We remember Martin Luther King, Jr., frequently through the transcendent address delivered at the Lincoln Memorial in August, 1963, the peroration ending with the cadences envisioning a dream, as he articulated it, grounded in the prophet Isaiah and the Declaration of Independence—the dream of a nation under God where our life together confirms the self-evident truths of our all being created equal.

Or we recall the astounding reflection delivered on the eve of his assassination in Memphis, April 3, 1968, instilling a vast hope into the sanitation workers of that city, retelling his and the nation's thirteen-year human rights saga, reinvigorating a troubled nonviolent movement for social change, and with uncanny, prophetic incantations envisioning his own death amid the turmoil of cultural, social, economic and political disruption.

These two addresses possess an inimitable King signature, and ring the chords of our deepest loyalties to what we call the American creed and the Biblical faith.

But, while these rhetorical and spirit-filled moments in Washington and Memphis may serve as epiphanies for us, the decisive epiphany, the spiritual cataclysm in Dr. King's life, occurred on January 27, 1956, when as a just-turned twenty-seven-year-old Baptist Minister in Montgomery, Alabama, he found himself, because of his youth, his newness to the community and lack of closet skeletons, elected President of an almost ad hoc group of bus boycott enthusiasts known as the Montgomery Improvement Association. Some six weeks previously, Rosa Parks, an African-American seamstress on her way home from work, refused to give up her seat at the request of a white patron. Her refusal, arrest and prosecution led to a bus boycott. Montgomery reeled economically as buses ran empty and a huge citywide car pool aided thousands in their substitute trips to work and back home again.

Resistance surfaced. American apartheid took hold and furiously fought back. Martin Luther King fielded scores of telephone calls threatening, insulting, condemning, cursing. The police finally arrested him on a trumped-up charge of going thirty miles an hour in a twenty-five mile an hour zone, finger-printed him, threw him in a filthy gang cell, only to release him shortly as his colleagues bailed him out. He says he expected to be lynched.

That night he received another telephone call: "Nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now, and if you aren't out of this town in three days, we're going to blow your brains out and blow up your house."

Dr. King could not sleep. He walked the floor. He went to his kitchen. He brewed a cup of coffee. He sat at the table petrified his newborn daughter might be taken from him at any moment, that his wife, asleep in a nearby bedroom, would be taken from him or he from her. "I got to the point I couldn't take it any longer. I was weak. Something said to me, you can't call on Daddy King now, he's up in Atlanta a hundred seventy five miles away. You can't even call on Mama now. You've got to call on that Something your Daddy used to tell you about, that power that can make a way out of no way."

"And I discovered then that religion had to become real to me, and I had to know God for myself. And I bowed down over that cup of coffee. I will never forget it . . . I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, 'Lord, I'm down here trying to do what is right. I think I'm right. I think the cause we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I'm weak now. I'm faltering. I'm losing my courage. And I can't let people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage, they will begin to get weak.'"

Something happened. He continues: "And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, 'Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And lo I will be with you, even until the end of the world' . . . I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me, never to leave me alone.'"

That epiphany describes Dr. King's. pivotal spiritual experience. "Almost at once," he writes, "my fears began to pass from me. My uncertainty disappeared. I was ready to face anything. The outer situation remained the same, but God had given me inner calm." Three days later some anonymous cowards bombed his house. He calmly pled to hundreds of gathered angry black citizens that they continue to love their adversaries, and went on to say, "I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped this movement will not stop. If I am stopped our work will not stop, for we are doing what is right, we are doing what is just . . ." That speech, says one Montgomery policeman, saved his own life. "I knew now," writes King, "that our God is able to give us the interior resources to face the storm and problems of life. . ."

Our God is able. For the remainder of his ministry, on the road, at his church, in mass meetings, in jail, this theme sustained Martin Luther King, Jr., as it can sustain us. Only God is able, he said. "It is faith in (God) we must rediscover. With this faith we can transform bleak and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of joy and bring new light into the caves of pessimism . . . Come what may. God is able."

In light, then, of this transforming power of the Love of God in troubled, dreary and grim circumstance, let us stand and sing with gratitude and joy two radiant hymns of praise and anticipation, exuberantly confessing, "Our God is able."

II. ". . . tied in a single garment of destiny . . ."

In early 1967 Martin Luther King, Jr. went to the Bahamas to finish work on his book later entitled "Where Do We Go from Here? Chaos or Community?" He continued to fret over the economic differentials between Black and White, poor and rich and with his colleagues began plans for a Poor Peoples' Campaign in the summer of 1968 designed to pressure Congress and the President into significant legislative changes aimed at political and economic justice.

