The Last Sermon at Mason Temple

On the evening of April 3, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. stood before a crowd at Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee. He had come to support thirteen hundred African American sanitation workers striking for dignity and fair wages. A thunderstorm raged outside. King was exhausted, battling a fever, and had almost stayed at his hotel. But the people were waiting.

What he preached that night still haunts and comforts in equal measure. "I've seen the Promised Land," he told them. "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." Less than twenty-four hours later, a bullet struck him on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel, Room 306. He was thirty-nine years old.

King spoke like a man who had settled his accounts with death. Not with despair, but with a strange and radiant confidence that his life had already been poured out for something the grave could not undo.

Paul wrote from a Roman prison, "For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain." This is not a death wish. It is the arithmetic of a life so consumed by holy purpose that even its ending becomes an advance, not a retreat.