“Somebody Must Have Sense Enough to Dim the Lights:” Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Sermon about the Power of Love

Strength comes from love.

In November 1957, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave a sermon at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. His theme was Jesus Christ’s commandment to “love your enemies.” King applied that moral precept to the growing Civil Rights movement, insisting that hate must be met with love, and violence with peace. King laid out many of the themes that would come to mark the movement. He warned that hate endangered everyone. He advocated nonviolent resistance and called for the Western democracies to uphold their noble values. Centrally, he insisted on an attitude of compassion and love toward one’s enemies. His sermon delved deeply into Christian theology and political theory. His practical application – the philosophy of civil disobedience – would arise from moral imperatives.

King’s proposition must seem like a massive paradox: for he taught that true strength comes from love and goodness, never from violence and hatred.

King’s eloquence and depth of thought belies the fact that, defying his physician’s orders, he dragged himself out of a sickbed to give this speech. Like most good preachers, he based his sermon on a text, in this case, Matthew 5:43-45 from the Bible.

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“Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbour, and hate thine enemy. But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.”

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King felt that his argument was not only moral, but practical. To King, love overpowers hate by its very nature. He explained that by “love,” he meant what the ancient Greeks called agape, which is unselfish love. Such unconditional love often runs against our impulses. Instead, our impulses often drive us to respond harshly when someone wrongs us. This inclination, King told the congregation, only makes things worse:

“Hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. If I hit you and you hit me and I hit you back and you hit me back and go on, you see, that goes on ad infinitum. It just never ends.”

King told a story about when he and his brother were driving across Tennessee. The other drivers were not dimming their lights. King’s brother threatened to shine his brights at the next car. But King protested that this could only cause an accident:

“Somebody must have sense enough to dim the lights, and that is the trouble, isn’t it? That as all of the civilizations of the world move up the highway of history, so many civilizations, having looked at other civilizations that refused to dim the lights, and they decided to refuse to dim theirs.”

That simple analogy led King to a powerful point. If nations respond to anger with more anger, if people respond to hate with more hate, we enter the down-ramp to mutual destruction. That is why King insisted that hate must be confronted with love. Hate does not defeat hate. That never works, he said. Instead, love was the universe’s greatest power:

“Somewhere, somebody must have some sense. Men must see that force begets force, hate begets hate, toughness begets toughness. And it is all a descending spiral, ultimately ending in destruction for all and everybody. Somebody must have sense enough and morality enough to cut off the chain of hate and the chain of evil in the universe. And you do that by love.”

African Americans in the 1950s suffered from horrible injustices. Especially in the states of the former Confederacy, African Americans lacked the most basic rights that other people took for granted. They could not stay in nice hotels or even drink at a cold water fountain. Laws excluded them from the best schools. A Black person in the South registered to vote only at the risk of her life. Emmitt Till had been lynched a scant two years before King’s sermon, and the Mississippi Burning murders awaited the future. By no stretch of the imagination was United States of 1957 a free country for African Americans.

Fannie Lou Hamer’s Voting Rights Speech, "Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired"

Yet, King insisted that monstrous injustices must be met by love.

King’s sermon gives us much to think about in 2022. Recently, people have been going to school board meetings, screaming in rage to stop their children from learning Black history. King’s message would be to confront such hatred with love, not anger.

Similarly, when people in 2022 give in to fear and vote for the angriest, meanest politician because they think that person is strong, do they not contradict King’s teaching? And was King not right? Strong leaders like Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin did not keep their people safe. Did they?

King’s speech taught a powerful lesson. Isn’t that the best reason to give a speech? And will we listen to his lesson? Can we, as a nation, as a human species, learn that love truly is more powerful than hate? Or will we succumb to fear and ignorance? Can Christian believers find the courage to love their enemies? Not to give in to evil; that’s not what King meant, but to love their enemies? To face down evil with good? Many years later, King said that, “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Can people summon the courage to believe that this is true?

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Martin Luther King, Jr. Said, "The Law Can't Change the Heart, but It Can Restrain the Heartless"

Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Speech, "Love, Law, and Civil Disobedience"

Martin Luther King, Jr. at the Mountaintop in Memphis, Tennessee: A Speech for the Ages

Rabbi Cahana's Sermon about the Summer of Love: Is Love the Answer to Nazism?

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P.S.: Dexter Avenue Baptist Church is now on the National Register of Historic Places