FARMINGTON — Due to weather conditions, Farmington Area Ecumenical Ministry held the annual Martin Luther King Jr. service via Zoom on Monday, Jan. 16, and focused on loving your enemy.

“Over the past several years we have had excellent guest speakers from many walks of life,” Anne Smith, one of the organizers, said. “This year we thought we would get back to the very heart of what the service is all about. Rather than hear about what others have to say about Martin Luther King Jr. we would take the opportunity to hear direct from the man himself.”

Over Christmas Smith asked her 23-year old granddaughter, who has hardly ever stepped foot in a church, what she thought should be highlighted when introducing King. “I was rather surprised at her answer,” Smith noted. “She said, “The thing about [King] was that most people describe him as a civil rights leader or as an agent of change or something like that but actually what he was doing was just being a minister. That was his whole shebang.” I thought that was pretty good. The whole shebang. Both his grandfather and father were preachers and he was just carrying on that role when he began his first job at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama.

“Just being a minister – what a great accolade. It struck me as a wonderful thing that even someone who is not religious in the traditional sense can nevertheless appreciate and value the profound changes for good that can be brought into peoples’ lives as the result of what a minister says and does.”

King didn’t go to Montgomery to be an activist, he came to be a pastor, Smith said. “[King] always felt that a preacher and a pastor had to be relevant by addressing the issues of the times and relating the gospel to those issues,” she noted.

King’s sermon excerpt, given at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in November 1957 focused on loving your enemies. King emphasized that “hate for hate only intensifies the existence of hate and evil in the universe. . . The strong person is the person who can cut off the chain of hate, the chain of evil. . . and inject within the very structure of the universe that strong and powerful element of love. Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you.”

“In this divided time in our country’s history, it is probably a very apt time to listen to it,” Smith said before the video was shared.

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