It was geniuses who engineered the Civil Rights Movement, with all of its moving parts and volatile variables. And when I sit back and reflect on the movement as a whole and its individual pieces and heroes and moments, I cannot help but to marvel at the extremely concentrated and potent nature of the sovereignty of God that those days and years demonstrated. It was more than just luck, hard work, courage, and inspirational speeches. They were being resourced by the grace of the God who empowers and inspires rightness and shalom, and that aids the righteous resistance of oppression. It was, indeed, a Movement of God.

Today marks the 50th anniversary of one of those moments. And as I reflect on Martin Luther King, Jr. and the words he uttered, I feel extremely overwhelmed.

I am overwhelmed with gratitude. My life is can be seen as the fruit of God’s sovereignty in those days. My parents and my grandparents have owned houses in suburbs. They excelled in jobs that, but for God’s sovereignty, they would have had no access to. As I grew up, I was able to attend an almost exclusively White public school in an upper-class neighborhood inside an upper-class neighborhood. I was a cub scout. I was able to sing in a prestigious children’s choir. I attended a prestigious and established public university. I got a degree. I have grown in my faith in congregations and communities that have had Blacks, Whites, and Asian-Americans in the majority.

But I am also overwhelmed with worry. I am worried because of the increasingly attractive idea that justice, rightness, and loyalty to Jesus don’t have much to do with each other.

In case you don’t know, the CRM was not the first phase in my people’s quest to be seen as full human beings . Since slavery, Black America has been fighting and clawing to secure a measure of dignity in popular society. Our attempts at this were multi-faceted, based in policy, religion, the marketplace, and academia. Largely, however, those efforts had failed, and it seemed that Jim Crow, the Black Codes, and the forces upholding them were more powerful than our resolve.

When Martin became the leader of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he was a pastor, committed to Jesus and committed to serving his people in the context of that commitment. His leadership, therefore, was located in his loyalty to Jesus himself, and not in his oratorical ability, nor in the significance of the moment in which he found himself.

If you want to know why the CRM was prophetic, it is simply this: the ethics of the Movement were rooted in the Gospel of Jesus and in an actual commitment to Jesus himself. The Movement was prophetic as a function of the effects that the Kingdom of God is meant to have on the broader society.

But when I hear people talk about the CRM and about Martin, I hear less and less about how Martin and the leaders of the movement were moved by Jesus himself, and the ethics he incarnated. However (speaking in caricatures), given how liberal Christianity has become about social justice devoid of the power of God, and conservative Christianity has become about maintaining a relationship with Jesus without following him into the renewal and restoration of all things, I’m not terribly surprised. No matter which way you look, Jesus looks irrelevant when it comes to economic and ethnic justice and rightness.

But I have a dream. I have a dream that the Church, the hands and feet and arms and legs of Jesus himself, will once again find and live in its destiny as the expression of and invitation into God’s Kingdom on earth, the way that he is inviting all humanity and all creation back into the fullness of its dignity in Himself. Hear the words of Jesus, recorded by his beloved disciple:

Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it. – John 14.12-14

Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing. Whoever does not abide in me is thrown away like a branch and withers; such branches are gathered, thrown into the fire, and burned. If you abide in me, and my words abide in you, ask for whatever you wish, and it will be done for you.– John 15.4-7

If I’m honest, these words seem foolishly impossible to me, but only because I’m deeply fascinated by what my life (and the Church) would look like if we believed them. So fascinated, in fact, that I’ve spent the last 8 years (and hopefully the next 8 or more) of my life among university students, helping them and letting them help me to make decisions to choose into life in the Kingdom of God, fully submitted to Jesus and fully partnering with him as he makes all things new in their midst. It has been students that have helped me to press deeply into the implications of Jesus’ ethics and supernatural power in my own life and in the lives of this student generation.

And so I have a dream, that when we all finally find ourselves in Jesus, fully loyal and dependent and submitted to the source and champion for our dignity, we will be obsessed with things like ethnic reconciliation and gender equity and economic generosity, because those things are in Jesus and they are evident in the works he did on earth. We will do what Jesus did, here and now, and we will do even greater things. We will be compelled to ask him to resource rightness and justice on the earth with his own supernatural generosity. And he will do so, for His glory and our good.