“He made my
mouth like a sharp sword, in the shadow of his hand he hid me…”
We have all been shaped by a consumerist culture that creates expectations of constant comfort. We tend to idealize our heroes and sanitize their life stories, placing them on pedestals where they are frozen in place, from which they cannot come down and disturb us with the rest of the story of their lives. But I believe it is important to dive deep into those stories including the chapters in which we find ourselves. And that is what I seek to do this morning regarding Martin Luther King, Jr.
Pilgrimage:
Descent into Our Collective Shadow
Last summer I was part of a pilgrimage that visited sites in Memphis, Little Rock and Mississippi to witness the events of the civil rights movement that had happened in those places. One of the highlights of that trip was the morning we spent at the Mason Temple in Memphis.
This was the place where Martin Luther King, Jr. had delivered his famous Mountaintop speech. I learned that he had not planned to be there that night amidst the pressing demands of the sanitation workers strike he had come to Memphis to lead. But a large crowd had come out in a thunderstorm to hear King’s words of encouragement filling this Church of God in Christ sanctuary that seated a thousand people. And so his aides called the Lorainne Motel where King was staying and begged him to come.
King arrived without prepared remarks, speaking to the crowd extemporaneously in lyrical words that would become legendary. He began with a reference to the matter at hand: “Let us keep the issues where they are. The issue is injustice.,, the refusal of Memphis to be fair and honest in its dealings with its public servants, who happen to be sanitation workers.” This is what the people gathered there that night had come to hear.
But soon his speech took on an almost ethereal quality when he uttered words that would soon prove prescient: “We’ve got some difficult days ahead….But it really doesn’t matter with me now, because I’ve been to the mountaintop … I’ve seen the Promised Land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land”
King would depart from the Mason Temple amidst a thunderous applause and return to the Lorraine Motel. Within 24 hours he would lay dead on its second floor balcony, struck down by an assassin’s bullet.
Breathless
in a Saint’s Pulpit
When the
recording ended I felt a sudden urge to go up into the pulpit from which King
had preached his last sermon. As I stood in that space infused with the spirit
of a martyred saintly man, I found myself absolutely breathless. After a
moment, I returned to my seat and closed my eyes, waiting for whatever might
come next.
What came was a vision of Jesus at the Last Supper. He was fervently trying to prepare his disciples for his death and the need for them to take up the mantle of his movement, his Way of Jesus, seeking a kingdom of God already present but not yet fully realized. Suddenly, I realized that this was also what Martin had been doing that last night in this place. Like Jesus, his words indicated he knew his death was imminent. And, like Jesus, he was convinced that his movement must go on and he was calling his disciples to that undertaking.
That was the moment it dawned on me that this was why we had come that morning, Martin’s modern day disciples, still seeking justice for all of G-d’s children, still working to create the Beloved Community, all these years later. And the question I came away with was this: “Martin, what are you calling us to do at this point in our lives?”
“I will never accept it….”
The Hebrew Scripture lesson for Epiphany II reflects the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., who like Jesus, was prone to quote Isaiah. The prophet begins with this statement: “The Lord called me before I was born, while I was in my mother's womb he named me.” Martin would have understood that passage implicitly, growing up in the home of his Baptist minister father who guided the Ebeneezer Baptist Church in downtown Atlanta for 44 years, hearing his father’s thundering sermons and engaging in nightly Bible lessons with his grandmother.
But his
father’s influence was hardly limited to theology. When Martin Jr's father took
him into a shoe store in downtown Atlanta, the clerk told them they needed to
sit in the back. Martin Sr. refused, responding "We'll either buy shoes
sitting here or we won't buy any shoes at all." Before leaving the
store with Martin Jr. but without any new shoes, he told his son, "I
don't care how long I have to live with this system, I will never accept it.” And as we all know today, neither did his
son.
