A Stone of Hope

“I have a dream,” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. said that day 55 years ago this summer. He said it over and over again in what is, by far, the most well-known speech given in my lifetime. And when he said those words, it was a difficult time in our country. Racial segregation was the law of the land in some parts, and despair that things would ever change was deep. But Dr. King spoke that day about a faith, rooted in the Bible that empowered people “to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope.”

And I think it was Dr. King’s faith and hope that gave his message such power to inspire us still today. To be sure, Dr. King’s was not a blind faith or a naïve hope. He knew all too well the reality of the evil of racism. But his faith gave him the power to hope, despite all the evidence, contrary to all the evidence that he had seen during his lifetime.

It’s the sort of faith that we need today. As is clear from the headlines, the civil rights movement of the 1960’s did not end the “starless midnight of racism and war”—that it did not usher in “the bright daylight of peace and brotherhood.” As is clear from the headlines, racism is still a powerful force in our culture, and we’ve grown almost numb to the violence. And we need a faith that can empower us, not simply to accept “that’s just the way it is,” but to hew out of that formidable “mountain of despair a stone of hope”—a stone of hope that we can carry into the struggles that we continue to face, those of us who continue to have a dream of “freedom and justice for all.”

--Pastor Don Steele