The final Christmas sermon Dr. King gave begins: “This Christmas season finds us a rather bewildered human race. We have neither peace within nor peace without. Everywhere, paralyzing fears harrow people by day and haunt them by night. Our world is sick with war; everywhere we turn, we see its ominous possibilities.” His words, spoken in 1967 as the war in Vietnam was escalating, describe the situation of the world today all too well. The ongoing genocide in Gaza and the growing risk of a wider war in the Middle East, the war of aggression began by Russia to subsume Ukraine, civil wars in Sudan and Myanmar, and the increasing threat of conflict between the United States of America and China leave me overwhelmed and tempt me to give in to despair. Additionally, the most recent election in America leaves me in fear for many things, including the future of our democracy, the safety of my friends who are transgender, and the well-being of immigrants in our country.

Acknowledging the evil in our midst is necessary if we wish to hope. Without a genuine reckoning with reality, we can, at best, achieve a naive optimism that produces platitudes rather than genuine wisdom or solutions. However, despite evil, the Christian story does not give in to despair. King has been formed by this story, so he continues his sermon, “And yet, my friends, the Christmas hope for peace and goodwill toward all men can no longer be dismissed as a kind of pious dream of some utopian.” Later in this sermon, he states, “We can’t ever give up. We must work passionately and unrelentingly for first-class citizenship. We must never let up in our determination to remove every vestige of segregation and discrimination from our nation, but we shall not in the process relinquish our privilege to love.” Amid national and international circumstances at least as bad as ours, and in the face of continual threats upon his work as a pastor and activist, as well as his very life, King refused to give in to despair.

This Christmas, let us draw hope from the story of God coming to live among us. God chose to become incarnate at a time when his people were colonized by an imperial power that had little or no regard for their human dignity. Jesus was born into poverty, the son of an unwed mother. Shortly after his birth, he and his family were forced to flee as refugees to escape the genocidal intentions of a brutal despot. Once they returned, he was raised in an impoverished region looked down upon by many of his people; indeed, upon hearing of Jesus, the future apostle Nathanael jeered, “Can anything good come from Nazareth?” This context does not suggest much reason to hope. However, God the God that King worshiped was able to “make a way out of no way.”

God enters directly into the cruelty and evil of our world in order to give us reason for hope. Theologian Keri Day has this to say about hope:

“Despite death and darkness, hope is an audacious conviction that genuine newness in history is possible. But this hope or genuine conviction in another future is not based on the hegemonic grid of meaning within the present social order. These possible other futures are based on the radical social practices and defiant liberative projects of those who are marginalized, as these groups articulate new visions and meanings of love, freedom, and justice”

(Day, Religious Resistance to Neoliberalism, 162).

Day rightly notes that our faith and hope are not in the status quo but in our God, who works with us to bring about new life. Due to God’s presence with us, and in particular, God’s solidarity with those who have their backs up against the wall, we are called to possess, in King’s words, an “audacious faith in the future.”

I don’t know exactly how to live into this new future inaugurated by Christ’s birth, given our present circumstances. Yet, there are two principles I believe we ought to hold in tension if we wish to move towards the realization of the Beloved Community. The first is a commitment to what King calls a positive peace. Positive peace refuses to ignore injustice in order to maintain the status quo. Instead, it seeks genuine justice and equality. It demands that we recognize and respect the dignity of persons and forge systems and structures that do the same. When those of us with privilege are tempted to look away and ignore the evil and suffering in our midst, we must remember that our commitment is not to the absence of conflict but rather to the fulfillment of justice.

The second principle I put forward is also based on the commitment to the dignity of all persons. Said simply, we must refuse to deny the dignity of those people who oppose us. In my experience, it is relatively easy for progressives to talk about the dignity of the poor and oppressed, and much more difficult to speak about the dignity of those who, by action or inaction, promote xenophobia, racism, misogyny, or any form of bigotry and hatred. Yet, if we hate or dehumanize those individuals enmeshed in systems of evil, we give in to what we are fighting to prevent. King, in this sermon and in various other places, states, “I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many sheriffs, too many white citizens’ councilors, and too many Klansmen of the South to want to hate, myself; and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear.” Hatred not only lessens the possibility of converting one’s opponent, it also deforms us at a fundamental level. Hatred makes us less human, even if we mean to use our hatred for a righteous cause.

Thus, while we must oppose those who support or directly perpetrate harm, we must do so through our love and respect for human dignity. To quote King’s sermon one more time, he states, “if we are to have peace on earth and goodwill toward men [we must be concerned about] the nonviolent affirmation of the sacredness of all human life.” King had witnessed first-hand many brutal atrocities committed by those who opposed him. He, more than most, had reason to hate those who terrorized, beat, and ultimately killed far too many people that he held dear. Yet, he never gave up on hope and love. So, while it may be hard for some of us to hope right now, we can draw strength from those who went before us. Mary, the mother of Jesus, was able to hope despite her circumstances that her son would change the world. For hundreds of years in America, enslaved Black people and, later, abolitionists hoped for the end of chattel slavery despite the seeming impossibility of ending the peculiar institution. And, Martin Luther King Jr., along with many who preceded and supported him, hoped for the end of Jim Crow segregation in the face of the odds stacked against them. In the present, we do not have reason to think that the path forward will be easy, but we have reason to hope that God is still present and active with us, and will ultimately make the New Jerusalem, the Beloved Community, a reality.