On Martin Luther and Frederick Douglass

In the same week recently, the Episcopal Church commemorated the 474th anniversary of Martin Luther’s death, and the 125th anniversary of the death of Frederick Douglass. I presided at the daily service for “Theologian,” Martin Luther, and the one for “Prophetic Witness,” Frederick Douglass, at Saint Stephen’s.

At our church, we build our daily services around the commemoration of holy people, like Luther and Douglass, because of their relevance, not only for our inner lives but also to consider how we might choose to conduct ourselves differently. In the case of Martin Luther and Frederick Douglass, I see an opportunity to explore what is, I believe, a wonderful connectedness out of which we might begin to see a new path for ourselves.

As I thought about this connectedness, I looked for common elements and I found them in a well-known tale from the Desert Fathers.

“Master,” the disciple asked, “what can I do to free myself”? And the Holy One answered, “who was it who put you in chains”?

Martin Luther, 1483-1546

As I considered this little story, I realized that the ideas of personal responsibility and enslavement are the important elements to examine. The Master is telling the disciple that he can find freedom when he faces the fact that he put himself in chains-- that he enslaved himself. But now he has a choice. And the tale leads us to see that Luther and Douglass were able to break their own “inner chains” and, as a result, create significant institutional and social change.

In 1517, Martin Luther wrote and published the “Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgence,” the document that is at the very heart of the famous “95 Theses.” Luther’s opposition to the selling of indulgences by the Catholic Church in order to fund the building of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome was the breaking of the chains of Catholicism and the creation of a “reformed” Catholicism, which was to become the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Luther’s declaration, ”Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise; God help me! Amen” was not only the “breaking of the chains’’ but became the basis for a much more personal and engaged form of organized religion, in his case, Lutheranism. Luther’s own faith, grounded in a robust theology, could not tolerate the practices and theological thinking of the 16th-Century Roman Catholic church and its establishment, and he was willing to do everything he could to find a new way for organized religion, a way that was not the Catholic Church with which he knew he could not agree.

Frederick Douglass, 1818-1895

Born as a slave, Frederick Douglass fought his whole life against discrimination and enslavement of any kind and took perhaps his most public stand in 1847 when he founded “The North Star,” one of the first abolitionist newspapers in the U.S. and, in every issue, Douglass included the paper’s motto: Right is of no sex-Truth is of no color-God is the Father of us all and we are all brethren. While he was alive, Douglass did everything he could to break the chains of enslavement, becoming a renowned orator, writer, and public figure. One important stand Douglass took was against those churches that did not disassociate themselves from slavery. He used words from the Gospel of Matthew (23:4). They tie up heavy burdens, hard to bear, and lay themselves on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them. Not surprisingly, it is not hard to imagine Martin Luther using the same words from Matthew to describe the Catholic establishment of the 16th century.

As we come back to the Master and his disciple, it would seem to me that we can look to Martin Luther and Frederick Douglass as guides and models for our own personal journeys in faith and moral behavior. In taking seriously their lives and their witness, we must ask a hard question: What is keeping us from doing what we are called to do as people of Faith to break the “chains” of injustice all around us? Like Martin Luther and Frederick Douglass, we need to hear our lives telling us who we are and what we need to do.

—Father Peter Kountz