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Good morning. I once asked a group of youth workers to suggest to me an eleventh commandment. One said, ‘Live the dream.’ I regret to say I laughed, because it sounded like such a cliché.

But one man did live the dream. He dreamt that his children would be judged not by the colour of their skin, but by the content of their character. For twelve years Martin Luther King led a movement that lived a dream. That led him finally to Memphis, Tennessee. There he described how God had allowed him to climb the mountain, and to look over. He said he’d seen the Promised Land. He realised he might not get there. Yet he believed that his people would indeed reach the Promised Land. The following day, at the age of 39, he was assassinated outside his motel room.

In the book of Deuteronomy Moses comes to the verge of the Promised Land, but he never gets to enter it. That fact becomes a symbol later in Israel’s memory for the way no one has any entitlement. Somehow salvation always remains just out of reach.

There’s a lot of heartsearching on the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King’s death about what’s sometimes called the failure of the success of the civil rights movement. In the seven years I lived in America, I saw just how much the MLK public holiday had domesticated King’s legacy, making his name an all-purpose acronym for liberation and justice. There has, of course, been the first black president. But I wonder whether the place of African Americans is really more cherished in the United States today than on the day King died. As long as some of her children walk in internal exile, it remains a question whether any of America’s people can call themselves truly free.

A number of years ago I saw a dream of my own unravel. I thought everything was going well and then watched as it all fell apart. I went to see my bishop. He said, ‘What was the worst thing about it?’ And I replied, ‘I think maybe for the first time in my life, I’d dared to dream.’ And I wept. He looked at me tenderly and said, ‘You’re going to need time – but you need to learn to dream again.’

Maybe that youth worker wasn’t as foolish as I supposed. Martin Luther King had a dream – of equality, justice and nonviolence. Something important in America died when he died. That makes today one of sadness as well as pride. But perhaps the best way to mark this anniversary and honour his legacy is to ensure his dream doesn’t remain just a dream – and instead, to live his dream, so that America, and the rest of us, may learn to dream again.

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