But something else began to capture his attention. He lost some of his top Lieutenants to a Spring Mobilization against the war in Vietnam. He started to see the war as a drain on the resources needed for the great Johnsonian war against poverty. He noted that approximately twice as many Black solders fought and died in Vietnam as white soldiers, and that it cost some $332,000 to kill one Vietnamese as compared to the $53.00 per poor person going toward the alleviation of poverty in his country. One afternoon, while sitting on that Bahamian porch eating lunch and leafing through some magazines he bought at the airport before his trip, Dr. King came across the January, 1967, issue of Ramparts Magazine. It contained an illustrated story entitled, "The children of Vietnam." The story included photographs of children badly wounded and burned by American napalm. One of his close associates remembers Dr. King's reaction:

"When he came to Ramparts Magazine he stopped. He froze as he looked at the pictures from Vietnam. He saw a picture of a Vietnamese mother holding her dead baby, a baby killed by our military. Then Martin just pushed the plate of food away from him. I looked up and said, 'Doesn't it taste any good?,' and he answered, 'Nothing will ever taste any good to me until I do everything I can to end that war.'"

And he did do everything he could. First in Los Angeles: "The bombs in Vietnam explode at home; they destroy the hopes and possibilities of a decent America." The FBI called it an antiwar course "remarkably similar to Communist efforts." Then in April, at Riverside Church, New York City, "Somehow this madness must cease," he asserted. "We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is begin subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours." Again, amid a "fusillade of abuse" the FBI accused him of being a "traitor to his nation and his race."

And yet he continued, claiming always a world citizenship. A world citizen? From what perspective dared he make such a claim? Listen to Dr. King in Canada's Massey lecture, at Christmas, l967: "It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are made to live together because of the interrelated structure of reality. Did you ever stop to think that you can't leave for your job in the morning without being dependent upon most of the world? You get up in the morning and go to the bathroom and reach over for the sponge, and that's handed you by a Pacific Islander. You reach for a bar of soap, and that's given to you at the hands of a Frenchman. And then you go into the kitchen to drink your coffee for the morning and that is poured into your cup by a South American. And maybe you want tea: that's poured into your cup by a Chinese. Or maybe you desire to have cocoa for breakfast, and that's poured into your cup by a West African. And then you reach over for your toast, and that's given you at the hands of an English-speaking farmer, not to mention the baker. And before you finish your breakfast in the morning, you've depended on more than half the world. This is the way our universe is structured, that is its interrelated quality. We aren't going to have peace on earth until we recognize this basic fact of the interrelated structure of all reality."

Right on, Dr. King! That's something we have seen reaffirmed this last year in spades. We testify to it now as we sing of our interdependence with Harry T. Burleigh's splendid tune to "In Christ there is no East or West" and then recognize the peace in our own hearts appropriate for our binding to others.

III. ". . . reaching out for the daybreak of freedom, justice and equality . ."

This weekend we commemorate Dr. King's 83rd birthday. On December 5, 1956, the day Rosa Parks went to trial, the first of 382 days the buses ran empty, that 26-year-old, Boston University Ph.D., newly elected President of the hastily assembled Montgomery Improvement Association, The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., discovered himself appointed to address the curious, committed, clamorous, Montgomery Black Community. Needing 15 hours, as he said, to prepare a sermon, in panic he prepared for this occasion with prayer and 15 minutes. Then pushing through the highly charged crowd, pouring out of church buildings on both sides of the street, he went to the pulpit of the Holt Street Baptist Church and offered the keynote address changing a nation. In it he said,

You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression. There comes a time, my friends, when people get tired of being plunged across the abyss of humiliation, where they experience the bleakness of nagging despair. There comes a time when people get tired of being pushed out of the glittering sunlight of life's July and left standing amid the piercing chill of an alpine November. . . There comes a time. . .

We the disinherited of this land, we who have been oppressed so long are tired of going through the long night of captivity And now we are reaching out for the daybreak of freedom, justice and equality. . .

And we are not wrong, we are not wrong in what we are doing. If we are wrong, the Supreme Court of this nation is wrong. If we are wrong, the Constitution of the United States is wrong. If we are wrong God Almighty is wrong. If we are wrong, Jesus of Nazareth was merely a utopian dreamer that never came down to earth. If we are wrong justice is a lie. Love has no meaning. And we are determined here in Montgomery to work and fight until justice runs down like water and righteousness like a mighty stream. . . . (And yes), right here in Montgomery when the history books are written in the future somebody will have to say, "There lived a race of people, a black people, fleecy locks and black complexion, a people who had the moral courage to stand up for their rights." And thereby they injected a new meaning into the veins of history and of civilization. And we're going to do that. God grant we will do it before it is too late . . .

We will now sing two great hymns: the first the ultimate in the symbols of justice and liberation, hope and freedom, "Go Down Moses, Let my People Go." The second, "Steal Away," according to commentators, either a metaphor informing slaves of a clandestine worship service, or a hymn using Jesus' name as a metaphor for ultimate escape to freedom. Either way, we find both "reaching for the daybreak of freedom, justice and equality."

Scripture Reading
Isaiah 52:7-10

How beautiful upon the mountains
are the feet of the messenger who announces peace,
who brings good news, who announces salvation, who says to Zion, "Your God reigns."

Listen! Your sentinels lift up their voices,
together they sing for joy;
for in plain sight they see
the return of the LORD to Zion.

Break forth together into singing,
you ruins of Jerusalem;
for the LORD has comforted his people,
he has redeemed Jerusalem.

The LORD has bared his holy arm
before the eyes of all the nations;
and all the ends of the earth shall see
the salvation of our God.