I don't know the average age of the adult members of this congregation, but I do know there are a goodly number of you who are under 40 years old, which means that means that you were no older than eight when Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered. Which means you probably have no more personal memory of Dr. King than I do of the Korean War, which I knew at age eight was going on, but not much more.

Even regarding King, I'm a late-comer myself, having been only eleven when the bus boycott by blacks in Montgomery, Alabama, began in December of 1955. Before that winter was over, King as the leader of the movement would be indicted for conspiracy, for the first (but not last) time have a bomb tossed at his home, and emerge as a black leader of national fame and influence. The next winter, following a Supreme Court ruling, Montgomery's buses were integrated; the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) was formed, with King as its president; and he appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

Not long after, I started to keep up with this story better myself. While I was in high school, King moved from Montgomery to Atlanta, to co-pastor with his father. Among the many efforts to integrate diners and restaurants, the Atlanta sit-in landed King in prison for a time. My first year in college, King got arrested again at a sit-in in Birmingham and wrote his famous, eloquent, and powerful "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," addressed to eight fellow members of the clergy who had criticized his tactic of non-violent confrontation.

The eight whites, who considered themselves supporters of the cause, had objected to "direct action" like sit-ins, preferring to let the courts solve matters in due course. They thought direct action like sit-ins and marches "untimely." King replied, "We know from painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was 'well-timed,' according to those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word 'Wait!' It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never….'

"I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, 'Wait.' But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity;" and the list is long and passionate.

At the end of it, he writes, "There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the blackness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience."

That was in the spring of 1963. A month later, the Supreme Court struck down Birmingham's segregation laws. In August the March on Washington created "the first large integrated protest march," at which King delivered his memorable "I Have a Dream" address.

In 1964 he won the Nobel Peace Prize. The march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, was the next year, at the end of which the marchers were addressed by King. By the way, plans are now afoot to construct a memorial on the second floor of our denominational headquarters to the three martyrs of that time, Jimmy Lee Jackson, the Rev. James Reeb, and Viola Liuzzo. Reeb and Liuzzo were both Unitarian Universalists.

Jackson was among a group of African-Americans ambushed by police in a town nearby, just before the march. Trying to defend his mother and grandfather, he was shot to death by a policeman. At twenty-five, he was the youngest deacon in his church. King delivered the eulogy. Reeb was beaten to death on the sidewalks of Selma. Liuzzo, a civil-rights volunteer from Detroit, was shot to death as she drove on the highway with other civil rights protesters.

Still, as one author [Stephen B. Oates] comments, "the Selma campaign … was King's finest hour." Within months, Lyndon Johnson would sign the Voting Rights Act. In less than two years, the justice department could report that most eligible black voters were registered in the deep south.

In many ways, that story is the real one, and it is the one tomorrow's holiday commemorates: a brave man confronted the terrible injustice of southern segregation and racial persecution and with the strength of his convictions, his determination, his bravery, and his unwavering commitment to non-violent confrontation and civil disobedience wrought a great good for black people and for the whole country.

If we can just get society to take the holiday that seriously, it will be a very good thing. But I am struck at how much that story leaves out, some of which we should at least admit, and some of which deserves more attention and respect.

The admitting part you probably know as well as I do, even if you're under forty. King was imperfect. As a graduate student, he was not as scrupulous as others have been about not citing sources without accreditation, otherwise known as plagiarism. As a husband, he was not as monogamous in his couplings as we want people to be, especially our heroes, unless they're movie stars, and King was not one of those.

We know of the latter fault because our government was gathering any such information it could on Dr. King, since the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, was obsessed with King and considered him a very dangerous man, the opinion of the Nobel Prize Committee notwithstanding. After all, King was looking to make radical changes, which Hoover felt obliged to try to subvert, even if the changes would make America more American, holding up our highest national aspirations and calling us to fulfill their promise.

So okay, thanks to Hoover and to researchers back at Boston University, where King got his Ph.D., we know that King was imperfect as a person. And we know this about the usual portrait, too: it over-emphasizes King's part in the struggle. He was in the right spot at the right time to play the role he did, but the success of the movement he gets given credit for depended on many, many other people, too.

How much did success depend on him, and how much on the tens of thousands of others? That kind of question is one that people have been arguing over for centuries: How much does progress depend on the person upon whom attention focuses, and how much is that person just the lucky or unlucky recipient of a lot of media hype for a phenomenon that would have happened anyway? Do great people create history, or does history create itself, exploiting people as it goes, assigning them roles like hero, villain, by-stander and the like.

Personally, as usual, I think the truth is somewhere in-between. I think the moment was right for black frustration at the egregious conditions in the south to seek redress. I think there would have been protests, sit-ins, boycotts, and the like, even if King had decided to spend his time with his own congregation and family.

But I suspect that it would not have gone as well. I suspect that not as much would have been accomplished. And I suspect that even more would have been accomplished if King had not been murdered. The moment, the energy, the rightness - they were all there, ready to happen. But they might not have happened anywhere nearly as well if King had not been there to accept the role of leader.

