At least fifteen Adventists participated in a series of interfaith events held in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 2003, to draw attention to the relationship between war and poverty, and thereby honor the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr. Several individuals connected with the Adventist Peace Fellowship, including Roy Branson, Doug Morgan, and Zack Plantak, and others from the Columbia Union College-Sligo Church community joined with hundreds of worshipers at the Washington National Cathedral for a prayer service that began 2:30 p.m.

Participants—many with signs and banners urging the United States not to wage war on Iraq—then marched to Lafayette Square across from the White House—pausing for prayer en route while passing the Naval Observatory, the vice-president’s residence, and the British embassy. Despite the increasingly bitter wind chills with the onset of evening, the marchers continued their vigil for over an hour—praying, singing, and waving battery-operated candles as testimony to their desire to "stop the war before it starts" and bring about a new resolve to reduce poverty.

Well-known leaders of two of the organizing groups—Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, and Jim Wallis, editor of Sojourners—spoke briefly at the prayer service. Other major sponsors included the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, D.C., and the National Council of Churches of Christ. When Wallis, putting a booming voice and dramatic pauses to effective use, declared "Mr. President, we ask you to take a faith…based…INITIATIVE," worshipers broke into a sustained applause that showed no signs of abating until Wallis finally persisted in concluding his remarks.

Adventist participants marched in the footsteps of pioneers who insisted that those preparing to meet the Lord must take a public stand against slavery. And, in honoring the memory of Dr. King, they took their stand with one who bore eloquent witness to the apocalyptic hope found in Scripture. This shining vision of hope, most famously expressed in the conclusion of his "I Have a Dream" speech, suffused the speeches and writings of Martin Luther King Jr. In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech delivered in Oslo, Norway, in 1964, for example, King testified to his indomitable hope in the coming of a transformed world:

I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right temporarily defeated is stronger than evil triumphant. . . .

I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for the minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive good will proclaim the rule of the land. "And the lion and the lamb shall lie down together and every man shall sit under his own vine and fig tree and none shall be afraid." I still believe that we shall overcome.

In the remaining years of his life, as American society became increasingly violent and divided and as the war in Vietnam escalated, King incorporated more of the warning dimension of the apocalyptic message into his speeches and sermons. In a sermon that used passages from Revelation, preached only days before his assassination, he declared:

One day we will have to stand before the God of history and we will talk in terms of things we’ve done. Yes, we will be able to say we built gargantuan bridges to span the seas, we built gigantic buildings to kiss the skies. Yes, we made our submarines to penetrate oceanic depths.…

It seems that I can hear the God of history saying, "That was not enough! But I was hungry and ye fed me not.…"

It is no longer a choice, my friends, between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or nonexistence, and the alternative to disarmament…may well be a civilization plunged into the abyss of annihilation, and our earthly habitat would be transformed into an inferno that even the mind of Dante could not imagine.

Yet King clung to the hope that "we shall overcome" based on the faith that "the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice," and concluded:

With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair the stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood.

Thank God for John, who centuries ago out on a lonely, obscure land called Patmos caught vision of a new Jerusalem descending out of heaven from God, who heard a voice saying, "Behold, I make all things new—former things are passed away."

Portions of this sermon preached March 31, 1968, including King’s tribute to the author of Revelation, were read at the service on January 20, 2003.

Adventists may generally see sharper discontinuity between the present order of things and the "earth made new" than Dr. King seemed to envision, and place greater emphasis on the divine role in bringing it about. Going too far in that direction, though, risks losing the depiction of a thoroughly dynamic and embodied life in the new earth found in Scripture and in the writings of Ellen White (see, for example, the final pages of The Great Controversy).

For those of us involved in the Adventist Peace Fellowship, and for many other Adventists, it is precisely because we are inspired by "We Have This Hope" that we want to join efforts energized by the singing of "We Shall Overcome." Our knowledge that war, poverty, and racism will not be eradicated in a permanent, decisive way this side of glory should not diminish our efforts to counteract these evils any more than knowledge that personal growth in grace will never reach perfection should lead us to nonchalance about sin in our own lives. We seek to direct our lives towards the future God has promised.

Our Adventist faith, then, motivates our protest against our government’s trajectory toward an immoral and unjust war, and our efforts to influence its policies toward expanding opportunities for the least advantaged to make their way out of poverty. It gives us hope that our efforts, ultimately, will not be in vain.

To the one who overcomes I will give a place with me on my throne, just as I myself overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne. (Rev. 3:21)

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