Martin Luther King, Jr. is one of my great heroes. His dream of Beloved Community is part of the reason I became a minister. How could that be? I was only two years old when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on that bus in Montgomery and so struck the spark that set fire to the modern civil rights movement and thrust King into the national spotlight. I was only fifteen when King was fatally shot on that motel balcony in Memphis in 1968. And even though dozens of my UU colleagues marched with King after he issued the call to come to Selma in 1965, even though that is part of the history I am proud to inherit as a Unitarian Universalist minister, in 1965, ministry was the farthest thing from my mind. And I never lived in fear of my life, never had my soul diminished, my personhood debased, in the way that was daily fare for black folks then. I never suffered racial injustice. So by what right can I lay claim to King’s dream?

Oh, I don’t mean I had no experience of the civil rights struggle. Richmond, Virginia, where I grew up, may not be all that far below the Mason-Dixon line, but it was still the south. Segregation was a given. Even though there were black families living nearby, there were no black kids in my school. The bus stations, lunch counters, movie theaters all had “colored” sections. Blacks sat in the back of the bus and were supposed to yield their seats to white folks. The colored schools, water fountains and restrooms were such a disgrace, by their very appearance they subliminally instilled the message that blacks were inferior. The “N word” was in common usage. And even though my mother early on instilled a message of equality and even though, sensitive child as I was, I instinctively identified with those unfairly treated, and even though my family wasn’t much better off than the poor blacks around us, even I, grandchild of a sharecropper on one side and a poor scratch-dirt farmer on the other, knew there was advantage that accrued to me simply because my skin was white. And I was not totally immune to the feelings of superiority that white folks sometimes seemed to imbibe with the very air they breathed. Nonetheless, I was moved by King’s vision of Beloved Community because it transcended categories of race and class. And it is just as timely now as it was then, in spite of the gains since his time, in spite even of what we have made of King.

I hate what we have made of him—we, meaning the American media, the American popular memory. I hate it that Martin Luther King’s birthday is at worst just another opportunity for a sale, for hawking the great American delusion that status and possessions can substitute for going to the mountain top; that the right luxury sedan, the right “he-went-to-Jared’s” jewelry, are the marks of a life well-lived. And I hate it that the national holiday in King’s honor is at best a time to trot out a frozen picture in time of King on the steps of the Lincoln Monument, that hot day in August 1963, announcing in that inimitable voice “I have a dream”…, invoking that, guaranteed-to-bring-a-tear-to-your-eye, a-catch-in-your-throat, image of little black boys and girls joining hands with little white boys and girls and walking together as sisters and brothers.

Don’t get me wrong. That speech that day surely occurred in sacred time. Those steps that August afternoon were holy ground. That march to Washington surely was a watershed in the struggle for freedom. And the man who delivered that speech most certainly was a prophet in a holy cause. The man, the moment, deserve celebration. But the demand for an end to segregation was not all there was to Martin Luther King. And if that is all we remember, we sell him, and by extension, ourselves, short.

There was so much more to Martin Luther King’s vision than that. Even I, as a child, and later as a teenager, knew at least intuitively that was so. As I watched TV coverage of King marching and King arrested and King speaking all across the south and then the north; as I heard him speak out, not just against discrimination, but increasingly against poverty and then later still against the war in Vietnam; as I heard him repeatedly exhort his followers to stay the course of nonviolent resistance and heard his calls for solidarity among all peoples impoverished and exploited, I sensed down deep in my soul that King’s vision was shaking the very foundations. When I heard King I felt he spoke a divine imperative, felt he incarnated a holy and prophetic demand that issued from the Source of Being itself. Oh, I might not have had the words for it then, but I felt it nonetheless.

And as an adult, as I studied King’s life and theology, I became ever more convinced that if ever God was at work in the world, God was at work in Martin Luther King. And, God is still at work in King’s vision of Beloved Community. These last few days watching the pictures of devastation and death streaming out of Haiti—this, in the words of the UUSC, “humanitarian disaster heaped upon an already existing humanitarian crisis”—I hear King, yet again, exhorting us to compassion, to justice, and I know he would remind us of the link between the horrifying poverty in Haiti and the role racism has played in that country’s fate. King is still calling us to a holy disquiet, still creating a sacred disturbance. The prophetic demands of Beloved Community are not yet met.

When King died he was planning what he called his “last great dream”—the Poor People’s March on Washington. Desegregation and voting rights were empty without basic “human rights”. True integration meant a sharing of wealth and power—a society where no child goes to bed hungry, where no family suffers from lack of housing, employment, health care or education. The Poor Peoples Campaign was a fight for economic justice for every American, regardless of race. King knew that a majority of the Americans living in poverty were white. He was trying to forge a new political coalition of poor blacks, poor whites, the labor movement and sympathetic elements of the middle class.

King was also increasingly vocal in his criticism of the Vietnam War. Primary to his reasoning was his unflinching belief that peace could never be achieved by violent means. But he was also dismayed that the poor were over-represented in the military—because they were disproportionately drafted or because their despair left them easy prey for recruitment—and that the war was draining billions of dollars from the nation’s potential for solving the needs of its poor. In words that are still relevant today, he decried a government that appropriated “military funds with alacrity and generosity” but provided “poverty funds with miserliness.”

King realized that vast inequities of wealth and the increasing concentration of economic power in faceless corporations were a threat to freedom and democracy, not only at home, but also abroad. He said, “we must begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented’ society to a ‘person-oriented’ society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplet of racism, excessive materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.” What King was calling for sounded revolutionary—and it was—as in the American revolution. King was calling for a radical embrace of core American values, like freedom, like justice, like equality. He was calling to account the powers that be, insisting America live up to its promise.

