A Grander Hope

On a sweltering day in August, 1963, with the shadow of Lincoln as his backdrop and 250,000 civil rights marchers sprawled on the national mall before him, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. launched into his address, entitled, at the time, “Normalcy, never again”.  

Though hardly common knowledge today, arguably the most famous speech in recent American history commenced not as a speech centered on a dream, but rather as a speech built upon a disaster, a “bad check.” African-Americans, King explained, had been given a “check” of freedom and opportunity at the Emancipation Proclamation, one hundred years prior to the march, and clearly now, in 1963, America had defaulted on this check.

Mahalia Jackson, the “reigning queen of gospel,” watched intently from her vantage point on the platform behind Dr. King. Her heart-rending performance of “How I Got Over” set up Dr. King’s speech. Ten minutes into his prepared remarks she sensed the crowd restless, and the momentum slipping away.

She urged:  “Martin, tell them about the dream. Tell them about the dream.”

Martin took heed. Abandoning his prepared remarks built around the notion of a defaulted check, he turned to pursue a more promising direction: the dream. The dream of what could be, a Grander Story.

If you watch the film on YouTube of the occasion, the turn from “disaster” to ”dream,” and the resulting energy, is palpable.

Surely our situation within the university in no way compares to the horrendous injustices incarnate in our civil rights history; we cite King here merely to note how in this speech he abandoned the theme of “disaster” to lead change via the power of a “dream.”

In light of the stories we often share here, we pause to ponder what God might do if a generation of Christ- following academics, in schools all across the country, rallied together to live their personal and academic pursuits in light of the grander story?

What if there were thousands of Christ-following professors wedding together their faith in Christ and their love of their discipline? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

We do not know the challenges on the horizon, nor the mysterious ways of God, but in light of God’s grander story we dream of the role they might play in ushering in a grander future.