By Mckinley United Methodist Church Pastor Peter Edward Matthews

“We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now."

- Dr. Martin Luther King

Right now, Russian aggression has many casual and skilled military experts convinced that the Ukraine is entrenched in a forever war while Western Europe appears to lack widespread cohesion to effectively respond. Right now, China’s economy is surging more than 8% over the previous year while its blatant human rights abuses are trending in a direction in which the horrors of the Tiananmen Square protest of 1989 seem like a picnic. Right now, the Biden Administration has not articulated a clear strategy for stronger federal voting rights even though he won more than 92% of the African American vote. It appears as if humanity is sailing in the wrong direction.

Despite each of the previously mentioned pressing concerns warranting our attention, none of them scratches the surface of the haunting trajectory that our global pandemic has placed us on in conjunction with a climate crisis that seems destined to be permanently irreversible. Each negatively affects millions of lives while permanently scarring even more families regardless of race, class, ethnicity or species. Indeed, it appears as if humanity is sailing in the wrong direction.

The three issues of race, war and poverty were dominant themes found throughout the words and work of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. These three evils that haunted King’s famed dream now haunt our realities. The speed of targeted information at our fingertips leaves us very little time to distinguish between facts and fiction. This is precisely why his quote referencing humanity aboard a “boat” must be considered as a point of reckoning. This reckoning is acknowledging that the current national hyper-partisanship is much more profound than Red versus Blue states. Now is not the time for anyone to get lost on the dispirited islands of ignorance and irrelevance. Now is the time for each of us to summon the moral courage and stare down the chamber of our assorted reckonings and make some life-giving decisions.

Looking at the context of the times illustrates how King was reckoning when he offered that seemingly simple quote. He was confronting his own myriad of reckonings when he first provided this quote. Father. Husband. Pastor. Leader. His genius never exempted him from responsibility, expectation, harrowing drama or trauma. What has given him mythical status was his unrelenting courage to reckon with the call upon his life, despite the challenges. A call that extended far beyond his vocational duties as a pastor, but an undying will to cultivate and convene spaces where people could live with decency and dignity consistent with his own life. King wanted for others what he wanted for himself. What about you?

Each day we breathe on this earth affords us another opportunity to take a serious look at our own lives and make respectable, concerted efforts towards our own assortment of reckonings: family, friends, and finances. To consistently examine these three as well as other values allows each of us to perform a type of internal audit that permits our hearts a greater capacity to be of a better use for the world, just like King.

To aggressively reckon with ourselves generates authenticity because it prohibits us from acting on behalf of anything or for anyone that is not consistent with our own fundamental beliefs. We must move through the world making decisions that reflect our beliefs and realities, our hopes and needs. Today and going forward, we must somehow make time to reckon with ourselves all the while knowing that this honest pursuit has the potential to create a tsunami of goodness. Here is where we become unafraid to make art with our imperfections and music with our inconsistencies. We give our entire selves permission to celebrate our broken humanity because we have started down the pathway of integration. We dare ourselves to participate in our healing.

Such a secular spirituality places a premium on a reciprocity that takes daily long hard looks in the mirror and discovers that “hope is a discipline” and not simply an emotion or a sentiment. This type of “joy work” permits profit margins to consider human faces and legislation to be written from a place of systemic decency. Here humanity finds its face again because it’s not ashamed to reckon with itself openly and continually. The late Archbishop Desmond Tutu referred to this as Ubuntu. King referred to this notion here as a boat.

Today reckoning with the fact that we are all in the same boat is to acknowledge new opportunities for growth. We must ascertain whether we are willing to reckon with our inconsistencies compassionately. Unity is not uniformity. Listening. Learning. Laughing. This is the MLK we must rediscover as we find ourselves listening to his orations in celebration of his 93rd birthday. Daring. Dancing. (and yes) Dreaming. Here is the King we should commit ourselves to reimagining while performing our assortment of MLK service projects across the globe today. Internal work does not require a doctorate in theology or a Nobel Peace Prize. Instead, it remembers that our interconnectedness has us all in the same boat reckoning with the fact that this boat is heading in the wrong direction.

Reckon we turn around now?