Theologian's Almanac for Week of January 15, 2023

Welcome to SALT’s “Theologian’s Almanac,” a weekly selection of important birthdays, holidays, and other upcoming milestones worth marking — specially created for a) writing sermons and prayers, b) creating content for social media channels, and c) enriching your devotional life.

For the week of Sunday, January 15:

January 15 is the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., born in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1929. A fourth-generation Baptist preacher, King was a 25-year-old pastor in Montgomery, Alabama, recently married and with a newborn daughter at home, when a local woman named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white man. Though Parks would later be described as “an old woman tired after a long day of work,” in fact she was a 42-year-old NAACP leader, activist, and organizer. As she later put it, “No, the only ‘tired’ I was, was tired of giving in.”

The Women’s Political Council, led by Jo Ann Robinson, had been thinking about organizing a bus boycott, and since Parks was so widely respected in the community, they decided to rally around her case. Four days after the arrest, Robinson and her colleagues formed the Montgomery Improvement Association to oversee and coordinate the boycott. It was Robinson who nominated her church’s young preacher, Martin Luther King Jr., as a potential leader for the effort.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott was originally conceived to be brief, but in the end it lasted over 380 days. Participants faced all kinds of resistance, including harassment, intimidation, and terrorism: many homes and churches, including King’s parsonage, were bombed by white supremacists. In 1956, the United States Supreme Court ruled that segregated busing was unconstitutional. The boycott vaulted King into a national civil rights leader; he was 27 years old.

In 1963, at the age of 34, King delivered what is arguably the most famous speech of the twentieth century at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. He stirringly spoke of having “a dream” for America, but the heart of the speech was about how African American civil rights were being nightmarishly, systematically denied, from police brutality to housing discrimination to segregation. And in 1967, King linked the civil rights movement to the peace movement, arguing that the Vietnam War disproportionately burdened soldiers who were often poor young men of color; that it drained resources away from important domestic social programs; and that it was an unjust war in any case, largely targeting poor people in Vietnam. He began organizing a “Poor People’s Campaign” to combat economic inequality in the United States. On April 4, 1968, King was assassinated just outside his Memphis motel room, having travelled to Memphis to lead a march in solidarity with striking garbage workers.

King said: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

January 16 is the birthday of American writer Mary Karr, born in Groves, Texas, in 1955. Her third memoir, Lit, published in 2009, is about both her struggle with addiction and her conversion to Catholicism that helped her move into recovery. Karr rewrote the book twice, throwing out over a thousand finished pages before starting over on page one. Near despair, she called her close friend, the writer Don DeLillo (author of the novel, “White Noise,” the basis of the new movie), for advice and encouragement, and he sent her a postcard with three words on it: “Write or Die.” Karr responded with her own three word postcard: “Write and Die.” She was deeply anxious that a book about her spiritual life wouldn’t be well received by her fans, who by then were accustomed to the rowdy, sometimes racy style in her previous two memoirs, The Liar’s Club and Cherry. She said, “Talking about spiritual activity to a secular audience is like doing card tricks on the radio.” Lit became a New York Times bestseller.

January 16 is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, observed annually on the third Monday of January, honoring the life and work of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The day became a national holiday in 1986, and is often observed with service projects, a public concert, and/or a prayer breakfast. Here’s SALT’s free film honoring the occasion this year (just click the “Download” button underneath the film on Vimeo); it’s especially powerful now, in the wake of last week’s anniversary of the horrific events at the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021, and the riots that just happened in Brazil.

January 21 is the birthday of American blues singer and songwriter Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter (sometimes his birthday is noted as January 20 or 29), born in Mooringsport, Louisiana, in 1889. Lead Belly, best known today for such songs as “Goodnight Irene,” “Midnight Special,” and “Rock Island Line,” played the 12-string guitar, harmonica, violin, piano, and accordion. While incarcerated in Texas, he entertained fellow prisoners, guards, and other guests — including the governor of Texas. Lead Belly wrote a song for the governor, comparing his own situation to Paul and Silas in the Bible, particularly the part of the story when an earthquake set them free. The governor returned repeatedly to hear Lead Belly sing and play, and eventually issued him a pardon.

January 21 is also the day in 1525 that a group of Swiss Protestants, later known as Mennonites, first gathered into a formal congregation. After they came under the leadership of a Dutch minister, Menno Simons, they were dubbed “Mennonites.” They faced persecution for their resistance to certain forms of civil authority, which eventually led some of them to emigrate to North America — first settling in Germantown, Pennsylvania, in 1683. Today, the United States has the largest Mennonite population in the world.