Invocation Delivered at the Funeral of John Wesley Dobbs at Big Bethel AME Church
Author: King, Martin Luther, Jr.
Date: September 2, 1961?
Location: Atlanta, Ga.?
Genre: Sermon
Topic: Martin Luther King, Jr. - Career in Ministry
Details
King delivers the invocation at the funeral service for family friend and Atlanta community leader John Wesley Dobbs, who died at age seventy-nine. He praises Dobbs’s personal life and social activism: “We thank Thee for his matchless love and affection for his wife and children and for the example that he has left for all of us to follow.”1 On 21 September 1961, Dobbs’s wife, Irene, thanked King for his “words of inspiration and consolation,” which “helped to sustain our spiritual strength.” The following transcript is taken from an audio recording.
May we pray. Eternal God, before whose face the generations rise and fall. In moments made dark by the mystery of death, we are usually so absolved in our natural sadness that we find it difficult to raise our voices in joyous thanksgiving to Thee. But today, we pause to pay our last tribute of respect to one of Thy servants whose life has been so packed with purpose and so saturated with meaningful achievements that our usual “Lord, have mercies” are transformed into a joyous “Lord, we thank Thee.” And so, like a mighty chorus we cry out to Thee, thank Thee for the life of John Wesley Dobbs. [Audience:] (Amen, Yeah)
We thank Thee for his Christian commitment and for his dedicated public service. We thank Thee for his love for people (Yes) and his unswerving devotion to the cause of freedom and human dignity. Especially do we thank Thee for the beauty of his family life, for his greatness as a husband and his magnanimity as a father. We thank Thee for his matchless love and affection for his wife and children (Yes) and for the example that he has left for all of us to follow.2 (Go ahead) In these days when all too many people look upon marriage as little more than a convenient arrangement to be entered at will and dissolved at whim, grant, O God, that the nobility of the family life of John Wesley Dobbs will remind us anew (Yes) that marriage is holy ground (Yeah sir), and that through its sacred portals men and women enter the realm of their immortality. (Yes) We pray, O God, for this bereaved family, for this devoted wife, who for lo these many years has surrounded him with a strong canopy of love and loyalty. And for these lovely daughters (Yes), whose accomplishments individually and collectively have plunged against cloud-filled nights of oppression new and blazing stars of inspiration. (Yeah) Grant, O God, that they will gain a little consolation from the universality of this experience, realizing that death is the irreducible common denominator of all men (Yeah), that it is not an aristocracy for some of the people, but a democracy for all of the people. (Yeah) Grant, O God, that they will be strengthened by their awareness of Thy divine presence. (Yes) Help them to realize that like the ever-flowing waters of the river (Yeah), life has its moments of drought and its moments of flood. Like the ever-recurring cycle of the seasons, life has the piercing chill of its winters (Yeah) and the glittering sunlight of its summers. Help us to know and help them to know that in all of the changes and the vicissitudes of life (Yes) Thou art forever with Thy children. And that Thou art able in our most difficult moments to lift us from the fatigue of despair to the buoyancy of hope and transform dark and desolate valleys of disappointment into sunlit paths of inner peace.
And, O God, grant that all of us will gain consolation from our Christian faith, which reminds us that man is immortal. (Yeah) May we go out with this invincible surmise (Yes), convinced that death is not a period which ends this great sentence of life (No), but a comma (Yeah) that punctuates it to more loftier significance.3 Death is not a blind alley that leads the human race into a state of nothingness, but an open door that leads men into life eternal.4 (Yeah) And now, O God, as we come to the afternoon of the earthly departure of this princely servant of humanity, we do not come here to question Thee (No), but to praise Thee (Yeah, Yes) for giving to Atlanta, for giving to Georgia (Yeah), for giving to the Masons, for giving to America (Yes), such a noble life that has for seventy-nine years stood as a refreshing oasis in the midst of a desert world sweltering with the heat of oppression and cynicism.5 And allow us, O God, to say to him as Horatio said at the death of Hamlet (Yes), “Good night, sweet prince (Yes), and may the flight of angels take Thee to Thy eternal rest.”6 In the name and spirit of Jesus we pray. Amen. (Holy Jesus)
1. William Holmes Borders, pastor of Wheat Street Baptist Church in Atlanta, delivered the eulogy (Big Bethel AME Church, Program, Funeral service for John Wesley Dobbs, 2 September 1961).
2. Dobbs had six daughters. The King and Dobbs families became well acquainted when the Kings moved to Boulevard Street, near the Dobbs’s house, in 1941. Their children played together.
3. Amos John Traver, The Christ Who Is All (Philadelphia: The United Lutheran Publication House, 1929), p. 95.
4. King paraphrases from Victor Hugo’s poem “Shall We Live Again” (Grenville Kleiser, comp., Models for Study: Practical English Series [New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1911], pp. 51–52: “The tomb is not a blind alley; it is a thoroughfare. It closes on the twilight, it opens on the dawn”).
5. Dobbs was grand master of the Prince Hall Masons of Georgia from 1932 to 1961.
6. Cf. Hamlet, act 5, scene 2, lines 312–313.
Source: JWD-ARC, John Wesley Dobbs Family Papers, Amistad Research Center, New Orleans, La.