MLK Day Events: Overcoming Racism with the Light and Love of Christ

Featuring words spoken by the slain civil rights leaders, the Martin Luther King, Jr., Day Celebration service at Madison Square Christian Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., began with song and dance on the evening of Jan. 21.

Earlier in the day, a theologian from Yale University spoke of racism as a sin that has spread and soaked into the ground of the United States, keeping groups of people under the control of a system that has exploited the land’s resources and the resources of people for their own gain.

Opening the event at Madison Square was Satrina Reid, program coordinator for the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, who set the tone for the celebration by performing a song that resonated powerfully throughout the sanctuary, turning everyone’s attention to God.

After that, as four young women danced and waved banners, a mass choir sang, and participants stood, some waving their arms, and together all sang: “As we’re moving forward, we press toward the mark, praying that your kingdom will come. We will not allow the vision to fade.”

The theme of this year’s service, sponsored by the CRC’s Office of Race Relations and Social Justice, the Calvin Institute of Christian Worship, and Madison Square CRC, was “Stone of Hope,” based on words from King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, delivered Aug. 28, 1963, from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

In that speech, King had said, “With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”

As part of the service at the church in Grand Rapids, a portion of King’s “dream” speech was projected on a wall in the front of the sanctuary. Images of King speaking were interspersed with pictures of people in the crowd that day in 1963. Overall shots of the thousands who filled the Washington mall also appeared.

Colin Watson, Sr., director of ministries and administration for the CRC, welcomed people to the service — which, he said, was taking place in a time of trouble that was also, as always for Christians, a time of hope.

“We are reminded ever more importantly of what Martin Luther King was about and what we yet have to do, especially those of us who are followers of Jesus Christ, the Savior,” Watson said. “We must take up the mantle now” and follow “God, the author of light.”

Referring to the issue of immigration, Watson drew applause and words of praise when he said: “Anyone who lives within the U.S. should never be considered an outsider.”

Michelle Loyd-Paige, executive associate for diversity and inclusion at Calvin College, offered a time of liturgical dance, her movements acting out praise and struggle in the face of the struggles that King faced and that the nation yet confronts today.

Earlier on Monday, Willie Jennings, associate professor of systematic theology and Africana studies at Yale University, gave two lectures as part of the annual Stob lecture series.

At the January Series, beginning at 12:30 p.m. in the Calvin College Fine Arts Center, his talk was titled “Dreaming the End of Racial America,” and at Calvin Theological Seminary in the late afternoon his topic was “Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origin of Race.”

At both venues, Jennings discussed the many ways in which western European settlers to the U.S. dominated and tore apart the land. The blood of countless Native American and black and other minority peoples has spilled into the land, causing the sin of racial separation to run deep, he said.

“The ground bears witness to the wounding that has become America,” he said at the January Series. “When they came here, the colonial settlers heard sounds and voices of people and animals they never imagined could even exist.”

Understandably, these early visitors to North America asked questions about the role they would play in what they considered a new world. “The problem,” said Jennings, “is the answer they gave themselves. They answered their questions without including the voices and vision of the people who lived there.”

From the beginning, the colonists saw the land and the people who lived on it as resources to subdue and exploit for their own gain.

“These Christians came to bring the new world into mature life. They considered it their God-given task . . . to promote a sick vision of maturity that believed it can master the world.”

Overriding society even today, he said, is the “constant construction of geographic whiteness. This happens block by block, even building by building, in the cities. A geographic whiteness has occurred that is promoted by the whims of real-estate brokers and the police.”

This geographic whiteness, characterized by a kind of “suburbia of the mind,” still stains the land and seeks to control the lives of others, said Jennings.

But, hard as this will be to do, we must follow in the footsteps of King and fight for equality for everyone.

Necessary today as much as ever, said Jennings, is for Christians to embrace and live up to their sacred duty of tearing down the barriers of racial geography.

“We need to remember that at the heart of our salvation is having a dream life of joining people together and being restored to health by the Holy Spirit,” said Jennings.

In her keynote address at the MLK celebration at Madison Square, Christina Edmonson touched on similar themes. She asked if it was possible to untangle the deeply embedded roots of racism in the U.S.

She spoke of George Whitefield, the influential evangelist and leader of the Great Awakening in 18th-century America. Though he is credited with bringing many people to the Christian faith and for leading an exemplary life of prayer, he also was a slaveholder who used slaves to make money to help fund an orphanage.

“We can argue that he was simply a man of his time,” said Edmonson, dean of intercultural student development at Calvin College. “But he reminds us of how really rotten the roots are.”

Whitefield’s Christianity reflected “racism, a man-made class system that is simply man-made idolatry,” she said.

How can the rotten roots of this kind of racism be redeemed? Edmonson asked.

As Jennings said, the answer comes in taking seriously “the love that God demonstrated through the personhood of Jesus Christ.”

Love, said Edmonson, is “the only force capable of transforming everyone into a neighbor. . . . God has called you to be compassionate, to love. We are judged not by the degrees we hold, but by love that is the mantra of Christ.”