Isaiah said the Lord “made my mouth like a sharp sword…” This is not eloquence for its own sake, but speech that cuts through denial and a false peace. While King developed preaching skills that were spell binding, they were never merely ornamental; they were sharpened instruments—disciplined, honed, often restrained until the moment of necessity. And he inevitably wielded them with finesse.
The heart of Isaiah’s passage offers us this: “But I said, ‘I have labored in vain, I have spent my strength for nothing and vanity…’” This reflects the interior life of prophetic leadership. It names exhaustion, doubt, and the fear that sacrifice has been meaningless. King’s later sermons and letters often echoed such doubts. Isaiah admits that faithfulness does not always feel effective. That’s why Mother Teresa often said, “God does not call me to be successful, God calls me to be faithful.”
Epiphany – A Light to Enlighten the Nation
This is where Epiphany comes into the picture. Isaiah says, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob…I will give you as a light to the nations.” While King’s witness began narrowly focused on civil rights for African Americans in a Jim Crow America, his vocation could not be contained there. By the end of his life he would speak out against the Vietnam War, against economic exploitation and against the spiritual corrosion of racism in white America. Like Isaiah, King realized God’s insistence that justice can never remain parochial; justice is the birthright of all of G-d’s children. And as King soon discovered, justice comes at a cost.
That cost is reflected in a chilling line from Isaiah which readily applies to the story of Martin Luther King, Jr. The prophet refers to “[the] one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers…” We tend to idealize King today. But he was deeply despised during his lifetime. As a child I remember seeing a John Birch Society billboard on I-75 just south of Ocala with a photo of King in a classroom it falsely declared to be a “communist training school.” Painting civil rights workers as communist was the preferred practice du jour in a racist America which tarred everything that challenged Jim Crow segregation as communist. It also served to rationalize anything that might be done to those who challenged the status quo.
Including death.
Isaiah knew that G-d’s chosen servant would be despised while faithful. Indeed, he would be despised because he was faithful. And we cannot honor King this day without asking the question I came away from the Mason Temple asking myself: Who bears that despised vocation now?
Calling,
Covenant, Courage
I believe that
question confronts us directly in our own time. We are living in a moment when
white Christian nationalism has gained real power in our land—distorting the
Gospel, erasing the history of the movement King led, and sacralizing fear. We
see people of color targeted because of appearance, immigrants treated as
disposable, truth treated as an enemy, and those who protest injustice met with
militarized force.
If hearing
this makes us uncomfortable, that too may be an epiphany. Prophetic truth
rarely arrives gently. The question before us is not whether we agree in the
abstract, but whether we are willing to bear the cost of faithfulness when
justice makes us visible—and therefore vulnerable.
Not everyone is called to be a prophet. And, thankfully, not everyone who would be an instrument of peace is required to be a martyr. But we Episcopalians have taken a vow to work for justice and peace for all people, respecting the dignity of all human beings, a commitment we reaffirm every time we renew our Baptismal Covenant. It is up to each of us to find the way in which we will live into those promises remembering that we are never alone in that calling. Our response to the vows we make in our Baptismal Covenant is clear: I will with G-d’s help. Thanks be to the G-d who is always with us in all things. Let us pray:
Holy One, by the hand of Moses, your servant, you led your people out of slavery, and made them free at last: Grant that your church, following the example of your prophet Martin Luther King, may resist oppression in the name of your love, strive for justice and peace for all your children, respecting the dignity of every living being in living out the blessed liberty of the Gospel of Jesus the Christ; who with you and the Holy Spirit, are one God, now and for ever. Amen.
A
sermon offered on Epiphany II, the Commemoration of Martin Luther King, Jr., January
18, 2026 at St. Richard’s Episcopal Church, Winter Park, Florida.
You may listen
to this sermon as preached at this link beginning at 29:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dyxu3yNQLn0&t=1740s
If
the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be
it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering
do not come in sound bites.
Those who
believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma
Gandhi
For what
does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk
humbly with your G-d? - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures
Do not be
daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now.
Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are
you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish
Sages (1993)
© Harry Scott Coverston, 2026
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