A New Lesson for the Godly Play Saints:
Holy Martin Luther King, Jr.

Photograph by George Tames / New York Times Co. / Getty [https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/when-martin-luther-king-jr-became-a-leader]

Photograph by George Tames / New York Times Co. / Getty [https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/when-martin-luther-king-jr-became-a-leader]

The students in my current parish go to excellent schools. They are taught—more effectively and at earlier ages—the sorts of critical and analytic thinking that I didn’t get until late in my public high school years. So I was disappointed when I discovered that they do not seem to be learning about the religious motivations of all these historical figures whose political behavior they can so effectively analyze. I have found this repeatedly in youth group and confirmation classes. This lesson, for our youngest parishioners, is one attempt to lift up the strength and beauty of our Christian heroes.

The Godly Play curriculum includes 14 optional lessons about certain saints. For the most part, these are an appealing and effective way to share stories of the Christian tradition with young people, and it is in this format that I wrote my new lesson.

In the Anglican Communion, of course, we do not canonize people the way the Roman Catholic tradition does. But we do feel emboldened to call certain people “Holy”; as a national church we authorize a calendar for remembering and marking certain feast days for holy people. (See here under “Calendar” for details on our current, somewhat muddled, calendar situation.) The commemoration for Martin Luther King, Jr., can be found here.

I taught this lesson yesterday (Sunday 19 January 2020) to a group of students ages 3 to 8. As I laid out the first picture, one of my most skeptical students said disdainfully, “Well, we all know him, but what does Martin Luther King have to do with church?” I said, “I am about to tell you exactly that!” And I hope I did.

Below you can read the spoken text of the lesson, and immediately below you can download the full PDF of the lesson with directions. If you would like the images I used for the lesson, send me an email (pastor [dot] ejgarcia [at] gmail [dot] com).

 

This is the story of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The church remembers him in April.

In church, we remember Martin because he spoke out and died for God.

He lived and died not too long ago. He was named after Martin Luther of Germany, another man a long time before, who loved the Bible and who spoke out against the Church, when it was going against God’s will and hurting people.

This Martin studied the Bible too—he knew all of its books, backwards and forwards.

He studied many people who had written about God—books of theology. He read books by theologians Paul Tillich and Karl Barth and Walter Rauschenbusch, and books by his friend Howard Thurman, and older books by Hegel and Spinoza, and very old books by Plotinus and Hindu philosophers. (In fact, he read a lot of this right here in Boston, when he was a student at Boston University!) He loved reading about God and people, and thinking about what he read.

Because he read the Bible so much, Martin knew that he had to speak up about what was happening around him.

Because he read the Bible so much, he knew that it was wrong that America kept white people separate and safe and clean, when Black and Brown people were kept apart. Black people—and other people who weren’t white—were treated badly, and unfairly, in all parts of their lives. Martin  knew that God did not want it to be this way.

And so Martin became like Moses. Moses said to Pharaoh, Let my people go. And Martin said the same thing to America—to white people in neighborhoods and cities and in the government and in churches.

This made many people—maybe most people—very angry. One day, someone called Martin, and they said that they were going to kill him, and going to kill his wife and his daughter, too. Martin knew that this person really might do that.

That night, he couldn’t sleep. He got up in the middle of the night. And at midnight, he sat at his kitchen table, and he prayed. He said,

Lord, I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. . . . I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I've come to the point where I can't face it alone.

And there at the kitchen table at midnight, Martin heard God’s voice say,

Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. . . . I will be with you, even until the end of the world.

And so Martin kept speaking up. He marched with people—black and white and brown people—to show the world that something was wrong. And he spoke and spoke and spoke about how God wanted the world to be different. When they marched, police officers would hurt them, and sometimes Martin was arrested, and people shouted at them, but they kept marching, and singing “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.”

And then, one day in April, Martin was in a room with his friends, after he had given a speech. He went out on the balcony, and while he was standing there, someone shot him, and killed him.

He died because of what he had said and done, and how he spoken up in God’s name. The church remembers him, and we call him a martyr, because he died for God. And now, all of America remembers him too.

Now, I wonder . . .