This morning in 1968 Martin Luther King gave the final Sunday sermon of his life [View all]

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This morning in 1968 Martin Luther King gave final Sunday sermon of his life at Washington National Cathedral: pic.twitter.com/NUd6IIeNAU



Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. discusses his planned poor people’s demonstration from the pulpit of the Washington National Cathedral, March 31, 1968. (Associated Press)


from BLOGGING-THOMAS:



____ On the Sunday before he was gunned down in Memphis, Dr. King stood in the pulpit of the Cathedral Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, otherwise known as Washington National Cathedral, to preach what no one there could have imagined would be his final Sunday sermon, entitled: “Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution.” The title comes from his opening musings on Washington Irving’s classic American fictional story of Rip Van Winkle, who went to sleep one day in the Catskill Mountains and awoke twenty years later to a completely changed world.

As King said that morning, “When Rip Van Winkle went up into the mountain, he saw a sign that had a picture of King George the Third of England. When he came down twenty years later the sign had a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States. Rip Van Winkle slept through a revolution. While he was peacefully snoring up in the mountain a revolution was taking place that … would change the course of history—and Rip knew nothing about it. … One of the great liabilities of life is that all too many people find themselves living amid a great period of social change, and yet they fail to develop the new attitudes, the new mental responses, that the new situation demands. They end up sleeping through a revolution.”

In a time when our technological advances have shrunk our world into a neighborhood, King said, “we have not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood. … But somehow, and in some way, we have got to do this. We must all learn to live together as brothers or we will all perish together as fools. We are tied together in the single garment of destiny, caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. And whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. For some strange reason I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the way God’s universe is made . . .”


MLK's final Sunday sermon in nation's capital, Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution- read/listen to the sermon: http://mlk-kpp01.stanford.edu/index.php/encyclopedia/documentsentry/doc_remaining_awake_through_a_great_revolution/