Martin Luther King, Jr. speaking at the Mason Temple in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 3rd, 1968. The next day he was struck down by an assassin's bullet.

Well, I don’t know what will happen now. We’ve got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn’t matter with me now. Because I’ve been to the mountain top. And I don’t mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And 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. And I’m happy, tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord.

For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, If any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book: And if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book.

    That refers to the Book of Revelation, not the Bible, not that a curse was needed to strangle communication with the divine. Less than 300 years after the life and death and life of Christ, the canonical texts were pretty much decided by men, though it wouldn't be until the 16th Century that the Pope stamped "APPROVED" on the books of the Bible. But men can't stop revelation, can't stop God from sending prophets. Prophets bring the word of God to humans, and sometimes God's justice, and sometimes God's mercy. Prophets herald change, but seldom do they see the outcome of that change in this life.

    It took about 250 years and a horrific Civil War to end the enslavement of African-Americans in what we now call the United States, and 100 more for equality to be written into law. Now, 45 years after the Civil Rights Act, we may witness the swearing in as President of the United States an African-American, and Martin Luther King will not be there to see it. Had he lived, he would have been 80 years old in January of 2009, and no doubt would have been at the Capital on Inauguration Day, but he did not live. It was said that near the end of his life he was weary and despairing, but if so on the day before he died God spoke once more to him.

    Revelation is not the book that closes the Bible. The days of Revelation will not end before the last day, and on this day, the day of a prophet's death, we should all turn to the letters of Martin Luther King. I read from a letter from the Birmingham jail.

One day the South will recognize its real heroes. They will be the James Merediths, with the noble sense of purpose that enables them to face jeering and hostile mobs, and with the agonizing loneliness that characterizes the life of the pioneer. They will be old, oppressed, battered Negro women, symbolized in a seventy two year old woman in Montgomery, Alabama, who rose up with a sense of dignity and with her people decided not to ride segregated buses, and who responded with ungrammatical profundity to one who inquired about her weariness: "My feets is tired, but my soul is at rest." They will be the young high school and college students, the young ministers of the gospel and a host of their elders, courageously and nonviolently sitting in at lunch counters and willingly going to jail for conscience' sake. One day the South will know that when these disinherited children of God sat down at lunch counters, they were in reality standing up for what is best in the American dream and for the most sacred values in our Judaeo Christian heritage, thereby bringing our nation back to those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.

    Not just the South, but every American and Christian, know that there was a prophet in America, and in America he was murdered. Like the Pharisees of old, we have built a tomb for him and called it a holiday, remembering the name and forgetting the words.

    God grant Martin Luther King, Jr. rest, and God have mercy on us all.