wasn’t planning to use them in his prepared speech for that day – until a friend of his, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, cried out from the crowd: “Tell ‘em about the dream, Martin.” And he told ‘em. Until that moment, his speech had been less than inspiring. The rest, as they say, is history. It’s one of those speeches that has changed the world. It shows us the power of a vision, and the power of words to move us and change us.
It’s perfectly possible to praise him for what he achieved, without pretending that he was faultless. He was, after all, unfaithful to his wife Coretta Scott King on a number of occasions. Nor does that mean that we cannot accept and value the good that he did. That is not to condone sin, but to realise that most heroes have feet of clay – in fact, they all do. In this fallen world, all people are… fallen. It teaches us to judge people – and ourselves most of all – by God’s standards, the standards of Scripture. Here, sinful people are capable of wonderfully good deeds, and even the most righteous are capable of the most appalling sins. We need to thank God for his common grace wherever we see it at work, and at the same time to be aware that human beings – ourselves included – are far more deeply sinful than we had ever realised.