Sunday Sermon with Dr. King #9
Shattered Dreams
This painting is the opening of Dr. King's ninth sermon from Strength to Love,** entitled Shattered Dreams. "In a famous painting, George Frederic Watts portrays Hope as a tranquil figure who, seated atop our planet, her head sadly bowed, plucks a single unbroken harpstring" (p. 87).
“Whensoever I take my journey into Spain, I will come to you.”
~Romans 15:24
Today is Resurrection Sunday, and I feel that everyday, there should be praise and honor to the power of Christ’s resurrection. But it’s also important to have the yearly commemoration, in grand style, to celebrate! So, I extend to you, the power of The Resurrection, as I dive into this sermon believed to have been preached in 1962 or 1963* and written from a jail in Georgia (p. xiii)**. Much like this sermon, Resurrection Sunday is all about hope. Although, Dr. King first paints how disappointing and painful real life can be. With the scripture, he discusses how Paul was so excited to go abroad to Rome, then Spain to preach the message of Christ, but he was captured, jailed, and killed for his beliefs while in Rome, and never made it to Spain. Similarly, hopes and dreams were left shattered for Abraham in the Old Testament, Gandhi, Woodrow Wilson, American slaves, etc (p. 88).
Now, a reminder that Dr. King wrote this while in jail, so there are several references to imprisonment, but many morereferences to having hope “in spite of”. Dr. King offers three ways to respond to shattered dreams: 1. “To distill all of our frustrations into a core of bitterness and resentment” (p. 89), 2. “To withdraw completely into themselves and to become introverts” (p. 89), and 3. “To adopt a fatalistic philosophy stipulating that whatever happens must happen and that all events are determined by necessity” (p. 90). No one wants to “end up like this'' but how many people do we know that fall into these categories? Living life without hope.
Dr. King’s answer, or counterbalance, to this is to accept “finite disappointment even as we adhere to infinite hope” (p. 92). He encourages us to “confront your shattered dream” (p. 92). Then he cites several people who have done just that: “Charles Darwin suffering from a recurrent physical illness; Robert Louis Stevenson, plagued with tuberculosis; and Helen Keller, inflicted with blindness and deafness…and George Fredrick Handel who lost all his money and became paralyzed” (pp. 92-93). They turned everything around for themselves rather than be bitter, go inward, or turn fatalistic. “We must accept finite disappointment, but we must never lose infinite hope” (p. 94). He illustrates this through the paragraph below about our ancestors (p. 94):
Dr. King leaves us with the understanding that discovering a “spiritual tranquility” is the key to balancing all of it. He goes back to Paul, who was a soldier for Jesus and would never be labeled as complacent, but one who possesses that true peace that surpasses all understanding (p. 96).
As I think about my personal life, and then my professional life, and now the mission and vision of Education Mosaic, I think about this fortitude of peace as described by Dr. King. Life is most definitely going to throw at you, disappointments and pain. But how will we react? Turn it into a superpower or let it take us down? I am praying I learn to react in the former.
*https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/draft-chapter-x-shattered-dreams
**King, M. L. (1963). Strength to love. New York: Harper & Row.