Impatient Hope

Impatient Hope

January 18, 2026 | Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Sunday

Guest Speakers: Lani Bennett & Jared Kieling

Download a printable PDF of this sermon here.

 

On the eve of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, we are honoring his belief in the transformative power of faith and hope. It lifted up a movement, and it inspires us today, fifty-eight years after he was murdered.

We’re grateful for this chance to share our reflections about Dr. King’s faith and hope as fifteen of us traveled to Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Like three Plymouth groups that preceded us, we came back with an enriched understanding of enslavement, systemic racism, and the biblical roots of the Civil Rights Movement.

Because our leaders, Mark and Leslie Swiggum, had established loving and deep relationships over the years—we were their forty-first group—we were able to meet eyewitnesses and Foot Soldiers of that movement. Hearing personal stories, knowing their names, sharing a meal, and being invited into their homes made their experiences real and unforgettable.

We feel a responsibility to say their names, and tell their stories, so that this significant history won’t be forgotten or erased. We want to introduce you to one woman, JoAnne Bland. She invited us into her home and is living with cancer now. JoAnne became an activist at eight years old when she attended a meeting presided over by Dr. King. She became a freedom fighter when she was told that once she had her freedom, she could spin on the twirly chairs at the drugstore counter. She was arrested at a demonstration and became the youngest person jailed. By the time JoAnne was eleven, she had been jailed thirteen times in cramped cells with dirty food and no privacy.

Stories like JoAnne’s carried us back in time, struggling to comprehend the scale of slavery and how its victims ever summoned the courage to confront it. In Montgomery’s historic slave market, we felt viscerally what we’d absorbed only in outline throughout our lives. Cotton and slaves were commodities in commerce, and slave traders were the richest men in town, by far. The economic value of America’s millions of enslaved persons exceeded the combined value of the nation’s railroads, factories, and banks, North and South. Generations were nameless. Families were destroyed.

After the Civil War, Southern states almost immediately created a successor system that used sharecropping, enforced illiteracy, denial of the vote, and humiliating so-called Black Laws. You could be arrested for being in town after sunset or have your church’s school bus pulled over “because it was too yellow.” JoAnne’s mother died in pregnancy in a “white” hospital waiting for a transfusion of “black blood.” Under Jim Crow, there were perverse, unwritten gotchas: You could not make eye contact with whites. You would fail nonsensical poll tests, like guessing how many seeds are in a watermelon. It was all kept in place by terror—terror of shootings, drownings, and being burned alive.

We were moved to tears by eloquent testimonies from surviving Foot Soldiers. We stood wordless on desolate sites of lynchings. We pondered the fluttering flags and braggadocious plaques in Selma’s lovingly tended Confederate cemetery. We stepped out on the grim little bridge where Emmett Till’s fourteen-year-old body was heaved into the Tallahatchie River seventy years ago, weighted down with a cotton-gin fan barbed-wired to his neck.

As we crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, we recalled JoAnne’s story of seeing fellow marchers beaten by the police, and her sister needing forty stitches from blows to her head. The marchers succeeded on their third try and completed a five-day trudge through heat and rain and mud to rally triumphantly, fifty-thousand strong, at the capitol in Montgomery. That led directly to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Our question was: How did people like JoAnne summon the courage, endurance, and abundant love that we witnessed?

The birthplace of the twentieth-century resistance to all this was the Black Church, which had been a prophetic voice since the eighteenth century. This morning’s processional hymn, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” now referred to as the Black National Anthem, was written back in 1899.

So, as the modern Civil Rights Movement got going, Black churches were pivotal, not just as places to gather and organize, but as sources of moral and strategic leadership. It was through the church that black Christians embraced and were trained in Dr. King’s nonviolent direct action.

It seemed an impossible idea—paradoxical on its face—that non-violent civil disobedience could enable an unarmed, impoverished, disenfranchised, and scorned people to overthrow an omnipotent system, rooted in hate and violence. Could Christian Black leaders, charismatic as they were, really promise to a people so hemmed in by brutality, that their deliverance could be brought about by taking beatings, withholding vengeance, and practicing forgiveness?

They would be putting Jesus’s law of love to the test.

