In celebration of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we look to cultivate his audacious faith in our own hearts.
I must confess, my friends, the road ahead will not always be smooth. There will be still rocky places of frustration and meandering points of bewilderment. There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted. [. . .] Difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future.
–from Where Do We Go From Here? (1967) by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Sermon:
An Audacious Faith
Rev. Joe Cleveland
January 19, 2025
I was listening to a couple puppets yesterday trying to understand what the word “audacious” means. They seemed to appreciate that a sort of bigness was implied by the word. The reason these critters were trying to take that word in is because it’s used in what the planning team for the Martin Luther King, Jr. Celebration weekend chose as this year’s theme: “We must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future.”
The words come from a speech titled “Where Do We Go from Here?” that Dr. King gave at the annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta on August 16, 1967. Cornel West tells us that “It was his last and most radical SCLC presidential address.” “Audacious” feels like a radical word. If you are audacious, you are bold and daring, fearless. My American Heritage Dictionary tells me that if you are audacious, you are unrestrained by convention or propriety. If you’re audacious, you’re brazen or insolent; you’re spirited and original.
But I don’t think the most difficult word in that sentence is audacious. I think the word that makes us react the most is the word faith — or perhaps the phrase faith in the future. Many of us are not feeling a whole lot of faith in the future. And yet MLK wants us not just to have faith in the future, but an audacious faith in the future.
We have a President being sworn in tomorrow who declares practices and values in his speeches that are antithetical to Unitarian Universalist values. We try to act from concern for interdependence, equity, justice, generosity, pluralism. We want to grow and transform spiritually and ethically. We center ourselves, root ourselves, in liberating love — liberation is what love that’s actually love results in. It’s hard to see anything but doom ahead. Climate catastrophe, even more anti-trans legislation and outlawing of abortion and reproductive care, the promise of mass deportations. People in this community here in Saratoga are already strategizing for ways to protect people. And the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., says to us from the past in a voices that rings still in our present: “But difficult and painful as it is, we must walk on in the days ahead with an audacious faith in the future.”
It’s not like things were especially rosy when Dr. King was saying these words in August of 1967. In the first nine months of 1967, there had been one hundred fifty riots over racial justice and civil rights in cities all across the country. Dr. King was being challenged by the Black Power movement, he was being criticized for speaking out against the Vietnam War. In this speech, Dr. King calls for changing the whole structure of American society. I don’t know how optimistic he’s feeling. Dr. King says “There will be inevitable setbacks here and there. There will be those moments when the buoyancy of hope will be transformed into the fatigue of despair. Our dreams will sometimes be shattered and our ethereal hopes blasted.” It’s because there will be inevitable setbacks that we need audacious faith.
Here we need to lean into faith — perhaps at first simply asking the basic question: What is faith? When we say someone has faith, what does that mean? It can mean that you have some beliefs — but that’s different than having faith. Lots of Christians, and even more UU Christians, lean into the “deeds, not creeds” ideal that we get from the letter of James in the Bible. “What good is it … if you say you have faith but do not have works? … faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (James 2:14, 17). Deeds, not creeds. Having a faith might refer to some beliefs you have, but it might be better understood as referring to what you do. “I by my works will show you my faith” (James 2:18).
But if your faith is revealed by what you do, how you live, how you treat people, how you treat the world around you, I’m still feeling like I don’t know what faith is. I know how faith can be revealed, but what is it?
Faith might be better understood as trust. If I act with faith, I am acting on the basis of some trust in something. I know a lot of people in this congregation are dreaming about having new chairs when we build our new meetinghouse. But I still have some faith that the chairs you’re sitting in right now will not collapse beneath you.
The theologian H. Richard Niebuhr wrote: “The belief that something exists is an experience of a wholly different order from the experience of reliance on it.” How are you feeling in those chairs?
Faith is about trust, reliance. Faith is about having confidence. Faith is also about loyalty. We put our trust, our reliance, our confidence in things all the time. It’s impossible not to put your trust in something. And give our loyalty to things, — to people, to institutions, cultures, and more — all the time.