This is the Martin many would rather forget. This is the Martin hounded by the FBI; the Martin the Washington Post said had “diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people.” This is not the Martin forever bathed in sunlight on those white marble steps, the Martin whose birthday we celebrate by singing a chorus of We Shall Overcome, have a few tears come to our eyes, and then feel like we have done something. No, this is the Martin who haunts, who is still invoking a holy disquiet, still creating a sacred disturbance.

There were and are those who would have us believe that this “revolutionary” Martin was a distortion of his former self—the product of stress and paranoia and preoccupation with death. But while King’s thinking did evolve and he did become more critical in the last few years of his life, his later ideas were of a piece with his earlier views. King had always believed that moral regeneration was necessary for social transformation and that nonviolence was the only viable method for achieving such transformation. And at the center of his thinking had always been the vision of “Beloved community”—a society based on justice, compassion and equality. And at the foundation of it all, from start to finish, was his unerring conviction that God demands justice—that God was on everyone’s side, including the poor, the disenfranchised, the exploited.

God, to Martin Luther King, was a personal God. God was the strength upon which he, Martin, could rely, if only Martin would stand on the side of right; but God was also the one who moves to compassion; the one who goads to justice. In March of 1968 King was in Mississippi on his People-to-People tour. A tenant farmer’s shanty was the symbol of his campaign. In a town called Marks he came face to face with what the current struggle was all about. He saw scores of Negro children walking barefoot, their stomachs protruding from hunger. Their parents were unemployed with no source of income—no welfare checks, no pensions, nothing. “How do you live?” King asked, incredulous. “Well,” they replied, “we ask the neighbors for a little something. When the berry season comes, we pick berries; when the rabbit season comes, we catch a few rabbits. Sometimes though we can’t get any food at all, not even for the children.” Listening to them, King broke down and wept—and he heard a voice telling him to bring them—every last one of them—to Washington, D.C. for Congress and the President to see, so they might finally understand what God required.

God was a personal God to King, but—and this is a very important point for us as Unitarian Universalists—God was not all powerful. God who needed the agency of loving, justice-seeking human beings to help effect God’s intentions for the world. King knew not all civil rights activists conceived of God in personal terms. He nevertheless maintained that even those persons believed in some kind of creative force that worked for universal wholeness. In language echoing Unitarian theologian Henry Weiman, King said, “Whether they call it an unconscious process, an impersonal Brahma, or a personal Being of infinite love, there is a creative force in this universe that works to bring (all) aspects of reality into a harmonious whole.”

King was absolutely convinced that the universe is an ally of justice; of the inexorable inevitability of his cause. How else account for the tenacity, the very survival of Black folk—those who, in the words of Audre Lorde, “were never meant to survive,” those who were “imprinted with fear . . . with their mother’s milk?” How else account for the victories by those who, in Camille Cosby’s words, “given the odds, given the opposition, given the history, were not supposed to have spirit, let alone . . . become their own victories”?

Martin Luther King was absolutely convinced that the very universe itself cries out for equality, for justice, and works through human beings to make it so. That was the foundation of Martin’s dream, at the core of which was the concept of Beloved Community. And, if we, here, are to lay claim to that concept of Beloved Community, then Martin’s dream must be our dream, also. Yes, even we sympathetic, mostly middle class, mostly white folk.

Today in the U.S. 39.1 million people, 13.2 percent of the population live below the government poverty line. 14.1 million U. S. children are officially growing up in poverty. Given the absurdly low official threshold, a more accurate estimate of the U.S. poverty rate would be 30 percent. Last year nearly 50 million people in the U.S. struggled to get enough to eat. 40% of the homeless are families with children. 45.7 million people in this country are without basic health insurance. Nearly 25 percent of people in this country are functionally illiterate.

And these are all aggregate statistics. This picture is much grimmer for persons of color—African Americans, Latinos/as, native Americans. The rates of poverty, illiteracy, lack of health insurance, and prison incarceration for peoples of color quickly convince that the effects of racism are alive and well in the U .S., even if we did elect our first black president.

Meanwhile, income inequality grows. The top 1 percent of the population now receives more after-tax income that the bottom 40 percent of the population, a greater concentration of income than at any point since 1929. And meanwhile, we have already spent $948 billion to date in direct costs on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with billions more to come, especially when indirect costs, such as the costs of caring for wounded veterans, is considered.

Poverty, racism, excessive materialism, militarism—they are all still very much with us. Martin’s dream must be reclaimed—not the static, frozen-image-in-time dream, of black children and white children holding hands; but the greater dream of making this nation what it ought to be, to the fulfillment and inclusion of all; the greater dream of making this world what it ought to be—for all peoples, even the poor, dispossessed people of Haiti.

When I was a teenager I felt, even if I didn’t have the words for it then, that God was at work in Martin. And I know God can be at work in us, too. Make no mistake—Martin was not a saint, not a superhero. Martin had his very human character flaws and weaknesses. And he, too, sometimes despaired of the future. And Martin, great as he was, prophetic as he was, never walked alone. It wasn’t just King who shook the soul of this nation—but those thousands of ordinary black folks—and some white folks too—willing to march on through rain and heat and bull whips and water cannons—some of them children no less! And some of whom fell in the struggle never to rise again. But all ordinary folks nevertheless—ordinary folks who, because they felt a holy disquiet, created a sacred disturbance.