And a Time for War

And a Time for War
Genesis 14: 1-13

On the first Martin Luther King Jr. commemoration after I came to the United States, his daughter Bernice King preached in the seminary chapel. As I walked to chapel that morning, I remember wondering whether she would be the kind of person who focused on a social gospel, on the need to develop a society in which people of all ethnic backgrounds could play a full part, or whether she would be the kind of person who focused on our personal relationships with God. As I walked back after chapel, I knew I had been put in my place. She had embodied the unity of God’s concern for us. God is not just concerned for the social or for the “spiritual.” The spiritual is social; the social is spiritual. If spirituality does not overflow into social concern, it is not spirituality, and if social concern does not incorporate questions about relationship with God, it is not social concern. My failure to take for granted that Bernice King would embody the unity of these two concerns showed how these have not been a unity in the traditions from which I come. The African American community has not had the luxury (or the misfortune) of being able to keep them separate...