Redstate
The Street Sweeper
By Erick Erickson
August 27th, 2013 

August 28, 2013, is the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It is a very good speech. But it is not my favorite Martin Luther King, Jr. speech. My favorite is little known and even less remembered. It is a speech no leader in America on a stage such as he commanded would ever think to give. It is a speech about individuals being the best they can be as the beginning of their way in life and finding God as the end. 

King’s “Street Sweeper” speech, which is more properly called “The Three Dimensions of a Complete Life” was a variation of a theme he went back and forth to over the years. He gave this particular speech to New Covenant Baptist Church in Chicago, IL, on April 9, 1967. 

It’s common title of “The Street Sweeper” speech comes from this passage: 

What I’m saying to you this morning, my friends, even if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; (Go ahead) sweep streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, “Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.” 

If you can’t be a pine on the top of a hill 

Be a scrub in the valley—but be 

The best little scrub on the side of the hill, 

Be a bush if you can’t be a tree. 

If you can’t be a highway just be a trail 

If you can’t be the sun be a star; 

It isn’t by size that you win or fail— 

Be the best of whatever you are.

And when you do this, when you do this, you’ve mastered the length of life. (Yes) 

This onward push to the end of self-fulfillment is the end of a person’s life. Now don’t stop here, though. You know, a lot of people get no further in life than the length. They develop their inner powers; they do their jobs well. But do you know, they try to live as if nobody else lives in the world but themselves? (Yes) And they use everybody as mere tools to get to where they’re going. (Yes) They don’t love anybody but themselves. And the only kind of love that they really have for other people is utilitarian love. You know, they just love people that they can use. (Well) 

A lot of people never get beyond the first dimension of life. They use other people as mere steps by which they can climb to their goals and their ambitions. These people don’t work out well in life. They may go for awhile, they may think they’re making it all right, but there is a law. (Oh yeah) They call it the law of gravitation in the physical universe, and it works, it’s final, it’s inexorable: whatever goes up can come down. You shall reap what you sow. (Yeah) God has structured the universe that way. (Yeah) And he who goes through life not concerned about others will be a subject, victim of this law. 

So I move on and say that it is necessary to add breadth to length. Now the breadth of life is the outward concern for the welfare of others, as I said. (Yeah) And a man has not begun to live until he can rise above the narrow confines of his own individual concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. 

But the speech begins and ends in a higher plane. King lays out three dimensions in life. The length of life is “the inward concern for one’s own welfare.” The breadth of life is “the outward concern for the welfare of others. “The height of life is the upward reach for God.” King used John’s vision of the city of God being of equal length, breadth, and height to draw out this imagery that started his speech. 

He ended his speech with a rejection of atheism… 

Read the rest of the article at Redstate