This
morning I share most of a sermon from Rev. Martin Luther King: entitled A
religion of Doing: this message was delivered at Dexter Baptist Church in 1954.
It is based on a sermon from Henry Fosdick “faith is a force not a form”. Although
it is based on a passage from Matthew 7, this is Martin Luther King’s vision of
Jesus parable of the sower, the lesson being the seeds that land in good soil
are the people with an active faith, who let God’s word and God’s grace shape
them and their actions.
In
the seventh chapter of Matthew's Gospel we find these pressing words flowing
from the lips of our Lord and Master: “Not every one that saith unto me, Lord,
Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my
father which is in Heaven.”2 In
these words Jesus is placing emphasis on a concrete practical religion rather
than an abstract theoretical religion. In other words he is placing emphasis on
an active religion of doing rather than a passive religion of talk. Religion to
be real and genuine must not only be something that men talk about, but it must
be something that men live about. Jesus recognized that there is always the
danger of having a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. He was
quite certain that the tree of religion becomes dry and even dead when it fails
to produce the fruit of action.
Let
us turn for the moment to some of the truths implicit in our text which must
forever challenge us as christians. The first truth implied in our text is that
the test of belief is action. This is just another way of saying that a man
will do what he believes and in the final analysis he is what he does. There
can be no true divorce between belief and action. There might be some divorce
between intellectual assent and action. Intellectual assent is merely agreeing
that a thing is true; real belief is acting like it is true. Belief always takes
a flight into action. The ultimate test for what a man believes is not what he
says, but what he does. Many people, for example, say that they believe in God,
but their actions reveal the very denial of God's existence. Indeed the great
danger confronting religion is not so much theoretical atheism as practical
atheism; not so much denying God's existence with our lips as denying God's
existence with our lives. How many of us so-called Christians affirm the
existence of God with our mouths and deny his existence with our lives. It
causes many to wonder if we believe in God after all. And there is warrant for
such a wonder. If a man believes that there is a God that guides the destiny of
the universe, and that this God has planted in the fiber of the universe an
inexorable moral law that is as abiding as the physical laws, he will act like
it. And if he doesn't act like it all of his impressive eloquence concerning
his belief in God becomes as sounding brass and a tinkling cymbal.3
Belief is ultimately validated in action. The ultimate test of a man's
sincerity in crying Lord, Lord, is found in his active doing of God's will.
A
second truth implied in our text is that real religion is not a mere form but a
dynamic force. Now there can be no doubt that this is one area in which we have
failed miserably. Dr. Moffatt's translation of that familiar passage in the
second letter to Timothy is a true description of much of our conventional
christianity. It reads: “Though they keep up a form of religion, they will have
nothing to do with it as a force. Certainly
that describes many people. There are about 700,000,000 christians in the world
today, and were Christ's faith and way of life a vital force in anything like
that number, the condition of this world would be far better than it is. How
much truth there is in the lines of a modern poet who speaks about our
worshipping congregation: They do it every Sunday, They'll be all right on
Monday; It's just a little habit they've acquired.
How
much of our contemporary christianity can be described as a mere Sunday habit.
To put it fugutively, christianity is not a garment that we wear in everyday
life, but it is a Sunday suit which we put on on Sunday morning and hang up
neatly in the closet on Sunday night never to be touched again until the next
Sunday. We have a form of religion but have nothing to do with it as a force.
As E. Stanley Jones put it, “innoculated with a mild form of christianity, we
have become immune to the genuine article.”6 Yet
if religion is to be real and genuine in our lives it must be experienced as a
dynamic force. Religion must be effective in the political world, the economic
world, and indeed the whole social situation. Religion should flow through the
stream of the whole {of} life. The easygoing dicotymy between the sacred and
the secular, the god of religion and the god of life, the god of Sunday and the
god of Monday has wrought havoc in the portals of religion. We must come to see
that the god of religion is the god of life and that the god of Sunday is the
god of Monday.
One
of the things that prevents the church from being the dynamic force that it
could be is the deep division within. We argue endlessly over creeds and ritual
and denominationalism while the forces of evil are marching on. My friends the
forces of evil in the world today are too strong to be met by isolated
denominations. We must come to see that we have a unity of purpose that
transcends all of our differences and that the God whom we serve is not a
denominational God. When we come to see this we will meet the forces of evil,
not with a mere form, but with strong organized forces of good. Let it not be
said that we have a form of religion but have nothing to do with it as a force.
{Quote Shakespeare Othello}
A final
truth implied in our text is that we must never substitute esthetics for
ethics. As Dr. Harry Emerson Fosdick has said, “There are two sets of
faculities in (all of) us, the esthetic and the ethical—the sense of beauty and
the sence of duty—and Christ appeals to both.”7 And
there is the ever present danger that we will become so involved in singing our
beautiful hymns about Christ and noticing our beautiful architecture and
ritual, that our religion will end up in emotional adorations only, saying,
“Lord, Lord!” What we are seeing in our world today is countless millions of
people worshipping Christ emotionally but not morally. The white men who lynch
Negroes worship Christ. The strongest advocators of segregation in America also
worship Christ. Many of the greatest economic exploiters worship Christ. Much
of the low, evil and degrading conditions existing in our society is perpetuated
by people who worship Christ. The most disastrous events in the history of
Christ's movement have not come from his opposers, but from his worshippers who
said, “Lord, Lord!”
My
friends may I say that a Christianity that worships Christ emotionally and does
not follow him ethically is a conventional sham. Let us be well assured amid
our beautiful churches, and our lovely architecture, that Christ is more
concerned about our attitude towards racial prejudice and war than he is about
our long processionals. He is more concerned with how we treat our neighbors
than how loud we sing his praises. Christ is more concerned about our living a
high ethical life than our most detailed knowledge of the creeds of
christendom. Not every one, not anyone, who merely says, “Lord, Lord!” but he
that doeth the Father's will!
The
sermon ends with a story borrowed from Howard Thurmann of a fictious town where
no one wears shoes, where everyone thinks shoes are great, where people
powerfully and poetically talk about the greatness of shoes, where they have
built giant factories to make shoes but no one does. When asked whats going on,
everyone simply says “that’s just it, why don’t we”.
As we
think about Jesus paraables of the sower, we get a clear image of what the seeds
of faith that are thriving looks like and what the seeds of faith that are dying in the thorns looks like
