Speaking to his congregation at Ebenezer Baptist Church on December 24, 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered what would be his last Christmas Eve sermon. He began by expressing the title of his sermon and his sincerest desire, “Peace on earth.”

“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… And yet, my friends, the Christmas hope for peace and good will toward all men can no longer be dismissed as a kind of pious dream of some utopian.”

Two years prior, on a sweltering September afternoon in Jersey City, Dr. King told an audience at Saint Peter’s College that globalization - the technological and scientific process that allowed business to cultivate international influence and operate on a global scale - “made the world a neighborhood,” but he warned that was not enough. “Through moral commitment we must make it a brotherhood.” In the two years that followed, King lamented that those commitments had not been met, domestically or internationally. America’s Cold War imperatives drew the nation deeper into the war in Vietnam and shifted much needed investments from the War on Poverty to an imperialist war abroad. In 1967, Dr. King lamented “if we don’t have good will toward men in this world, we will destroy ourselves by the misuse of our own instruments and our own power.”

“Now let me suggest first that if we are to have peace on earth, our loyalties must become ecumenical rather than sectional. Our loyalties must transcend our race, our tribe, our class, and our nation; and this means we must develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone; no nation can live alone, and as long as we try, the more we are going to have war in this world. Now the judgment of God is upon us, and we must either learn to live together as brothers or we are all going to perish together as fools."