What MLK's Christmas Sermon Teaches Us about Hope and Peace

On Christmas Eve 1967, MLK shared a moving vision of peacemaking guided by love.

Dec 25, 2024

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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.

King took as his theme the Christian concept of peace.

One of the most precious names of Christ is “Prince of Peace.”

Jesus comes into the world as a newborn baby whose life and witness brought peace between humanity and God and peace with one another.

"For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be on his shoulders. And he will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.”

~Isaiah 9:6

CREDIT: DONALD UHRBROCK/THE LIFE IMAGES COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES

Our world right now is anything but peaceful. The bonds of our shared humanity are torn by widespread poverty, political divisions, racial injustices, ongoing wars, the climate crisis, and more.

We can learn much from King. His entire public life was marked by strife, danger, and violence, yet he persistently 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.

Today, when disinformation and fear-mongering from some of the most prominent voices seek to distort the image of God in others, King’s call to embrace agape—a love that seeks goodwill even for our adversaries—challenges us not to descend into hate.

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.

Many of us felt our hopes for democracy and decency dim with the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.

Understandably, we wanted to rest, rage, grieve, and perhaps even retreat.

But just as King saw the nightmare of an unjust reality around him and held onto his dream we, too, can cling to that “quality that helps [us] go on in spite of it all.”

Few of us will ever suffer as much as Martin Luther King, Jr. or his family. If he could still dream, so can we.

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 whose prospects for progress seemed hopeless, there shines a great light.

Christmas, as King reminds us, is not just a holiday—it is a bold declaration that light can break through even the darkest moments. It compels us to carry that light forward by striving for peace and justice in our own lives and the world.

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.

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.

How can the message of Jesus as the 'Prince of Peace' guide us in responding to the challenges of our time? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Footnotes by Jemar Tisby

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