The Prophet

He was someone who was on television a lot, but a person who so many people in my world seemed to dislike, maybe even hate. He didn't seem like a guy who needed to be hated, but hatred was one of the things that followed him around. He was a black preacher from Atlanta who spent a lot of time talking about freedom and rights, about justice and equality. The preachers of my culture just talked about sin, how angry God was with most of us, and how we all couldn't wait to get out of this world and into the next one...where we could have one long, never-ending church service. Welcome to Heaven.

But this black preacher from Atlanta seemed to have an idea that God might just be a bit more interested in the here and now than my preachers thought He was. All the preachers from my world were white, however, so that made the black preacher wrong, maybe even not a true follower of God. The South in the 60's. What a wasteland. Tons of religion, little to no righteousness.

Someone (or a group of them, depending on which conspiracy school you belong to) finally shut the black preacher from Atlanta down on a Memphis motel balcony in '68, but not before he had stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on a sweltering August day in '63 and told the audience, the nation, and the world that he had a dream. It was a dream that was meant for "all God's children," and it sounded kind of like some of the words Jesus used, but those words were typically overlooked by the preachers of my world. Freedom for the captive....good news for the poor, stuff like that. He stood there that day in '63 and called a nation, the world really, to return to true humanity, where we each are valued and each of us matter because all of us matter.

His words that day inspired millions, both that day and the days that immediately followed, as well as in the years to follow. The inspired ones included the man from Texas who occupied the White House at the time, later a young rock band from the north side of Dublin who sang about all that he did in the name of love, as well as a young preacher's son who grew up in the unrighteous South of the 60's...me.

Today we remember that black Atlanta preacher, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and all that he meant and means to us. And tomorrow in Washington, D.C., we will remember that his dream continues, as a man becomes president who would have never had a chance at it had Dr. King never dared to dream and then dare to share that dream with the rest of us. Tomorrow will be a great day, and I have to believe that on that hot August day in '63, the black preacher from Atlanta saw it. Had he shared with us then what he saw waiting for us tommorrow, I'm sure we would have all said he was crazy, but then we tend to respond that way to most prophets.