The LORD called me before I was born,

while I was in my mother's womb he named me.

Isaiah 49:1

Once upon a time there was a young Baptist minister who woke up one day and realized that everything must change.

He was the kind of man that the prophet Isaiah spoke about here in this famous song, a song, in the words of Daniel Berrigan, about vocation and consequence.

It sounds silly, or redundant, but he was born to become who he was. While he was still in the womb, God called him by name, Martin Luther - for he would be a second history-making reformer.

And God called him to be a prophet. Not to predict the future, but to tell the truth about how things are. Not to wear a sandwich board warning that the end is near, but to bear witness to realities that can only be glimpsed by the eye of faith, and that take the heart of a lion to say out loud and in public.

And so the young man did what young women and men do who sense that call and who realize they won't be happy doing anything else until they answer it. He said yes to his destiny, and submitted his application to Crozer Theological Seminary.

When he set out for seminary he surely did not realize how consequential his destiny would be. But saying that simple yes, answering that divine summons, was the first step.

Maybe it was because he was a black man growing up in a black church. And maybe it's because that church was full of descendents of people whose lives and names had been stolen from them; maybe it was because of that that he knew in his heart the gospel had to be about something more than the promise of eternal life in heaven when so many people in America and around the world lived in an earthly hell.

Or maybe he was simply courageous enough to read the book for what it actually says. Perhaps he was possessed by a desire to look beyond the elaborate story our culture seemed to be telling about Jesus, and to actually read the teachings of Jesus for themselves.

Whatever the reason, once he made that turn, then everything did indeed begin to change. For not only did he become an ardent student of the teachings of Jesus, he began to practice them. And to think carefully and deeply about what would happen if a committed group of people applied those teachings to the most urgent problems of his day - war and racism and poverty.

And as this young pastor, just 26 years old, thought about these things, he picked up the paper on the morning of December 2, 1955 - or maybe he heard the story on the radio, about another young African American, a young woman named Rosa Parks, and how she had refused to give up her seat on a bus to a white passenger. And he had another great epiphany.

He realized that his beloved country was not yet living up to its potential. It was not fulfilling the dream of its founders, a promise made to all citizens, enshrined in the one sentence known and repeated by more Americans than any other sentence in the English language.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

The desire to realize that promise seized him, to make that day dawn and that dream come true, the dream of liberty and justice for all.

And so he began to speak and to bear witness. Out loud and in public he invited Americans to live into that dream, and live up to that promise. In that process he himself began to live more deeply into his own calling to bear witness and to tell the truth.

And if the truth about his country was that its leaders were willing to employ violence as a foreign policy tool, then he had to insist that they stop doing that. For he knew from the teachings of Jesus that violence only begets violence, and that we're called to make peace, not war.

If the truth is that his country invested more in building weapons than in building schools or in feeding the world's poor, then he had to insist we stop doing that, for he knew from the teachings of Jesus that God is not on the side of the powerful; God is on the side of the poor.

If the truth is that black people could not drink the same water as white people, or sit in the same theaters, or give birth to their children in the same hospitals, then he had to speak out against such dehumanizing discrimination because he knew that in Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female.

He knew that if all are equal before God then all must be equal before the law and in the courts and in the schools and the churches and the hospitals and the colleges and the universities and the bathrooms and the board rooms.

But it turned out that his country didn't like hearing the truth about itself, wasn't ready to hear the truth about itself.

And so his country fought back with fire hoses and guard dogs.

Many of us look back now with shame and indignation on the struggle for civil rights. We wonder how could such things have happened in a land like ours? How could one man who was brave enough to insist that we live up to our founding principles, how could we have harassed and killed him?

As sad as all that is retrospectively, perhaps it's really not all that surprising.

No one ever likes hearing the hard truths about themselves. I suspect that anyone who's been in a long-term relationship can remember a time when your partner or spouse shared with you a hard truth, something you didn't know about yourself. But can anyone remember enjoying that?

Honey, you snore so loudly I can't sleep in the same bed with you. Sweetheart, did you know you slurp your soup? Darling, I can't help but notice you spend more on green fees than you do on the children.

Anyone ever been there?

I imagine the same is true for parents whose dear children are kind enough to share with them the truth about mommy and daddy as they see it, and are guileless enough not to know better.

Daddy, why do you only put a dollar in the offering plate? Mommy, I don't like it when you shout at me. It makes me feel scared.

It's not fun to have our shadows brought into the light, to have our shortcomings revealed. And probably most of us have at one time or another responded with our own version of firehoses and guard dogs - a blast of water, teeth bared and growling.

Friends, we need this holiday, Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. We need it because even 40 years later we still have a long way to go until America lives up to its promise as a country. Until we learn to make peace, not war. Until we care about our poor as much as we care about our weapons or about keeping our taxes as low as possible, even as our public schools and roads and social programs deteriorate.

And certainly many of us feel strongly that we can't sit idly by while dozens, even hundreds of fully qualified and wonderfully gifted members of our churches are denied the right to respond to their own sense of call and to be ordained as ministers, elders and deacons.

But perhaps there's a more personal reason we need this holiday. I sometimes think there's a George Wallace alive and well in each of us, ready to call out the national guard when our interests or our hold on power is threatened. Or when our deeper truths are brought into the light.

And that speaks not only to why we need this holiday, but why we need each other.

Martin Luther King, Jr., held a vision of a truly United States of America, one nation under God, with liberty and justice for all. A vision he held onto passionately until the day he died.

But that civic vision lay on top of a deeper, spiritual vision, a vision of the Beloved Community. For King, the Beloved Community was not a place where segregation was merely illegal, but a place where people were valued for who they are, treasured for their gifts, and celebrated just for being a child of God.

The NT name for that community is the ecclasia . In old fashioned, institutional language we call it the church. Over the years we've dressed the church up in all sorts of institutional garb, but it was never meant to wear those clothes.

From its founding the church was always meant to be a living community, a place where the process of conversion continues for all of us. Where the point of preaching is not just to make converts but to make a new family. Where the point of worship is not to entertain us but to draw us closer to God to thus transform us.

And so, dearly beloved, we need this holiday, but we need each other even more. Because whether its in a community of two, in the context of a long-term relationship, or in the ecclesia, the community of God's people, that's where we learn the truth about ourselves.

It's in the hurly burly of our life together that our love is tested made real. Where our faith is tested and made real. Where we are tested and made real.

In the end, that test comes down to one simple question. They'll know you are my disciples by your love, Jesus said. By the simple and profound and imperfect and ever-improving ways we love and serve one another in Christ's name.