MLK's Christmas Sermon on Peace and Nonviolence
On Christmas Eve 1967, Matrin Luther King Jr. delivered his final Christmas sermon and he emphasized peace and nonviolence.
On Christmas Eve 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. ascended to the pulpit of his church, Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, Georgia and preached his last Christmas sermon. Just four months later a white supremacist would kill him.
But this man of God whose life ended in violence preached peace. In his sermon King emphasized the necessity of harmony between all people. His words remain relevant more than 50 years later.
This Christmas season finds us a rather bewildered human race. We have neither peace within nor peace without. Everywhere paralyzing fears harrow people by day and haunt them by night. Our world is sick with war; everywhere we turn we see its ominous possibilities. And yet, my friends, the Christmas hope for peace and goodwill toward all men can no longer be dismissed as a kind of pious dream of some utopian. If we don’t have goodwill toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments and our own power.
Peace, King explained, had to come through the requisite realization that everyone's life and flourishing are linked. Humanity will never grasp peace until we apprehend that each person's well- being is tied to that of every other's.
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.
King spoke of the Greek word, agape, and the imperative to love (not to like) one’s enemies. He pressed the necessity of nonviolence. The ends are wrapped up in the means so that peace cannot be attained through violent methods. Then King ended his sermon with the familiar chorus of “I have a dream.”
But six years after he delivered his most famous oration during the “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom” the preacher confessed that he had seen “that dream turn into a nightmare.”
Continued repression and anti-Black racism mingled with the bloodshed and.injustice of a protracted war in Vietnam.
Yet through it all and to his last day, King clung to hope.
Yes, I am personally the victim of deferred dreams, of blasted hopes, but in spite of that I close today by saying I still have a dream, because, you know, you can’t give up in life. If you lose hope, somehow you lose that vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of all. And so today I still have a dream.
Christmas stands as a defiant expression of hope. Into the darkness of a land crushed under the rule of an oppressive empire and a people who had reduced their religion to a set of hollow rituals shines a great light.
A newborn child who was both human and God brings the hope of salvation in the next life and the courage for transformation in this life to anyone who believes.
For unto us a child is born…that is the perennial and eternal hope of Christmas.
Listen to MLK’s Christmas sermon HERE.
Read the transcript HERE.