Kitchen Table
18 January 2023
Dear Friend in Faith,
One of my favorite COS trips was our Civil Rights Pilgrimage to Montgomery, Alabama, that we took years ago. Our group included high schoolers and seniors alike as we grew in our appreciation of this justice aspect of our baptismal journeys. Our tour guide was legendary Lutheran pastor, Bob Graetz, one of the very few white pastors serving on the planning team for the Montgomery Bus Boycott. (In a previous WFW, we told the full story of Pastor Bob’s faithfulness, including his home being bombed twice for his commitment to full community).
I’ll never forget as we toured the home of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., standing in his kitchen, when we were told the “Kitchen Table” experience. (Thanks to writer John Dear whose summary follows.) King was enduring the hard days of the bus boycott. All were challenged when days passed into weeks and months, and white Montgomery rightly discerned a bona fide economic threat. “That’s when the death threats began. Chilling and cutting to the chase: “Call off the boycott or die.” Towards the end, as many as 40 such phone calls came to the King kitchen phone every day. And on one occasion, when the police had hauled him into jail for speeding, in the clutches of the police at last, he imagined himself on the threshold of being lynched. Fear descended like a fog.
Fear and discouragement reached an apex late Friday night, Jan. 27, 1956. King slumped home, another long strategy session under his belt, and found Coretta asleep. He paced and knocked about, his nerves still on edge. And presently the phone rang, a sneering voice on the other end: “Leave Montgomery immediately if you have no wish to die.” And then there were further threats about the life of his children. King’s fear surged; he hung up the phone, walked to his kitchen, and with trembling hands, put on a pot of coffee and sank into a chair at his kitchen table.
In his book, Stride Toward Freedom, King describes what was a tremendous spiritual experience.
“I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me, I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud.
The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory. “I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. 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.”
At that moment, I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced God before. It seemed as though I could hear the quiet assurance of an inner voice saying “Stand up for justice, stand up for truth; and God will be at your side forever.” Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything.”
Three days later a bomb blasted his house and his family escaped harm by a hairsbreadth. “Strangely enough,” King later wrote, “I accepted the word of the bombing calmly. My religious experience a few nights before had given me the strength to face it.”
News of the bombing drew a crowd. A mob formed within the hour, all clenched jaws and closed fists. And they pressed up against the shattered house and shouted for vengeance. King mounted the broken porch and raised his hands. “We must meet hate with love. Remember, if I am stopped, this movement will not stop because God is with this movement. Go home with this glorious faith and radiant assurance.” And thus the mob dissipated, their mood disarmed and their ears ringing with the message of gospel non-violence.
Question:
What is causing you fear or worry these days? Like King, deep down, do you think you’re trying to do what is right? Is your plan in synch with what is just and pleasing to God? Like King, can you offer yourself as an agent of God’s love and trust that God “will be at your side forever”?
Let us pray:
Dear God, I admit to you today that I’m sometimes really worried and even scared about . . . . . . . (name your issue). Would you confirm in my heart that my goal and effort is on the right pathway and pleasing to you? And once you do that, would you send your Holy Spirit of encouragement upon me? Would you please, heavenly Father, strengthen with me your promise that, while the desired outcome may or may not come to fruition, in terms of my effort for you, as King felt in his kitchen table prayer, you are “by my side forever”? In Jesus’ name, Amen.