Marchers and demonstrators signed oaths not to retaliate, even in the face of injury and death. How could they know that God would be with them?

They looked to the pulpit. We learned about the courage of Ralph Abernathy, Fred Shuttlesworth, and many other church leaders.  Preeminent among them was Martin Luther King Jr.  Upon hearing him speak, many in the congregation felt the Lord had laid hands upon him. We heard that Dr. King brought the three ‘Emms’ to the cause —Money, Media, and Motivation.

That last ingredient, Motivation, rested on Christian Faith, and was sustained by Hope.

Faith, according to Dr. King, is more than an assurance of things unseen. “Faith,” he said, “is taking the first step when you don’t see the whole staircase.”

King’s faith was rooted in scripture, and in his understanding of God’s laws, which condemned segregation as morally wrong and sinful. “We will win our freedom,” he wrote, “because the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are embodied in our demands.”

Guiding him always through dark times was the light of Hope.

Hope must become more than a reassuring voice that calms us so we can wait and trust. A good description of the hope that Dr. King speaks about is in the Soul Circle curriculum used at Plymouth:

“Faith, whenever it develops into hope, causes not rest but unrest, not patience but impatience.”

Hope, in other words, helps us to see that things should be different, that things can be different.

When hope’s holy impatience becomes part of us, we start acting as if we are worthy of whatever rights we are demanding, whether for ourselves or for someone else. That stance, in turn, convinces others that we all have waited long enough.

One of our favorite expressions of this impatient hope was spoken by activist Fannie Lou Hamer in 1964: “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired!”

In Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” begun on scraps of paper smuggled out by friends, King responded with deep disappointment to criticisms from white clergy who wanted him to “wait” and to call a moratorium on demonstrations and sit-ins. “Wait” was synonymous with “never.”  King replied that “We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights.” 

King pointed out that he stood in the middle between two opposing forces at work within the Negro community, as it was then called.

One was complacency—people so long oppressed that they had adjusted to segregation.

The other counterproductive force, ominously, was bitterness and hatred, embodied by Black Nationalists who were close to advocating violence.

King, echoing the Apostle Paul, proposed the more “Excellent Way” of love and nonviolent protest. “Love,” King wrote, “is the greatest force in the universe. It is the heartbeat of the moral cosmos. He who loves is a participant in the being of God.”

His people had suffered too many broken promises. King knew that it was time to act.

Black communities were getting spiritually prepared. But they were also impressively organized in battleground cities like Birmingham, Montgomery, Memphis, Little Rock.  Much of the credit, we were told, goes to Black women who set up infrastructure ahead of time—meetings, handouts, phone trees, carpools, word-of-mouth networks.  The Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted as long as it did, 382 days, because advance work had given that community alternative means of getting people transported.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott led directly to a Supreme Court ruling in 1956 that declared bus segregation unconstitutional.

So many other iconic acts of nonviolent resistance are preserved today in photographs and newsreels of marches, mass arrests, lunch-counter protests, children facing police dogs and fire hoses. But what about the inward, not-so-visible final challenge this devout people took on: to forgive their enemies. Was that really possible? Did that happen?

Well, we met foot soldiers once beaten and treated like dirt, who ultimately arrived not at hatred and vengeance, but at forgiveness, to which their faith in the words of Jesus led them.  It was an enormous ask then, and it still is, for us, in our era.

Foot Soldier Diane told us this about the here-and-now. “The Ku Klux Klan now wears suits. It’s happening again, and now it’s up to you.”  And indeed, we, too, have faced unjust laws that are out of harmony with the law of God. Any law that degrades human personality, says MLK, is unjust. Like Black people in the South, we have faith and hope to draw from.

Their examples of faith and impatient hope must keep inspiring us. Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, and author of Just Mercy, reminds us that “Injustice prevails where hopelessness persists.  Hope,” he says, “is our superpower.”

The fear that we feel when authorities terrorize our communities is tempered by Hope that we will see Justice.  Hope comforts us, but it also emboldens us.  It gives us a nudge.  If we pay attention, where might impatient hope take us now?

May our faith guide us, and our hope embolden us.  Let us follow the more Excellent Way and use our superpower as we work together for justice and peace.

May it be so.