The UU minister Fred Muir uses the concept of story to understand what we’re doing when we put our faith in something. We each have our story, he says:
It’s composed of all the events and transitions, all the people and pets, all the loves and hates, all the everything that is our life experience. When we bring this story, the story of our lives, into the context and perspective of a larger story/narrative called a religious tradition, we let that tradition speak to us to see if it fits, if it makes order of our story, if it gives our story roots and wings, stability and ecstasy, explanation and spirit, sense and mystery.
If we feel that, if we have that experience of roots and wings, we put our trust, our confidence, our loyalty, in living our story in collaboration with that other story.
We all do this, sometimes consciously and often unconsciously. The way Ralph Waldo Emerson put it is:
A person will worship something — have no doubt about that. We may think our tribute is paid in secret in the dark recesses of our hearts — but it will out. That which dominates our imaginations and our thoughts will determine our lives, and character. Therefore, it behooves us to be careful what we worship, for what we are worshipping we are becoming.
We all have faith. We all act with faith. The key is to realize that faith is a choice. This is what Dr. King is urging us to do: to make a choice for an audacious faith.
Faith is a choice. You have to decide where you’re going to put it. You can trust that people will feel afraid. You can trust that people will act out of fear. You can trust that people will be greedy and selfish. You can count on that. But you don’t have to put your faith there. People will also be generous. People will help each other. Institutions actually do train doctors so that they know what they’re doing when they replace a joint or prescribe a medication.
Sure, people won’t be competent or kind all the time. If they were you wouldn’t need faith. So we decide where we will put our faith. We decide what story we will live.
The Rev. Dr. King, finds his faith in the story James Weldon Johnson tells in his great poem that we will sing as our closing hymn today. King says,
… when our nights become darker than a thousand midnights, let us remember that there is a creative force in this universe, working to pull down the gigantic mountains of evil, a power that is able to make a way out of no way and transform dark yesterdays into bright tomorrows. Let us realize the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.
Maybe this is a story we can choose to live. King did get the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice part from the Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker, after all, so perhaps this is within a Unitarian Universalist orbit.
A story that I try to put my faith in is simply this: love is always possible. It will never not be possible. And I choose to live that faith as best I can, halting and stumbling as we humans do. But I will keep choosing it. “I have decided to stick with love,” King says earlier in this same speech. “… hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love…”
Wildfires burning up California. Wars, a ceasefire or two not withstanding, continue to be fought. A wildfire burns through our country’s body politic. We don’t have faith because everything is ok. Dr. King wants us to go forward with an audacious faith and a divine dissatisfaction, because things are not ok. He also says in this speech:
Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer hav a high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds.
Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the forces of justice.
Let us be dissatisfied until those who live on the outskirts of hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security.
Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heaps of history, and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home. …
Let us be dissatisfied until integration is not seen as a problem but as an opportunity to participate in the beauty of diversity
Our dissatisfaction will be a sign of our faith. Let it be a sign of where we have chosen to put our faith, confidence, loyalty and commitment. And why not have an audacious faith, a faith audacious as the one King lauds William Cullen Bryant for: “Truth, crushed to earth, will rise again.” It is only where there is doubt that we can have faith.
May your faith be audacious in its generosity, audacious in its celebration of both interdependence and pluralism.
May your faith be audacious in its work for equity and justice.
May your faith be so audacious that it transforms and grows in spirit and in its ethical acuity.
May your faith be audaciously
courageously
outrageously
loving.
So may it be. Make it so.
Resources
- Martin Luther King, Jr. “Where Do We Go from Here?” August 16, 1967. Atlanta, GA. Annual convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Text available at The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.
- H. Richard Niebuhr quoted in: Nieuwejaar, Jeanne Harrison. Fluent in Faith: A Unitarian Universalist Embrace of Religious Language. United States, Skinner House Books, 2012.
- Fredric John Muir. Heretics’ Faith: Vocabulary for Religious Liberals.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, quoted in Singing the Living Tradition, reading number 563.