We All Need Heroes and Heroines. Thanks Rev. King!

“The history of struggle is rich with stories of heroes and heroines - some of them leaders, some of them followers, all of them deserve to be remembered.”                --Nelson Mandela

I’ve always needed heroes and heroines in my life. Women and men, who, by the ways they live or lived, inspire me. Folks who by their life examples, make me want to just be a better person. To take whatever gifts God gives to me and then to use them, not for self alone but also to make the world a better place as well.

Who is your hero? Your heroine?

I discovered my first hero at eight years of age, a time when so many of us first find someone larger than life, someone to look up to. He was a baseball player named Carl Yastrzemski who played left field for the Boston Red Sox. For me, he was a Greek god-like person, who had seemingly superhuman powers to bend the will of the world to himself. Yaz was his nickname. (Is that cool or what?)

When me and the neighborhood boys would play wiffle ball on endless summer days in the backyard, I always tried to copy Yaz’s unusual batting stance. He held the bat so high above his head and at such a tilted angle. He looked like a coiled machine, ready to spring forth in an explosion of power.  He hit the ball over Fenway Park’s Green Monster. I hit the ball over the rusty chain link fence that marked the border and the back boundary of our playing field.

Then I learned my first lesson about heroes. He was fallible.

Heroes are finally just humans with feet of clay like you and I. That truth came home to me on the final day of the season in 1978 when he was the last batter in a one game playoff against our nemesis, the New York Yankees. I huddled by the radio that September afternoon and listened to every pitch, strike and hit with worry and hope, especially in the bottom of the ninth when Yaz came up to the plate with two out and the Sox losing 5-4.

And then Yaz popped out. Game over. We lost. Say it ain’t so Yaz.

Then I grew up a bit more and grew into my next hero, just as I realized my call to work in the church. I began that journey and got to go to the school where the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had attended, Boston University School of Theology. It was in Boston that he also met his wife, Coretta, and they both fell in love.

And so I discovered a new hero, MLK.

He showed me that a preacher didn’t just stay in the pulpit preaching flowery rhetoric and praying poetic prayers. A preacher was also supposed to get out into the streets and world too, and take the moral lessons of religion and bring them into the social realm.  King put his life on the line to help secure the civil rights that all God’s children in America are entitled to, not just legally, but morally too, as a matter of justice. King spoke out on racism, and also on the sin of poverty in America and the waste of human life that marked the Vietnam War. King used non-violence and peaceful protest to get the message of radical love across to society, especially to his opponents.  That unwillingness to seek an eye for an eye confounded his enemies.

Like Yaz, like all the folk we see as saints, King was human too. He did not live without temptation and stumbles, but I’ve learned that the best heroines and heroes live fully human lives, and become vehicles for love, hope and peace to break into the world, not through angelic hosts but instead through cracked and earthen vessels.

Like Rev. King. Like you. Like me. 

And then Pastor King was murdered, cut down by an assassin’s bullet, killed not just by a gun but by hatred too and prejudice. America’s national sins that still burn brightly and call forth for more heroines and heroes to act for the common good. That’s the final lesson I’ve learned from my heroes.

Heroic work takes time, commitment, discipline, and a willingness to embody goodness in how we live.  Heroic work comes not overnight as some flash in the pan star or hollow celebrity shout outs, no.  Heroines practice, practice, practice.  Heroes try and try and try again. 

My new hero, new heroine? Folks who protest injustice with their feet and their votes.  Humble folk who serve the least among us in our world: the poor, the hungry, the forgotten, the lonely. People who see all the challenges our nation faces and yet they refuse to give in or to give up. They keep on keeping on.  They live hope.

Maybe you are the hero or the heroine our world has been waiting for. What better time that this Martin Luther King Jr. long weekend to find out. 

Be a hero. Be a heroine. You can do it.

The Reverend John F. Hudson is Senior Pastor of the Pilgrim Church, United Church of Christ, in Sherborn, Massachusetts (pilgrimsherborn.org). He blogs at sherbornpastor.blogspot.com and is a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute at Saint John’s University in Collegeville, Minnesota. For twenty-five years he was a columnist whose essays appeared in newspapers throughout Massachusetts and Rhode Island. He has served churches in New England since 1989. For comments, please be in touch: pastorjohn@pilgrimsherborn.org.