So okay again, while I'm cataloging ways that our holiday doesn't offer up the picture at its most complete, let us acknowledge that King was not The Civil Rights Movement, but only someone in it that was cast by fortune into a role - but it was a role he accepted and played with admirable bravery and skill.

If the usual press around the holiday pays too little attention to the importance of other figures in the Civil Rights Movement, especially the many brave men and women who courageously challenged Jim Crow laws in their local communities, far from the eyes of mass media, it also understates the virulence of the opposition encountered by the Movement and by King himself. I'm not sure, if I were under forty myself, I would know how hated King was, not just by southern bigots, but by northerners as well, and not just J. Edgar Hoover.

When King came to my home county, invited by a Catholic prep school to speak at graduation, the local politicians who always attended boycotted King's address. King had won the Nobel Peace Prize, but in the eyes of the leading officials of Monmouth County, New Jersey, he was a dangerous subversive.

I'm not sure I would know, from the way the holiday is presented, how fiercely he was opposed, even outside the south, and understandably, because his passion was more broadly focused than on overcoming racist laws. For King, that was one of three passions, and they were interrelated in his mind, and they upset lots of folks.

Of course, overcoming racial discrimination was his primary passion. But the effects of racial discrimination had created poverty among southern blacks that was a curse of its own, and once he had his focus on poverty, it encompassed white poor folk as well, and everyone who lived on little in a society where some live so extravagantly well.

I get the sense that this is a side of King that much of America would as soon leave behind, however many streets we name after the man. It is easier to have the holiday remind us how good it is we passed some important laws in the '60s and have made some progress in racial relations -- and we have, if you think back to where we were before King, before the bus boycott, before the Supreme Court decision to end school segregation, before the military was desegregated.

That's a good reminder, and we can make it a reminder to stay the course and get on with all the progress that still needs to be made. But we need to remember, too, that King wasn't just out to change discriminatory laws, but to work for the institution of programs to overcome the effects of past discrimination. He was out to organize workers, to win health care for all, to have the government guarantee a job for anyone who could work and an annual income for those who couldn't.

And he had a third passion, also little heralded now: he was a devoted pacifist, and an ardent opponent of our military involvement in Vietnam. It was actually his anti-war stand that caused the walk-out by Monmouth County politicians at that graduation years ago. If I were under forty myself, I'm not sure how I would know that King's fervor ran in all three of those channels.

They were connected by one final reality that may receive less notice than it deserves: King was a minister. A recent book [A Knock at Midnight, Clayborne Carson and Peter Holloran, ed.] noted that "The world saw him as a marching protest leader, but Martin Luther King, Jr., was first and foremost a preacher. 'In the quiet recesses on my heart,' he once remarked, 'I am fundamentally a clergyman, a Baptist preacher.'" [viii]

It's not the professional call I want to highlight, though he was a fourth-generation Baptist preacher. I want to recall that his was not primarily a political campaign but a spiritual one, a living out of his faith. He said so himself: "This is a spiritual movement…." ["Our Struggle: The Story of Montgomery," quoted in Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century, Meier, Rudwick, and Broderick, ed., 300]

It was a movement grounded in scripture, in the Social Gospel and Personalism movements of the early twentieth century, and in the writings of Thoreau and Gandhi. King had worked long and hard on his own beliefs, and still they were not completed in the formal sense of a systematic theology. "And yet," it has been said [Martin Luther King, Jr.: Theologian and Precursor of Black Theology, Paul Russell Garber], King "had a clear purpose, namely the creation of a beloved community where [people] would be free … to live together in mutual respect and appreciation." [432-3]

That's at the heart of his efforts, the creation of community, community of ever-larger scope, ultimately encompassing all people in their diversity and freedom. And his way of achieving this was love, the redemptive power of courageous love. Hence his non-violence direct action, neither acquiescing nor attacking. Hence his drive for economic justice, a way of freeing people from self-interest and materialism to be in person-to-person relationships with each other. And pushed by the logic of it, despite his initial reluctance, hence his pacifism, an extension of his belief in non-violence to relations between nations, too.

So good for the country, that it should make a try at celebrating a man who did so much to try to heal our most grievous wound, the heritage of slavery and oppression. But let's keep in mind how hard was the struggle, and how broad, how much his view of the future called into question not just atrocious laws but our economic system itself, how radical his faith was in not returning hate for hate, and how deeply grounded his mission was not in ideology or partisan opinion but in his religious faith.

You probably know the sermon, "the Drum Major Instinct," that he gave near the end of his life, in which he imagines his own funeral, which he hopes will be brief. "If you get somebody to deliver the eulogy," he said, "tell them not to mention that I have a Nobel Peace Prize" or all the other prizes, or "where I went to school.

"I'd like somebody to mention that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to give his life serving others.
"I'd like for somebody to say that day that Martin Luther King, Jr., tried to love somebody.
"I want you to say on that day that I tried to be right on the war question.
"I want you to be able to say that day that I did try to feed the hungry … clothe those who were naked … visit those who were in prison.
"I want you to say that I tried to love and serve humanity.
" Yes, and if you want to say I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the shallow things will not matter. I won't have any money to leave behind. I won't have the fine and luxurious things of life to leave behind. But I just want to leave a committed life behind. And that's all I want to say."